Evolution #2 - Infrastructuring through federating

Exited to see these link-ups happening! :star_struck:

Definitely agree with the importance of documentation to try and make efforts replicable; Autonomic is hoping to do more in this area as time allows.

Tech-wise, we tried and gave up with Ansible for app deployment. To add to our brief notes about our rationale in the Co-op Cloud FAQ, we found Ansible fragile as a front-end (several of us ended up in very cursed situations with our local Ansible set-ups, which were huge time-sinks to resolve), and found playbooks difficult to reuse between deployments, especially those coming from other groups.

Iā€™ll also repeat here some comments from an e-mail thread about single sign on, which does seem like a key part of the puzzle tech-wise:

To explain: a key part of the idea behind cooperative.computer is that SSO-linked open source platforms are better than ā€œeverything appsā€, even open source ones, because it lets app developers play to their strengths, and gives administrators freedom to experiment in choosing between them. We also see SSO as a killer feature vs proprietary systems which, if they support SSO at all, usually hide it behind an ā€œenterpriseā€ pricing tier, see https://sso.tax. So weā€™ve ruled out several great pieces of tech (notably Cryptpad, and email) unless and until they support OAuth or SAML.

Weā€™ve started to explore the inter-group federation possibilities ā€“ git.coopcloud.tech supports (as well as some convenience corporate providers) logins with Autonomicā€™s Keycloak, and Local-ITā€™s (a Co-op Cloud federation member organisation) Authentik.

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