This is the first monthly report for the OpenAppStack project managed by Greenhost and eQualit.ie.

Introduction

OpenAppStack will be a suite of provisioning tooling to allow for automated deployment and management of OSS groupware tools, secure communication, circumvention and other offerings from the Internet Freedom community. OpenAppStack will offer self-managed click-and-play auto-updated provisioning of necessary software for CSOs. A user will be able to log in using multi-factor authentication (MFA) and Single Sign On (SSO) to all of these tools using a (self-)hosted instance of the OpenAppStack, running at a cloud provider like AWS, Eclips.is or Greenhost, an alternative infrastructure provider or even on their own hardware.

OpenAppStack will initially package the most popular services used by CSOs: file sharing and shared calendars, internal communications, video conferencing, and a single sign-on and sign-off solution for this services. For tool developers OpenAppStack will provide CI/CD and (functional) testing hooks as well as APIs to integrate the setup process into the user interface, allowing additional applications to become supported and included.

OpenAppStack is built around a single-tenant cloud model, which means that every organization will have its own OpenAppStack system setup, running on one or more cloud instances (using low-level virtualization). The individual applications within the stack are containerized. This model optimizes between the cost efficiency of containerization and the security benefits of full virtualization (between tenants).

Activity

This month the strategy and planning for the following months was defined. A core team within Greenhost was formed which will lead the OpenAppStack project. Colleagues outside the core-team were introduced to the details, challenges and opportunities of OpenAppStack to combine expertise in all areas.

The core team consists of two developers and a system engineer who will work together as the OpenAppStack DevOps team to set the groundwork for this project. The team will start out by sketching a clearer picture of the project’s infrastructure. Additionally, they will further investigate which containerisation and container management system is best suitable for OpenAppStack. Lastly, they are responsible for designing and setting up a pipeline for automatically creating containers from application code which are auto-updatable and easily installable and manageable.

Additionally we have started conversations with other infrastructure and tool providers. This is to make sure that we align goals, requirements and expectations to increase support for OpenAppStack early on in the process.

Next month we expect to report more on our roadmap and research.