Autonomous Infrastructure

Not sure how relevant this is, but I've just come across what looks like a great collection of Libre software, with what looks like a donation model (if you read French)... https://framasoft.org/ -- does anyone know these people?

Having infrastructure/hosting/sysadmin/devops provided from within CoTech sounds very attractive. While AWS has a million services (many of which are pretty cool and innovative) it's pretty bewildering unless you make it your life's work to understand it.

Outlandish has traditionally seen this area as a but of a pain rather than an opportunity - basically because none of us have ever been that passionate about it. We've been very pleased to work with @chriscroome on a few projects since the meet up and he's got us much further than we'd have got on our own for the same time/money.

It's a shame that Blaze Hosts seem to have gone of the radar. There were (apparently) six of them running a hosting co-op in Manchester. Maybe they can be reached somehow.

It would seem that with Web Architects, Broadband Co-op, (maybe) Blaze Hosts and whatever capacity the other members have we have some good expertise in this area.

Would anyone be up for leading some research into a potential business model for pooling services in this area? I'd be up for contributing but not sure i really have the skills or capacity to lead it.

We've also got something in the region of £200k EU funding to investigate how to make Docker work well and would be keen on collaborating with others.

@harryrobbins said:

Having infrastructure/hosting/sysadmin/devops provided from within CoTech sounds very attractive.

I agree and had a good chat with Alex about this at Wortley Hall and we have a Coop Cloud wiki page and #coopcloud slack channel where we are discussing this.

However this wasn't why I started this thread and it's now clear that there has been some misunderstanding -- all I was intending to suggest with this thread was that we should have an aim to run our own infrastructure for our own internal use as a network of Co-operative Technologists, and to a large degree we are already, our wiki is self hosted, so is our email list and so will be our web site when it is launched and so is the dev site at the moment.

If it is practical and easy to self host other things in the future and if there is a demand for them then let's do it, for example Etherpad has been mentioned a few times and perhaps having a pad.coops.tech site would be nice someday, but I recall hearing in IRC at the time that Riseup set up their pad that is was quite a pain, but that was years ago. Hosting our own Loomio instance and perhaps even Rocket.Chat or something might also be good sometime down the line but I'm not suggesting we should do these things now.

Setting up a MediaWiki site for the group during one of the sessions, while hung over and half asleep, was quick and easy for me because I have been doing it for years, in contrast at the other end of the spectrum, producing an alternative to YouTube and Vimeo to host our videos would be far from quick and easy to do, so it would have to be something for a very long term wishlist, if we thought it was a good idea -- it simply isn't practical and as has been discussed on other threads I'm also keen to spend more time getting stuff done that talking about getting stuff done :smiley:

PS Exploring Docker sounds interesting, but it isn't a technology I have found time to play with yet.

@harryrobbins said

Outlandish has traditionally seen this area as a but of a pain rather than an opportunity -basically because none of us have ever been that passionate about it.

Lucky Outlandish now has someone in the mix who really is passionate about it!

I've been researching Open Stack quite a bit over the last week and it seems that, given hardware and fully understanding it, creating a AWS compatible cloud which includes the three MVP level features me and @chriscroome talked about at Wortley Hall (virtual servers, databases, storage compatible with S3) should actually work "out of the box". Plus Open Stack already has mature plugins for the most popular platforms for infrastructure as code: Ansible, Salt and Terraform. It wouldn't take more than a couple of lines change to adopt, say, some of Outlandish's Ansible provisioning scripts to use this https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/os_server_module.html

I think me and @chriscroome will kick the tires on this in the new year when he comes in to do some stuff around provisioning at Outlandish.

Just to chime in saying that I think this network coming together to offer a co-operative & open source saas/ cloud offering would imho be absolutley brilliant (and I'd be a customer, as would I imagine quite a large niche of companies/ NGOs etc who would much prefer to not routinely give Dropbox, Google etc money and would much prefer to routinely give money to nice co-op people maintaining open source stuff).

And also to add that Sandstorm rocks and everyone should check it out (and this network should have an instance of it).

@chriscroome @alexwa check this out https://ioo.coop/2017/01/14/prospectus-ioocloud-a-cloud-services-cooperative/ (although I see you've already seen it Chris).

Thanks, that proposal is very much in line with the Sheffield based https://darkpeak.org/ co-op (I did try to get some of them to come to Wortley Hall) but I guess more ambitious (and US based), I think it is a great idea and I'd love to see a lot of co-ops of this nature.

What we have been discussion in terms of a co-op cloud was more like a co-operative version of Amazon Web Services -- aimed more at other co-ops rather then individuals, but of course there would probably be some overlap with these things.

As I also commented over on ioo see also IndieHosters - they aren't really a co-op (at least not yet, think it's basically 2 people), but offer similar "hosted open source apps" stuff (they host the Discourse we've got at https://discuss.open.coop/ )

Over on the Commons Transition Loomio the topic of http://www.beyondbroadband.coop/ has come up, under the topic of "Commons trasition: what about the IT infrastructure?" [sic]

Is there a way of coordinating the discussion? Or is all we can do to have people in both?

@asimong I was involved in the beyondbroadband.coop work and know the INCA people well (INCA was originally set up by CBN). I don't know how to co-ordinate the discussion. Are there specific questions being asked?