VirtKick
Infrastructure
self-hosted vm management
SHOW HN2014
216points
92comments
#87of 2,272 in 2014
Top 4%of 2014 by points
How HN took it
MixedNo clear lean
10 positive, 20 neutral or asking, 3 mixed, 15 critical, out of 48 comments about the project. Thread score -0.17.
Idea: 4 for, 6 againstExecution: 0 for, 3 againstDesign: 0 for, 1 against
The thread, comment by comment
Each row is a top-level comment and its replies, in HN's order. Select a cell to open that comment on HN.
positive neutral or mixed critical about another commenter or something else the maker
What HN said
What people liked
AGPL licence choice welcomed
From 2 comments
This is an awesome project! Thanks for choosing the AGPLv3! I tried to create a VM on the demo site, and got a nice Ruby error message next to the VM's name on the 'Machines'…
davexunit on HNVirtkick has a web application component, which makes the AGPL a great choice. Without the 'Affero' component, anyone could host a version of VirtKick with proprietary…
davexunit on HN
Simple UI and clear goal
From 2 comments
So excited to see this! Great job guys!
dailen on HNI've been following this for a while, and it looks like an awesome way to roll your own cloud!
jameshk on HN
Objections
Copyright assignment requirement raises worries about proprietary relicensing
From 3 comments
This looks cool, but I can't see why contributors should assign you copyright so you can sell proprietary versions of VirtKick. Very few free software projects have copyright…
eltondegeneres on HNThis is an awesome project! Thanks for choosing the AGPLv3! I tried to create a VM on the demo site, and got a nice Ruby error message next to the VM's name on the 'Machines'…
davexunit on HNWith a copyright assignment, the authors could take the entire project closed-source for future versions. You'd still be able to use older, AGPL-licensed versions, but perhaps…
mbreese on HN
Not truly self-hosted DigitalOcean, and libvirt tools already exist
From 3 comments
I would not consider nor call this "Self-hosted DigitalOcean" - Interesting project never the less.
neom on HNWithout any judgement over the project and its quality, I would not call it "Self-hosted DO". Because DigitalOcean, basically, is a way to get VMs without self-hosting them!
hbbio on HNSo what exactly is the advantage of using this layer over the existing libvirt ecosystem? If this is supposed to manage your VMs for you instead of you using the existing libvirt…
catern on HN
Requests
SSH key injection for VMs
From 2 comments
I actually wanted to create something like this. Does it do ssh key injection when VMS are created?
Stephen304 on HNPerfect! I wanted to host my own DO type thing for personal projects and I tried "webvirtmgr" which has a nice control panel for libvirt, but the creator insists that ssh key…
Stephen304 on HN
Support for more Linux distributions
From 1 comment
This is an awesome project! Thanks for choosing the AGPLv3! I tried to create a VM on the demo site, and got a nice Ruby error message next to the VM's name on the 'Machines'…
davexunit on HN
LXC support
From 1 comment
No LXC on the map? :(
wolpherine on HN
Questions
Why libvirt and not existing tools or OpenStack
From 2 comments
So what exactly is the advantage of using this layer over the existing libvirt ecosystem? If this is supposed to manage your VMs for you instead of you using the existing libvirt…
catern on HNSo what is this? A project based off of openstack, a complete re-working of an openstack-like environment or something different?
salesforce_wha on HN
Is documentation available
From 1 comment
some documentation...?
anentropic on HN
Alternatives named
OpenStack
From 2 comments
I disagree - OpenStack scales down perfectly to two-machine or even (one-machine) deployments (if you don't want HA). It is a pain to configure, but that's the price you pay for…
q3k on HNA complete re-working - as OpenStack is too big if you're not a corporation with a very big infrastructure.
Nowaker on HN
WebVirtMgr
From 1 comment
You may be surprised that VirtKick wraps WebVirtMgr and uses it as a JSON API for libvirt. :-) This is a temporary solution but does the job - it allowed us to start real quick…
Nowaker on HN
Cloud Foundry
From 1 comment
How does this compare to something like Cloud Foundry?
hangonhn on HN