Just checked the part about self-hosting. While it’s probably possible to handle things with a less heavy approach, their only “easy to use” example right now is to have a full-blown kubernetes cluster at hand or run locally in the source directory. That’s a bit much.
In the README there’s also instructions for Docker Compose, although it’s quite the compose file, with SIXTEEN containers defined. Not something I’d want to self-host.
it seems to contains development containers and external services containers. So the compose file is more for local dev it seems
What i do find weird is the choice for Django for the backend. Python is incredibly slow, and django rest framework is even worse.
Honestly, k8s is super easy and very lightweight to run locally if you know the rights tools. There are a few good options but I prefer k3d. I can install Docker/k3d and also build a local cluster running in maybe 2 minutes. It’s excellent for local dev. Even good for production in some niche scenarios
I don’t like the approach of piling more things on top of even more things to achieve the same goal as the base, frankly speaking. A “local” kubernetes cluster serve no purpose other than incredible complexity for little to no gain over a mere docker-compose. And a small cluster would work equally well with docker swarm.
A service, even made of multiple parts, should always be described that way. It’s easy to move “up” the stack of complexity, if you so desire. Having “have a k8s cluster with helm” working as the base requirement sounds insane to me.
Honestly, a lot of the time I don’t understand why a lot of businesses use k8s.
At my company especially, we know almost exactly what our traffic will look like from 9am-5pm. We don’t really need flexible scaling, yet we still use it because the technology is hyped. Similar to cloud, we certainly don’t need to be spending as much as we do, but since everyone else is on or migrating to the cloud, we are as well.
The “problem” with k8s is not that it’s abstract-y (it’s not inherently any more abstract than docker), it’s that it’s very complex and enterprise-y.
The need for such a complex orchestration layer is not necessarily immediately obvious, until you’ve worked on a complex infra setup that wasn’t deployed with kubernetes. Believe me when you’ve seen the depths of hell that are hundreds of separately configured customer setups using thousands of lines of ansible playbooks, all using ad-hoc systems for creating containers/VMs, with even more ad-hoc and hacked together development and staging environments, suddenly k8s starts looking very appetizing. Instead of an abominable spaghetti of bash scripts, playbooks, and random documentation, one common (albeit complex) set of tools understood by every professional which manages your application deployment & configuration, redundancy, software upgrades, firewall configs, etc.
A small self-hosted production kubernetes cluster doesn’t have to be hard to operate or significantly more expensive than bare-metal; you can buy 3U of rack space, plop in 3 semi-large servers (think 128 GB plus a few TB of SSD RAID), install rancher and longhorn, and now you’ve got a prod cluster large enough for nearly every workload such that if you ever need to upgrade that means you have so many customers that hiring a k8s administrator will be a no-brainer.
Or you can buy minutes from AWS because CapEx is the absolute devil and instead you pay several times as much in OpEx to make it someone else’s problem. But if you’re doing that then you’re not comparing against “installing things the old-fashioned way”.
Thanks for the response!
I personally haven’t rolled a k8s or k3s cluster, so it’s always felt a bit abstract to me. I probably should though, to demystify it to myself in my work environment.
Complex is definitely what I have noticed when I see my devops team PR into the ingress directories.
I guess the abstract issue I see, that ties in to the meme i shared above, is that sometimes around deploys where we get blips of 503/4’s and we appear to be unable to track them down. Is it the load balancer? Ingress? Kong? The fact that there is so many layers make infra issues rough to debug
I mean yeah it’s all very complex for sure. Managing a cluster is very involved and k8s administration is typically a completely separate role from dev/devops. I am comfortable with the idea and I still run my selfhosted setup on docker because it’s easier and I have no personal use for multi-node setups.
However when you get down to it pretty much everything in k8s solves a real problem that in a “traditional” infra would require lots of ad-hoc bullshit. The ingress system of k8s is, at a high level, a standardized recreation of the typical “haproxy+nginx+ad-hoc provisioning” setup you’d find in a “classical” private cloud deployment. TLS in, send to nginx, nginx chooses a relevant healthy back-end and reverse proxies the request. K8s doesn’t really do anything crazy complex, the complexity is just inherent to having a many-to-many mapping of HTTP requests while optionally supporting multi-zone setups with local affinity and lifecycle management/awareness.
But unlike with a traditional deployment there’s not a greybeard guru in the back who deployed it all and knows the ins-and-outs so it’s quite common that the complexity is not understood and underappreciated by the “admins”. That complexity is a blessing when you need to leverage it but a curse when you lack the expertise to understand what is happening holistically.
Kind of like a linux distro… It’s amazing when it works but when libpam throws an error and you don’t even know what that library is or does, well you’re in for a fun evening.
Kubernetes is not really meant primarily for scaling. Even kubernetes clusters require autoscaling groups on nodes to support it, for example, or horizontal pod autoscalers, but they are minor features.
The benefits are pooling computing resources and creating effectively a private cloud. Easy replication of applications in case of hardware failure. Single language to deploy applications, network controls, etc.
Yea I’m not a fan of helm either. In fact, I avoid charts when possible. But kustomize is great.
I feel the same way about docker compose. If it wasn’t already obvious, I’m biased in favor of k8s. I like and prefer that interface. But that’s just preference. If you like docker compose, great!
There’s one point where I do disagree however. There are scenarios where a local k8s cluster has a good and clear purpose. If your production environment runs on k8s, then it’s best to mirror that locally as much as possible. In fact, there are many apps that even require a k8s api to run. Plus, being able to destroy and rebuild your entire k8s cluster in 30s is wonderful for local testing.
Edit: typos
I won’t argue with the ups and downs of each technos, but I recently looked into docker swarms and it was all I expected kubernetes to be, without the hassle. And I could also get a full cluster with services restored from scratch in 30s. But I am obviously biased towards it, too :)
Did not realize swarm was still a thing, not trying to be offensive here.
My best find was using traefik as a reverse proxy in docker (compose). It is easily configurable through container labels and pulls resource definitions straight from docker. It is awesome!
Seconding k3d (and, by extension, k3s). If you’re in a market for sth suitable for more upstream-compliant clustering solution (k3s uses SQLite instead of etcd, iirc), RKE2 is also a great choice
k8s is overkill for a lot of homelabs. Using docker compose is a fraction of that complexity
Yes if single node, kinda if 2-3 nodes, no for anything above that IMHO.
There are many reasons to use k8s. Managing multiple nodes is one good one. But more importantly, k8s gives you an api-driven runtime environment. It’s really not comparable to docker compose.
Please develop this self hosted version using sandstorm
It makes hosting a breeze with one click installation
Surprised they didn’t go with cryptpad - aren’t they already French?
Cryptpad is French, but they are using OnlyOffice, which is Russian.
Fuck :( Didn’t know that… I got convinced by the company being supposedly Latvian.
It is Latvian. It’s also Russian. It’s also Singaporean. It just depends on who you ask and how much you want to look into it.
But yeah, that’s a large part of why I use Collabora instead of OnlyOffice, it’s just a lot less sketchy.
Interesting, thanks for sharing!
Is there any evidence of any wrongdoing or are we just considering all open source software from Russia a bad actor by default?
Yes, there is evidence. Did you read the linked post?
I wouldn’t have any problems with it if it were just free open source software. But they also offer paid services. Internationally they do that through their Latvian based subsidiary, obfuscating their origin. At home in Russia their suite is renamed R7-Office, which is a reference to the first ICBM with a nuclear warhead. The release imagery also depicts the release of a rocket that looks like the R-7.
Altogether pretty sus, if you ask me.
First, keep your condescension to yourself.
Second, that’s not evidence, that’s FUD.
No condescension intended.
What was wrong with libre?
Pretty sure Libre only does local document collaboration, having it online is helpful for teams far from each other or who simply don’t have the infrastructure for their own central server of this kind.
Well this has been running in our Nextcloud and works pretty well collaboratively :) https://github.com/CollaboraOnline/online not sure how it scales, but definitely an alternative that can be built on
Thanks for this; I may use it to build out my NextCloud server. I’ve already used it to replace shared calendars and contacts.
If you’re using Nextcloud All In One then it’s easy to enable it in the AIO settings.
If you’re not, I suggest looking into it. It’s the new officially recommended way of installing and it’s been great.
Nextcloud has an export/import data function but at the time I did it I only had a few GB of data so not sure how well it scales.
The web browser is the future, especially for a crappy document editor and spread sheet.
Then just use Word online.
Not FOSS and probably not privacy friendly
Calligra and LibreOffice already exist though. I am not against this in principle but couldn’t they have invested in an existing FOSS project?
While both of those are great software. Unless I’m not aware of something they aren’t cloud/network based office suites like Google docs and office 365.
It seems this is an alternative to office software where you can work simultaneously and share documents in the same cloud/network.
I don’t think there is an alternative to office 365 and Google docs at this point that is open source. So this seems like a great project and I’ll definitely be considering it for our company.
What about Collabora Online? It integrates nicely into Nextcloud, but I am not sure about pricing for business use.
https://www.collaboraonline.com/collabora-online/
Guide for self hosting: https://collabora-online-for-nextcloud.readthedocs.io/en/latest/install/
Thanks I’ll definitely check that out. I’ve seen some posts about it working on Synology Nas devices so that’s very interesting.
If you ever diverge away from proprietary Synology solution, NextCloud has 100% integration with Collabora too.
There is nextcloud and others you can self host at least.
LibreOffice online exists. It’s not mature, but they could have invest half their time in making it so.
Only Office is natively cloud based, with an optional offline/desktop version.
Both are open source, if the concern is project governance, create a fork and rebrand.
A lot of government programs don’t really make sense and are there just to put a name on a CV sadly. Collabora Online does exactly that and is primary licensed under Mozilla Public License.
They could have easily expanded Collabora. But you know, can’t stamp your name on it.
To be fair, though a new project might not be as efficient as improving another, projects learn off each other, and sometimes it’s good to have developmental ‘competition’, and variety.
Can either of those do collaborative editing? I usually think of that feature when I think of Google Docs
OnlyOffice does for sure, not sure how well it works on LibreOffice Online.
Wait LibreOffice has a cloud?
Note: The LibreOffice Online repository at TDF is temporarily frozen. Updates on this will be published on our blog and on our website.
yeah
Yes, that’s excellent. We need our own Google suite. Fingers crossed so that it may come eventually.
As someone in and from the US, good. Private companies are far to prevalent in public institutions all over the world. Something as basic and fundamental as word processing should not be controlled by a small select few huge international companies.
Really glad to see the EU adopt more open source software as a way to combat the centralized control some of the american software companies have over the space.
Really cool. I tried to sign up but you have to be part of an officially recognized organization in France and input their registration number as part of the process.
I definitely don’t want the government attached to my personal files, in any country.
Yeah I thought this was open to the general public, I didn’t realize that it was not
I’m sure it will be. This is a government funded thing in the early stages so I can see how they would set it up that way.
Nice. Where is the source, on github (I didn’t see it but I only skimmed)? Federated? Self-hostable?
From briefly looking over the toot, I think the German version is called openDesk (bad choice as there seems to be some interior design software with the same name) there is a community version you can self host in a docker container. They apparently also have distro packages for Debian and Ubuntu but they seem to have stopped development on those.
Here’s a link: https://opendesk.eu/en/
openDesk is a complete suite of open source software. I guess Docs could at some point become a part of it. But it‘s not the same thing.
Github: https://github.com/suitenumerique/docs
Self-hostable, but it seems like an absolute behemoth of an application if their “non-production-use-only” docker-compose file is to be believed, and I couldn’t find any production-ready deployment instructions on a quick skim. No obvious signs of federation and I didn’t see anything on their roadmap, not sure it would make a lot of sense for this though.
Deployment instructions start with the prerequisite that you have a full kubernetes cluster with ingress laying around, so… yeah. It looks like it’ll be on the heavy side.
https://github.com/suitenumerique/docs
Self-hostable, needs Minio (or any S3 compatible system).
Great news!
This is probably the last hump for me before I can completely degoogle.
So FramaSoft is not a thing ?? It’s French
Nice, DINUM is doing a lot so great to see go beyond with supra national collaboration!
I’m using NextCloud (Germany and international open source community) hosted on Webo (Slovenia) with data centers in Germany and Helsinki (so I bet on Hetzner). I’m happy with it but I’ll keep on eye on https://github.com/suitenumerique/docs
I’d be curious, they use Minio which puts S3 first. Does it mean Docs (the official instance) is relying on AWS?
If so IMHO that’s not a great default EU sovereignty.
I would assume (without having looked at the codebase) that if they use minio they are, by default, not reliant on AWS.
Minio is its own S3 implementation which can be self-hosted.
S3, being an AWS protocol originally has
AWSenvironment variables all over the place but that does not necessarily mean a reliance on the service. Rather, they rely on the protocol and you bring your own S3 endpoint I would assume. be that minio, hetzner or what have you.Thanks for the clarification, that makes sense, closing the issue then.
FWIW if others are curious https://github.com/suitenumerique/docs/issues/755 opened an issue
I thought that MinIO is a Open-Source S3 implementation, which you can just install on your own system. S3 is a “protocol” here IIUC.
Is your complaint that they are using the S3 protocol, because it was invented and is controlled by AWS?
Or that some services might use it without MinIO, directly on AWS?
Seems I misunderstood, if it’s solely the branding (of that implementation) then it’s fine. I thought they relied on AWS itself.
I got a kick out of Google Docs alternative since it is trying to be AnyType, AFFiNE, AppFlowy, etc and none of those editors are stupid enough to claim to be Google Docs alternatives nor are they a bloated mess. Proof is in the pudding though… Try putting 1 inch margins on a page & add tab stops with this & printing it out where you get the same results… oh wait, you can’t… Cause it isn’t a Google Docs alternative.
I disagree. There’s Microsoft Office, and there’s everything else. Google is in that second bucket.
There’s Libre office for those who like freedom and open source tech.
Depends on who you hang with. Pretty much all businesses at this point do collaboration either with Office 365 or with Google Docs, and the same in Academia. Usually it’s a mix of both.
None of those tools are editors, right? They all try to be a notion alternative, which is also not an editor. There is basically 0 focus on typesetting.
That is what I’m saying this editor is trying to be Notion, not Google Docs.
Yes, but who said otherwise then?
Oh OP made it up. Nvm. They write themselves that it is a notion alternative.
Google docs is trash.
That is fine to have that opinion but it is irrelevant to the discussion since no where did I praise Google Docs. I’m just explaining the difference between this & and editor that does descent typesetting.
And an editor that does a decent job is not google docs.
It is embarassing that MS has dominated this for more than 30 years and Google, despite its infinite wealth, hasn’t made a decent office app.
I wholeheartedly agree with this opinion. Google Docs has done very little to innovate. The fact that you’re still limited to like 6 built-in styles & lack of integrated syntax highlighting is ridiculous.
Google Docs has done very little to innovate.
The place where I see Google Docs being far superior to any other product I’ve run into is collaborative work. Having multiple people writing in the same doc at the simultaneously is a train wreck in most products Office365 included. In other products there’s a good chance you’ll have a version conflict and someone’s changes will be lost. Google docs handles that with ease.
I have been using collaboration with Microsoft products for decades with little issue. I first started in college in 2006 with Onenote and it worked well even then. googol is garbage.
I have been using collaboration with Microsoft products for decades with little issue.
You’ve had 60+ people all in a single Excel spreadsheet on Sharepoint all making changes at the exact same moment and never once had a issue of a document lock or file corruption? Its okay to have a preference for one product over the other, but when you’re blinded by brand loyalty where you can see no wrong with your preferred product, it makes you lose credibility.
What does this do over what the collabora tools in Nextcloud do?
NGL I keep forgetting NextCloud has collaboration tools.
Now explain this to EU based corporations, which in my opinion needs to be the focus on making the change. They drive the economy. All major assets in software income are being routed to American firms through their licenses.
