Mission statement #

We want to build tools and services that are useful for software development. We want to empower individual contributors to rapidly prototype and boost productivity.

Design goals #

• Primary directive is to be useful to ourselves
• Developer tools and services
• Focus on the individual developer
• Enable developers to rapidly prototype
• Ability to host small web services
• Authentication with SSH
• Move fast and break things

What it is not #

• Not a PaaS
• Not designed for teams or organizations
• Not going to provide 99.99% uptime
• It's not going to scale with demand

Services #

• static site hosting pgs.sh
• tunnels as a service tuns.sh
• distrobox as a service
• docker compose as a service pcompose

static site hosting #

An easy to use static site hosting platform. Publish your sites as easy as copying files to our SSH app.

TODO #

• Figure out storage, bandwidth limits

distrobox as a service #

Create a development container in the cloud. Use familiar linux distros. Remote into your dev container from any client.

TODO #

• One big benefit of distrobox is that it lets you mount your home directory
  • Do we want to support persistent disk for distrobox containers?
  • That way a user can spin up as many containers as they want and they have the same persisted home directory
• Many developers need access to Docker, which is a technical challenge
• Could we link this service with our docker compose one?
• For example, I could have a distrobox with arch but I need a postgres server and I'd like to run it inside a docker container
  • I know there's a way to proxy docker commands to a remote docker daemon, I wonder if we could leverage that here?
• How many containers do we want to support?
• Do we want to provide an ephemeral version of this? (e.g. docker run --rm)
• Do we want to automatically load remote vscode?

docker compose as a service #

If all you need is a place to host your simple services, use docker compose. This service is not designed to scale, rather, a quick place to get services up and running with minimal effort. This service is also great for rapidly prototyping and getting a product or service out-the-door quickly.

TODO #

• How do we handle network isolation?
• How do we charge?
• How do we technically allow pcompose to be multi-tenant?
• Should we provide officially supported images for some apps/services/tools?
  • git repos
  • image registry
  • CI/CD
• How many distinct docker compose files should we support?
  • Current thinking is just one but that might be limiting

tunnels as a service #

Need to access localhost from https? Not only that, but we also use tunnels to allow you to connect to all your other containers.

TODO #

• Can we leverage tuns for network isolation?
• Can we leverage tuns to connect to all user containers?
• Can we leverage tuns for web tunnels?

Pricing #

We would like to keep pricing as simple as possible to reduce overhead. The current idea is we only offer a yearly subscription service. Ideally we would be able to charge somewhere around $20/yr, but that might change depending on how much compute we offer users. I think we could implement a tier pricing model but that is kind of a pain. It would be better if there was just one single plan that works for most users.

TODO #

• How much do we want to charge users?
• How much compute do we want to offer users?
• Do we want to allow users to horizontally scale their compute?
• Do we want to allow users to vertically scale their compute?