Sandstorm Blog

Sandstorm Oasis hosting open beta and App Market launch

By Kenton Varda - 31 Aug 2015

Try The App Market Now »

As you know, Sandstorm’s mission is to bring open source and indie web apps to a wider audience. To run open source web apps, you need your own server – the developers aren’t a big corporation with resources to run servers for you. And for everyone to run open source web apps, everyone needs control of their own server. That means that running your own server and installing apps on it needs to be so easy that everyone can do it. Most people do not have the time or expertise to edit config files or use SSH, so we need to eliminate the need. Installing apps on Sandstorm needs to be as easy as installing them on your phone – and it needs to be secure by default.

We’ve made a lot of progress on these fronts – try our online demo to see for yourself. However, up until now, to use Sandstorm, you still had to have a Linux machine to install it on. For many people, that’s great – running on your own machine provides the ultimate in privacy. But running a physical machine is still a burden no matter how easy the software may be, and a lot of people don’t want to do it. That falls short of our goal: if we want everyone to be able to use open source apps, we need to give them another option.

Managed Hosting

Sandstorm Oasis is a managed hosting service for Sandstorm. For $6/mo. (but free during the beta), we will give you a web-accessible Sandstorm server on which you can install any apps you want. Choose from the apps on our app market or package and upload your own. Or better yet, package your apps and submit them to the app market for everyone to use.

When paying $6/mo for Oasis, you get a much better experience than you would installing Sandstorm on a $6/mo virtual machine elsewhere. In addition to the ease of use, Oasis knows how to give your apps resources when you are actually using them while not wasting any resources when you aren’t. In contrast, a personal VM will typically reserve a constant amount of RAM for the entire month while sitting idle most of the time. This means that on Oasis, you get the effect of having a server with many times more RAM for the same price.

Some might ask: Doesn’t managed hosting go against Sandstorm’s goal of decentralization? We don’t think so: the most difficult part of decentralization is separating the developers from the hosts. Once you are using Sandstorm apps, you can easily move your data between managed hosting and your own personal server, because the same apps are available everywhere. Sandstorm will always be available to run on your own machine as open source software, so the choice is yours. Moreover, we expect that some day there will be many competing Sandstorm hosting services located in many countries.

Updates for Self-hosters

Today’s launch includes a HUGE update to our user interface. So much has changed that it would be futile to try to describe it; you should just try it. We have, of course, pushed all these changes to our self-hosted users too. Some of you have even been following our Github repo and IRC and helping us test these features early – thanks! For everyone else, run sudo sandstorm update to update now, or wait for the auto-update by the end of today. Don’t have a server yet? Install Sandstorm on Linux now »

Also New: The App Market

Along with today’s launch, we have deployed our new App Market, full of Free and Open Source apps, to replace our old ad-hoc app list. You can now browse apps more easily, complete with ratings and reviews. More importantly, submitting your own apps is now more streamlined: you can upload your package directly from the command-line using the spk publish command.

Our Terms and Privacy Policy

People don’t usually talk about Terms of Service and Privacy Policies. It’s always the same story: a wall of inscrutable legalese that inevitably gives the service provider free reign to do whatever they want, which most users don’t even bother to read.

We wanted Oasis to be a little different. We wanted our terms to address a number of shortcomings we see in “cloud services” today, in each case protecting you, not us. And we wanted to make sure that normal people can read and understand how our terms protect them.

In particular:

• We prohibit ourselves from looking at your data except under very specific, unusual circumstances (such as court orders).
• We promise to notify you if your data is the target of a court order (if we legally can do so).
• We think that protecting your data is the most important thing we do, and we will not delete it against your wishes unless we have no choice. In contrast, many cloud services are known for deleting people’s data on a whim when they violate obscure rules they may not have even known about.
• We do not tolerate harassment. Luckily, Sandstorm’s sharing model provides an elegant way to deal with it, without deleting your data.
• Unlike some people, we explicitly permit white hat security research, so long as no one is harmed and bugs are responsibly disclosed.
• We have zero interest in “tracking” you to learn your interests and build a personal advertising profile, therefore our privacy policy prohibits us from doing so.

Check out the full Terms of Service and Privacy Policy for details – and if you see anything wrong, feel free to file a bug!

Free During Beta

Oasis is not done yet – we have lots to do. We anticipate it will remain in “beta” for several months – and during that time, the service is completely free. To get started with Oasis, head over to oasis.sandstorm.io.

PS: The Name

A couple months back, we asked you on Twitter what our managed hosting service should be called. Nearly everyone who replied – and there were a lot of you – had the same answer: “Oasis”. So, thank you for making the decision easy!

Recap of our August meetup

By Asheesh Laroia - 11 Aug 2015

Last Thursday, RethinkDB co-hosted the first Sandstorm meetup in the South Bay Here’s the view of the crowd at their Mountain View office.

I gave a talk introducing Sandstorm, inspired by Kenton’s blog post explaining the motivation for Sandstorm: making it possible for open source and indie developers to build successful web apps.

Jorge Silva followed that with a talk focusing on RethinkDB. He explained how the open source RethinkDB database makes real-time apps easy to build, and showed how to package RethinkDB apps for Sandstorm. He used the new Sandstorm packaging tool called vagrant-spk.

We then heard four lightning talks.

• Paul Pelzl explained how and why he wrote an implementation of Cap’n Proto in OCaml.
• Warren Togami talked about the importance of security in enterprise chat.
• Andy Lutomirski discussed recent Linux security vulnerabilities, the history of Linux’s surprisingly large attack surface, and his excitement that Sandstorm will bring object-capability security to the world.
• Ross Light showed us the simple file uploading and sharing app he is building using Go. The app looks sharp and he expects it’s almost ready for release. He remarked that it has a 3MB package file, and that could shrink further as he works on implementing replacing sandstorm-http-bridge with new code using his support for Cap’n Proto RPC in Go.

My personal thanks go out to Christina Keelan for handling the logistics and planning that made the event a success.

I plan to organize September’s event in San Francisco and return to the South Bay in October. If you want to hear about those events, join the Sandstorm Meetup group!

Thu Aug 6: First Sandstorm meetup in the South Bay

By Asheesh Laroia - 22 Jul 2015

On Thursday, August 6, the Sandstorm meetup group has its first event in the South Bay. RSVP here!

RethinkDB is graciously offering space and helping provide food and drink. They’ll also be participating by showing off their open-source database for the realtime web and how to use it in a Sandstorm app.

RethinkDB is based in Mountain View, which means easy travel if you’re based in Silicon Valley. After this event, I aim to switch monthly between organizing events in San Francisco and the South Bay.

• Date & time: Thursday, August 6, 6:30-9:30
• Food & drink: provided, with thanks to RethinkDB
• Location: RethinkDB, 156 E Dana St, Mountain View, CA
• Sign up: On the Meetup.com event

One more thing: You should give a lightning talk, where you talk for five minutes about a success story, a challenge or unresolved issue you’ve run into, or whatever else about Sandstorm strikes your fancy. It’ll be easy, and we’re a friendly bunch. Leave a comment on the Meetup event with your idea for a talk!

Sandstorm community raises $10,644 for Roundcube Next

By Jade Wang - 01 Jul 2015

Last week we asked the Sandstorm.io community to come together to support the Indiegogo campaign of Roundcube Next using their Sandstorm app store credit. Today we’re happy to announce that we’ve raised:

$10,644

We’ve contributed the total to Roundcube Next as a lump sum, making the Sandstorm community the single largest contributor!

Roundcube is an open source email app that you can run on Sandstorm today (demo). They are running a crowdfunding campaign on Indiegogo to modernize their user interface and bring Roundcube to mobile. Although the campaign has reached its funding goal, they’ve got some great stretch goals and you can still contribute until it ends tomorrow.

Almost a year ago, Sandstorm raised approximately $60K on Indiegogo to fundamentally change the way we use and host web applications. When we raised our $1.3M seed round last January, we made a promise to the community to pay-it-forward – to forward the crowdfunds to support other open source projects (such as Roundcube) in the ecosystem through the App Market. Since the Roundcube Next crowdfunding campaign launched before the App Market launched, we rallied the original Sandstorm contributors to dedicate a portion of their App Market credit to forward to Roundcube Next as a bloc.

Roundcube has promised that they will directly support Sandstorm as a target platform for Roundcube Next, meaning the app will get timely updates and integrate with Sandstorm-specific features. For example, we want to make it easy to attach Sandstorm documents to email for sharing.

Let’s take a moment to thank all the Sandstorm contributors who have chosen to forward part or all of their App Market credit to Roundcube:

Erik Swanson, Tommy Hodgins, Mark Bradley, Ondřej Böhm, August Lilleaas, Paul Gaspardo, Oluf Lorenzen, Eddie Jesinsky, Charles Lehner, Francois O Baldassari, Florin Godard, Lachlan Musicman, Patrick Ohly, Praveen Moorthy, Corey Ford, Toby Matejovsky, Giorgos Logiotatidis, Maxime Quandalle, Alexander Kulbartsch, Colin Maudry, Francesco ‘makevoid’ Canessa, Ben Cordero, Sebastian Kippe, Shawn Becker, shazow, Michael Manley, Pascal Gellert, Dan Bornstein, Wong Ho Wang, Petr Viktorin, Christopher Toledo, Thomas Hansen, Noah O’Donoghue, Matthew Steffen, Baruch Even, Pascal de Vink, Tim Davies, Alex Dempsey, Fred Schättgen, Bruno ARLIGUY, Maria, David Turner, David Meyer, Noel Yap, Hugo Artur Weber Schmitt, Joel Roller, Keith Hall, C. Moreno, Abdullah Khalid, Vincent Malley, James Graves, JollyOrc, Shane Gould, Matt Johnston, Alec, Alan Karp, JT Olds, Daniel Ring, Wes Felter, Sage Ross, Joseph Lee, Asheesh Laroia, Jason Hsu, Yuriy @html5cat Dybskiy, Amir Chaudhry, Pedro Ângelo, nFec, getify, Dan Morrill, Daniel DeSousa, Collin Jackson, Daniel Yokomizo, Aaron Vaneps, Glen Skinner, Tobias Ammann, Dinyar Rabady, Will Norris, Tim Butram, Nathan Henderson, Colin Dean, Jeff Cressman, Vincent Lim, Adam Berkan, Audrey Tang, Justin Fox, Jan Jambor, Fahrstuhl, Greg Perkins, Zellyn Hunter, Tim Lossen, David Alfonso, Michael Bright, Jamiel Almeida, Ali Gunduz, Jonathan Wheaton, Nathan Greene, Mitchell Barry, Matt Campbell, the paul, Svemir Brkic, Paul-Robert Archibald, Tiago Freitas, Eli Willaert, Daniel Schulze Hagen, Tobias, Jeremy Coté, Matthew Baggott, Jason Glass, Thomas Myers, Scott Pritchett, Mike Linksvayer, Fred Eisele, @noahsilas, Fred Smith, Jochen Bartl, Suvi-Tuuli Allan, Mark S. Miller, Rick Richardson, Rebecca Wise, George Ellenburg, Andrew Thibeault, Andrew Jennings, Rahim Nathwani, Aren Olson, Richard Bairwell, Heri Sim, Erik Andersson, Matt Siegel, Phil Dutson, Siegfried Kettlitz, William Zajac, Nick Richards, Kamil Páral, Garance A Drosehn, Guido Hoermann, Robert Konigsberg, Jasvir Nagra <img src=x onerror=alert()>, Joshua Warner, Ana Ulin, Walter Ebert, Brooke Schreier Ganz, Kevin Wallace, Ingo Blechschmidt, Beni Paskin-Cherniavsky, Cole Mickens, Andy Gayton, Scott Nesbitt, Strick Yak, Andrew Chilton, Matthias Dallmeier, Geoffrey Thomas, Matthias Liertzer, Brit Butler, Dan Nuffer, Ry4an Brase, Dawn Luoma, Chhi’mèd Künzang, Duncan J, Vivek Gani, Gaelen Hadlett, TJ Rothwell, Lucas Dohmen, Derek Waters, Igor Cananea, Colin Barrow, Kevin Baker, Richard Thompson, whitequark, Michael Fitzpatrick-Ruth, Jonathan Castello, Michael Powell, Ryan Kelly, J. Ryan Stinnett, William Kilmer, Kenny Rachuonyo, Lionel Debroux, Bastian Allgeier, John M Cooper, Tako Marks, Børge A. Roum, Alex Morega, Bruno Orcha García, mike nonemacher, Andy Burnett, Phil Kates, Lucian Carata, Gregg Cooke, Kevin C., Séamus O’Connor, Tim Kiekhafer, Derrick Southerland, Simon Clausen, queria, Simeon Farwell-Miller, Shyam Paryani, Sascha Zelzer, Jared Sohn, Daniel Dornhardt, Maftoc, Jake Rayson, Brandon Peters, Joshua Wise, Randall Leeds, Kit Stubbs, Ph.D., James Warner, Ben Rog-Wilhelm, Andreas Rohlfs, Konrad Scorciapino, Arne Neumann, Ben Cohen, James Synge, Johannes Krampf, Bryan Luoma, Martin Krafft, Jim Garrison, Kingdon Barrett

Upcoming events in San Francisco & Portland

By Asheesh Laroia - 17 Jun 2015

David, Jade, and Asheesh will be speaking at events in Portland, OR, and San Francisco.

San Francisco meetup, June 18

At our second SF meetup, we’ll have a brief intro by core dev David Renshaw about the new sharing features of Sandstorm. We’re lucky to have David in town, as he’s normally in Pittsburgh.

Co-founder Jade Wang will showcase how to package a Meteor app for Sandstorm, which is a preview of her jQuerySF talk.

That’ll be at ThoughtWorks (thanks to them for hosting!) in San Francisco, 6 PM Thu 6/18. RSVP here!

jQuerySF, June 22-23

At the upcoming jQuerySF conference, Jade will give a talk entitled “Sandstorm.io: one-click, deploy anywhere.” It’s at 11:10am on Monday, June 22.

If you haven’t bought a ticket yet, use our Friends & Family of Sandstorm discount code to register for just $20, saving a a huge amount off the ticket price. Register at the registration page and use the code sandstorm-ftw!

Open Source Bridge, Portland, OR, week of June 22

I’m giving two talks at Open Source Bridge, and would love to see Sandstorm-minded people there.

• Economics of Volunteer Labor: Three stories from Debian, Tue Jun 23, 10am
• Five years, 1000 students: The story of Open Source Comes to Campus, Thu Jun 25, 10am

I hope to see you in SF or Portland! Feel free to drop me a line; I’m asheesh at sandstorm.io.