Add Coop Cloud post

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Luke Murphy 2021-02-17 14:24:49 +01:00
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---
layout: post
title: The Cooperative Cloud
description: Free software infrastructure without re-inventing the wheel
image: coop-cloud.png
category: coop, cloud, docker, swarm, free-software
date: 2021-02-16
---
At Autonomic, we've been using [Cloudron] to quickly and easily deploy free
software applications (Wordpress, Nextloud, Mediawiki, etc.) for our clients.
If you haven't heard of Cloudron, here is the short summary of what it does: it
provides infrastructure hosters like Autonomic with a simple to use web
interface for deploying hundreds of free software applications in a few clicks
of the mouse.
Using a system like Cloudron has expanded our capacity to support more "on a
shoestring" grassroots organising because it reduces our initial starting
costs. This is the work that we feel is important to support even when there is
little funding to pay for that work.
However, as time has gone on, we've had a few moments when we questioned our
reliance on Cloudron.
- Parts the system officially [became proprietary] which was worrying but also
somewhat understandable from a funding perspective.
- The work to package the available applications is done [entirely by
the Cloudron team itself] and doesn't re-use the existing rich ecosystem of
free software packaging work already going on. This seems unsustainable.
- A growing fear of centralising a significant part of our offering on a
single business which may make decisions that could have a large impact on
our ability to provide services.
As a result of these concerns, we tried to map out a few core principles of a
project which might work a lot like Cloudron but give us more guarantees that
we can depend on. We've started to call that the Cooperative Cloud.
- The Coop Cloud should always be available under [copyleft licenses] to retain
the shared work as public property. This doesn't mean we can't pursue
commercial work but we can't rely on creating false scarcity to earn money.
- The Coop Cloud doesn't re-invent the wheel. We aim is to work with existing
free software communities who are already packaging and publishing their
software (Nextcloud, Gitea, Mediawiki, Rocket.chat, the list goes on...). We
want to be involved in their community spaces and build bridges between
infrastructure, software development and end-users.
- The Coop Cloud has democratic governance at the core of the project. We
want to work as much as possible with other cooperatives to build up good
decision making structures so we can all depend on this project.
With those ideas in mind, we started to build something in the time we could
spare. We worked on a simple packaging format using existing [open standards]
to build the application catalogue. We wrote a command-line client which could
read the catalogue and deploy those applications.
We can safely say the cooperative cloud project is currently alpha quality
software but it shows promise and signs of stability. We've already been
testing a sort of "dual power" strategy with some existing clients and we've
been seeing good results. We're happy to say that we're already partially
running operations on the Cooperative Cloud.
If you want to learn more about the project, please read our documentation
where we explain the decisions we've made so far in more depth. What
technologies we're using, how we fit into the existing ecosystem, ways to
contribute, what applications are available and so on.
> [cloud.autonomic.zone](https://cloud.autonomic.zone/)
At this point, we'd like to invite other cooperatives to take a look at what
we're working on and come and have a chat with us. We think a common platform
for hosting free software infrastructure could make a big difference in terms
of what we're able to offer as a movement.
[cloudron]: https://cloudron.io/
[became proprietary]: https://forum.cloudron.io/topic/2862/why-not-make-cloudron-fully-open-source-again
[entirely by the cloudron team itself]: https://git.cloudron.io/cloudron
[copyleft licenses]: https://www.gnu.org/licenses/copyleft.en.html
[open standards]: https://compose-spec.io/

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