Deploying on StackOS

A month or two ago we announced a partnership with StackOS. Yesterday they announced their Mainnet Launch. So, I headed over to app.stackos.io to try it out.

First Impressions

The first thing anyone expecting a cloud deployment and management dashboard will notice is the need to connect up metamask. As soon as you have done that, connected it up and gotten some STACK, it starts to become clear what the guys have accomplished. A proper decentralised hosting option. There is never a need to provide identity, or log in with permissioned credentials. Everything is mediated by signing with your keys via metamask. Everything is paid for via STACK tokens.

How it works

The StackOS dashboard is definitely pretty and is simple enough to use. I had some issues that stemmed from me overthinking things, expecting more complexity than there was.

To get started you need to select CPU, RAM, Storage and Bandwidth allocations, and charge your wallet with enough STACK to pay the monthly fee and sign them over to pay. (Don’t forget you will need gas on the relevant chain in your metamask. This threw me at first, but demonstrated again, that I was in charge here and committing required an on-chain transaction.

The system is container based, load balancing, dns and other tools you’d expect are built in. It will be really interesting to see a community grow around this, and how they start pushing the edges of what the team imagined.

Right now it’s possible to spin up an existing container from the ‘app store’, or pull a public or private one in from the cloud.

I decided to use the standard WordPress container to host a one page website for an up coming Saito community activity. It took a few moments for things to deploy and I was greeted with the WordPress language selection page, filled in the basic data and was in with a new website.

Conclusions

There were some rough edges that the StackOS team helped me with. But experiencing a permissionless version of something I use permissioned every day was really exciting.

We are looking forward to working with StackOS to make various Saito tools available in their app store for simple deployment, and I will be keeping an eye on StackOS offerings as a partner project and as a system administrator.