Talking Cloudron at #OER18

Tim and Jim talking CloudRon

Image credit: Lauren Brumfield

I was part of two sessions at OER18 a couple of weeks ago. Lauren Brumfield already blogged and shared the slides of the session she authored on Digital Literacy. I say authored rather than presented because, unfortunately, she fell ill on day 2, and Tim, Meredith, and myself had to step in and deliver the talk. It went off seamlessly because Lauren had already written us into the plot, but the design and execution was all Lauren’s doing—we were just errand boys and girls sent by a grocery clerk to collect a bill 🙂

Digital Literacy: Reclaiming Your Space

Meredith also presented, and I will post about that separately, but it’s worth taking a moment to comment on the importance of having everyone at Reclaim Hosting getting comfortable with proposing and presenting their ideas at conferences. I know it was huge for me when I was encouraged to present as soon as I started working at UMW. I was pushed to work with the rest of DTLT to hone how we told our story, and that resulted in so much goodness over the years. It’s important to provide a space for exploration and narration as part of life at Reclaim, and OER18 provided an intimate, welcome environment for us to do just that—even beyond Reclaim Video 🙂

So, having some time to present with Tim about the possible future of Reclaim Hosting in beyond the LAMP environment was a lot of fun. We focused on our explorations of CloudRon, which was timely, given we have a couple of schools particularly interested in exploring a container-driven environment like this for their respective programs.

What is CloudRon? It’s an open source environment for running containerized applications, making it simple to run apps in Node.js, Ruby, etc. which do not run cleanly in a LAMP environment. Below are the slides from our 15 minute lightening presentation, not necessarily all that informative given they are screenshots, but basically comparing cPanel to the CloudRon experience—although to be clear it is not necessarily one or the other.

We discussed how folks have pared down cPanel to just WordPress to make things easier, as well as how software like CloudLinux for cPanel has made it possible to install Ruby apps like Jekyl or Node.js apps like Ghost, but the process is not easy. From there we looked at how dead-simple Cloudron has made it not only to install applications, but map DNS, and even copy and share applications templates. It’s an increasingly compelling space for us to be exploring, and we are fortunate enough to have a couple of partners interested, so I imagine you’ll be hearing much more on this front from Reclaim in the coming months.

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