Cloud in a Bottle: A Personal Cloud for Those Tired of Everyone Else's

The creator of Cloud in a Bottle opens with a confession of frustration: modern software, in his words, works against the user's interests — it is deliberately addictive, stuffed with ads, spies on you and sells your data. The culprit, he argues, is the migration of programs into the cloud. A cloud service is convenient — nothing to install, everything available from any device — but someone pays for the hosting, which means behind every product stands a company whose financial incentives diverge from ours.

In the pre-cloud era, open source worked differently: authors handed out their programs, and everyone ran them on their own computer. Today a single instance of a piece of software serves the whole world, and the costs fall on its creator — so few are willing to give their cloud application away for free.

What's on Offer

Self-hosting exists, but it remains niche and unwelcoming. The author runs through the existing solutions and finds a flaw in each: sandstorm.io is close in spirit but long abandoned; Nextcloud is slow and increasingly geared toward enterprises; YunoHost runs applications right on the host with no isolation, so one leaky program compromises the entire server; Coolify keeps things in containers, but each application is an “island” with its own login.

Cloud in a Bottle is, in essence, a machine running Ubuntu and a web server that serves up a control panel and routes requests to applications. The applications run in isolated, hardened, rootless containers, so existing software works almost without modification and inside a reasonably secure sandbox. On top of that come optional platform features: once you're logged into your instance, you're automatically authorized in every application, and you can configure permission-based data access between them — much the way APIs on Android or iOS give apps access to sensors, notifications and the like.

Openness and the Business Model

The project is open, self-hosted, free of telemetry and, as promised, “without magic.” Imbue, the company where the author works, also offers a managed version — that's what the business model rests on — but the open version runs exactly the same code and remains first-class.

The launch came after more than six months of closed development. The author acknowledges the chicken-and-egg problem: as long as there's no accessible way to host open web software, there's little such software to be had. The application catalog is still small and carefully curated — only things that are genuinely convenient get added — but it grows every week. Early users, the author honestly warns, will still need a bit of technical background (or the help of a coding assistant).

Source: Hacker News