 All right, so Tim, this is reclaimed today, is that right? It certainly is. And this is live. It's live. It's on demand. It's in 27 locations coming at you. Apple TV, Roku. Don King is going to be producing us. It's going big. Should go the other directions. Instead of mass distribution, it'll be distributed nowhere. If you don't catch it live, you never saw it. Which means it will never be watched. It's the nobody's listening video, like you said. I like it. I do. So what I wanted to talk with you about today in the time we have is, you know, I saw a tweet from Tony Hearst. And we've been going back and forth with Tony Hearst in this kind of weird, disjunted conversation about like what's next in terms of reclaimed hosting and how do we host cloud applications? What does that mean with stuff like Docker containers? And it's interesting stuff. We've been talking about this since 2014, 2013 with Kin Lane. We even brought him into UMW. And we talked extensively for a day or two about what an API-driven container-based hosting infrastructure would look like. I mean, we had that conversation early. Things got in the way in terms of like us actually growing as a company. But it's funny how we circle back to these ideas. And one of the, I bring up Tony Hearst because one of the things he linked me to that I then shared with you is this service called Zeit Now. Which is from what I understand, and this is why I need you on this call because my understanding hits the brick wall behind you very fast and hard and it hurts to people who listen and realize that I'm misinforming them. But the way I understand Zeit Now is, you know, this is basically Docker container hosting that you can through GitHub, you know, not only deploy a container but host it through Zeit Now and they charge you for usage. I imagine it's by month or by day even or by hour based on how the cloud could do it. But it's effectively you are able to spin up and host your own container. So this is of interest to us for many reasons. One of which is I get a ticket a week about I want to run R or Shiny or I have this new application, a guy from Israel reached out not too long ago and said I want to run this thing called Dataset which is actually what Tony Hearst had used Zeit Now to run. And so it's all these people who have these very specific applications a lot of that is data analysis applications which are Shiny and a dataset is. Now when I say R Shiny, am I even saying that right? Like is R Shiny like a suite of tools? Is it a specific visualization tool? You're kind of asking the wrong person. I'm definitely no kind of data scientist or data analysis type person but my understanding is that R is the programming language and you set up a Shiny server to run Shiny apps and Shiny apps are a implementation of using R for specific things. So I think it's all kind of used in the same respect but I think R is sort of the underlying language which actually I had done a course a couple years back playing with R. I can't remember a single thing from it just because it wasn't really useful to the kind of things that I play around with day to day but for many people it is in terms of data analysis stuff but R is the language and then you can set up a server with R but a lot of people are setting up servers with Shiny so that they can run Shiny apps and I think Shiny apps are maybe an easier way to be introduced than to use the R language, sort of a more onboarded way to do that. And another application we hear about running in a specific container based situation is like Jupyter notebooks. Right, yeah exactly. We hear about this a lot, regularly from people who want to do this stuff and when I saw Tony Hurst and I follow Tony Hurst's links right now what I thought was really interesting about their infrastructure is if you have some knowledge of GitHub and you can deploy and you have I believe Docker running on your laptop or wherever on your server, you can deploy it. You can deploy it pretty easily. So what I'm going to ask you to do and I'm kind of putting you on the spot here Tim is I'm going to see if you can get data set that application I've been running, I've been running through Zyte Now. You're killing me, I don't even know what data set is. That's where I am. That's messed up, that's the whole point, you don't need to know. Oh okay, yeah, I don't know about that. Let's back up a bit here because actually so like when I was playing around a little bit with Zyte Now so I haven't played with data set at all but I did play around with and I guess it's just called Now and the company is called Zyte.co if I understand that relationship properly and I was playing around a little bit with it and it's not just Docker. So it's no JS applications and it's also static HTML. So obviously a lot of people are interested in the idea of using static HTML templates for speed and performance or just for ease of use things like Jekyll and that it can generate static HTML but you know there's HTML5 up templates and things like that as well and so you could just have a static set of HTML files and push that and it'll be hosted on this Now service. So that's another way to do it. So it was those three specific things and it kind of reminds me and I never played around with the service too much but a lot of developers love it, it's called Heroku. Heroku was a way to really quickly fire up a small instance of a server that would do specific things and it wasn't like you had root login to like set up whatever you wanted it was sort of just like on-demand hosting for projects and stuff like this and so to be able to do it really quickly and easily is very cool and it doesn't necessarily require you to even use GitHub. When I was playing around with it I was not using GitHub the way where GitHub ties into it is that let's say that you have a project that you developed yourself and that is living on GitHub instead of having to download the code and then send it to Now you can set it up so that any time you update your code it will push it to Now's hosted service. So if you're actually a company and your code base is living on GitHub you can have a direct link between GitHub and this hosted service without having to run your own servers necessarily. Or you could fork your own GitHub project from someone else and then as you make your updates in there it would push those directly to this Now service. So it's watching your repository for any kind of changes and any time it does it pushes those changes directly to their hosted infrastructure which is interesting. So one of the things I didn't see when I played with it was I didn't see the idea of where you would use a file manager like interface like the only thing I saw was the ability to push through GitHub so I didn't see like where you would push and I do think right now I'm focused on the developer and they're clear about that like this is the developer infrastructure but what I liked about it was how seamlessly it allowed you to push applications that were container based or on Docker into a hosting environment. It was basically a couple of commands and you're up and running. So let me share my screen I'm going to share a little screen here share it all Tim I'm a sharing person as soon as I turn I do not disturb notifications on and then I'll share because I've got up the link that you sent specific one the data center data set like a set but for data Gotcha So let me pull this up here so I'm looking at that GitHub URL right now and if I were to look at this and figure out what it was running I would assume probably Python I see .py files so I'm going to assume it runs Python but no clue there but a key thing there is that Docker file so they built what is essentially a set of rules to set up a Docker instance from it and yeah you can see it's basically kind of like a laundry list of setting up a server and so they're saying start with a container that's got already a build of Python on there and then I want you to install these things SQLite a couple other tools and then copy over these specific things from my repository for data set to make it work and it should all be up and running so it's got that Docker file but you would need to have a server running Docker in order to use this I don't at the moment I'm going to download this it's a zip file onto my computer and open it up so I've got this folder now data set master which is the github repository right? yes now also if I open up the application it has no main interface except for what's up in my menu bar here and this keeps an activity of all the stuff that you've done with it so far so check this out because it can kind of seem if you look at the website for now it kind of can seem like well you need to know command line you need to do all this stuff you don't you need to drag the folder up to that now icon cool and it warns you that any code that you're putting up here technically somebody could see the logs so all that code is sort of on their open source plan which is what the OSS plan is everything is kind of open so somebody if they went to the right URL structure they could get the logs of the server and that kind of thing too something to be aware of for sure if you're using private stuff if you're just playing around with tools you know go for it so I'm going to hit deploy on that and that sort of fires off some stuff in here so let's see let's just scroll down there well I'm wondering if it crashed just now let's see let's try it one more time because I think it should give us like you know some information about what's happening ah there you go so that's it it actually opened up a window for me in my browser and it's now building this docker container for me I didn't have to create a server I didn't have to install docker I didn't have to do anything so this is a hosted service but this is a way for you to kind of play around with docker if somebody's already created the docker file and it's got all those instructions it's pretty wild right because you don't have to you didn't even have to install docker I didn't have to install docker I didn't have to open a terminal you're telling me you didn't even have to install docker yeah no and I didn't even have to open the terminal so I didn't have to type a single command which I think is actually pretty cool you can download something from github you can drag it up to that now icon and it starts building which it's doing right now which is cool and so so that may take a few minutes and to be quite honest with you I don't know what it being finished actually looks like here's a great example while that's doing that and we don't really necessarily have to worry about that because I don't know the data set either but this is a question we get on a regular basis at Reclaim you know I'm trying to run this application and in this example it was data set and I went and looked it up and I saw that it was Python but I didn't know that it was specifically running environment and it wouldn't but here's an example where someone who you know maybe can't use Reclaim for whatever reason could experiment with hosting that is through something like Zeitnow that allows you to do it and I didn't even know which is why I'm so glad we did this that you could do the drag and drop from GitHub right or from the master GitHub repository onto the Zeitnow icon that is amazing. Yeah they promote pretty heavily their command line interface because obviously one of their audiences and probably the primary audience is developers and so developers love command line tools and so that's one way to interface with it when you install the program on like your Mac it also installs things so that you could open up terminal and just type like now with the URL or something and it'll start firing things off and you can interface directly with them through the terminal but yeah that drag and drop thing is pretty cool for sure. Yeah Now let me ask you this Tim we're playing with a tool called Cloudron right we're trying to get other schools to experiment with and for those who are listening Cloudron is very similar to Zeitnow in some ways in that it's a Docker container installer it's a very nice hosted interface where they have a list of installers that they have kind of customized for their environment you click on them they let you point DNS they let you back it up get HTTPS and often running with stuff like ghost etc so how in your mind are the two different and similar Tim and what does this mean for the future of us trying to think about hosting containers or enabling to bring this into our kind of our broader infrastructure because it's something we've been talking about for years No it's a great question because obviously there are a lot of different services and a lot of different tools that are taking advantage of Docker right now and have been for several years so one thing to keep in mind with the now service is that it's a hosted service so by me dragging and dropping that it's putting the files on a separate server that I have no control over so you know as an end user I might not care as much about that people assign that control to us all the time you know people put their own HTML files and everything on a reclaim hosting server as a hosting provider that that kind of leaves me in a different situation because I can't necessarily use the now service with end users from what I've read anyway so I don't think I'm not sure if now is open source I don't know if there's a way to run a now server that might be an interesting way at it if we wanted to sort of do a more community based thing specifically for education whether or not we could spin up our own instance of the larger server but I imagine there's issues with that because of course they've got Mac apps they've got you know all those interfaces and they're all built directly to work with that specific website so you want to think of that as a hosted service you know I compare it to like you know whether you want to run your own email or if you want to have it hosted by Google through Gmail or something like that so it's how far down the levels you want to go with that stuff so Cloudron's interesting because it actually does allow you can set up a Cloudron server and so in in fact that's really what they're pushing while they have some managed hosting pieces for the most part they want you to buy your own server or lease one or set up a VPS on digital ocean as an example and then install their software and when you install their software it sets up a Cloudron server that you can then install these apps so your data is living on your server the Cloudron folks don't have access to it unless you give it to them so it's a little bit of a different relationship there from the now service which is really meant to say like I've built my own personal application or our companies built this app and we need a quick way to deploy it and they're built for that they're built for scale they're built to make it easy to work with repos and containers for people who just want to play around with stuff but at the point where you need some sort of you know long term and something that you own it probably makes more sense to run your own server and Cloudron might still be a nice onboarding middle piece to that because it can be easier to run applications and Cloudron I think is very much more focused on the end user and consumer rather than the developer the key difference there is that while Cloudron is built on top of Docker you have to have a specific Cloudron container containerized application it still uses Docker but there are specific ways in which you build a container that works on Cloudron it's not as easy as taking a Dockerfile and saying hey fire it up for me whereas I found that you actually can do that with the now service so just because Cloudron is handling other things there's different permissions and user based stuff it's a different aspect to that so from a hosting company point of view though what Zeit now did is pretty amazing it is and I've also I didn't even show this but I'm happy to so when I was playing around earlier with it I was actually even able to map a domain to it I was playing around I have to find the GitHub repo for this this is a service this is an application called Dillinger I think that's pronounced like that and it's actually a markdown editor if we go to the website you can read a little bit about it it's DillingerDillinger.io I think like John Dillinger there you go and when you open up the main website it's actually a demonstration of what this looks like and it's essentially a markdown editor you've got on one side markdown the other side is the preview of what that would look like and it's got different options to be able to export it to PDFs to HTML and they also have options to be able to save it to Dropbox, GitHub and other services like that so as I was going through here I was like hey they have a Dockerfile so maybe this would be an example of me playing around with this so if you go up here and I can scroll down you can see where I dragged it into there and it created when you drag it in there it creates a URL automatically and this is really cool I think the way that they use domains as well because you get a domain as soon as you drop the files in there and it starts building and it's like this is where it's going to live and then you can later map something else to it but that domain always works and if you push changes to it let's say you make some changes and you push those changes to it they give you a new URL and the old one redirects to it so all those domains always live and these of course are subdomains of now.sh which is theirs but I was able to map markdown.timo and .io to it so if I go there I haven't played with it in a couple days but hopefully the mapping piece will still live on this I could of course go to their subdomain but it's kind of interesting to think of it as a hosted service where where I'm not having to deal with keeping it up and maintaining it or anything like that and they're doing all of that level of things and I'm just able to map a URL onto it in the same way you would with Tumblr or any of these other services can't get that one to load so it's wild too because it sets up a dataset instance and they want dataset.timo it's .io there's their instance like sure it is nice there it is and they handle it with let's encrypt as well so you'll notice that's on SSL and they did the whole SSL certificate provisioning and all that kind of stuff as well so you know it was pretty interesting and that was again me not doing anything with code that was I downloaded the same way that I did with that other one dataset I just downloaded it from github and dragged it up there and it built everything for me and then as soon as it was done building I went to the URL that they had already given me and it was up and online that's cool because I got the github repository running for the default one where they show you the HTML sites when you set up your account so that worked but then I went and I installed there and I was messing around with Docker on my computer and you know that was going to lead to a complete trainwreck which it did but then I'm seeing you just dragging dropping and I'm like hey you know the futurism of containers drag and drop technology the future is now the future is Zeit now I think that needs to be the title of this episode is Zeit now. Well I just think it was really cool and I appreciate you playing with it it's one of the things I also appreciate about this and the space brand and I thought this when I saw it I was like this is an awesome model for Docker hosting it definitely is and I'm interested in playing with other node apps too there were applications out there where they haven't gotten around to turning them into Docker containers but you know if it's a Node.js app that should work as well you know there may be some applications that it's not best suited for I haven't looked into like for example like could you run a discourse community which of course runs Docker but they have their own stuff as well so it's Docker but it's more complicated Docker setup so I don't know if you could do that on Node.sh or something along those lines I imagine there may be some limits and then of course there's the pricing and the infrastructure it's free to play around with it's free for a certain amount I think a bandwidth and stuff like that can get into more intensive uses or if you need to run a whole lot of different things at the same time if you need your code to be private you know sell that warning that it showed up before all of those start to get into paid plans and so I haven't looked into that too much but it's very cool that they have a free service that you can just play around with just to get a sense of you know would this be difficult to run how could you run in that kind of stuff as opposed to having to fire up a VPS and like you said if you have to install Docker you know already starting to get a little bit of a to be of a tenuous relationship and then to try and figure out how to do SSL certificates on top of that mapping your domains it all starts to really complicate matters and I think the the original tweet from Tony had to do with someone who wanted to use and with Tony it's always like next level stuff you so you got I gotta always be like ah but the thing for me is keep on the person wanted to have their database the databases actually via API you know pushed out to a service so a service that basically fed or served or hosted just databases via API and he said right now the person who was doing that said right now does something like that but it's too expensive so I don't know that and I would have to go back to the original tweet but he was saying is this something that Reclaim could do and I was like Tony you're about three four years ahead of us right but the broader point though is and you're looking at data set is you know the fact that you know faculty and students or other folks researches who are out there who want to do this stuff you know David Wiley was very interested in the art stuff when we were at OER 18 in Bristol and so I just think that like here is some good examples for that community for people who need these apps because I hate to turn people away yeah right you know and while I may not run a Reclaim the fact is there's some cool technology out there that's doing it and to find that it's drag and drop is just mind-blowing even for me. It's interesting and I'll mention this here because I just noticed that I went to check back on that and check out the little error message I got at the bottom the built image exceeds the 100 megabyte limit so when it's building that Docker container out of those instructions I guess there are limits to that free account in order to run this so this built image is 157 megabytes and it exceeds their limit presumably with the free plan I would think so that's right because there is a 100 megabyte limit on the free plan yeah so and again I don't know like the specifics of this particular application if it's more heavy than others but something to think about about you know like whether it would fit in you know be useful so but it wasn't necessarily able to get it up and running but it got all the way to building the application so I assume it would have run if I was not on the free plan yeah exactly well you know what I'm really blown away by how much we covered in a short 30 minutes absolutely yeah I think reclaimed today might be one of the best things on the internet right now it's hot it's still underground so the hipsters need to get in early I think this is this is your moment did I tell you the story that I invented hipsterism I did in the 90s in LA absolutely don't sure me I was on the ground floor I'm basically like one of the two or three people at UCLA who started hipsterism you're literally saying like I was I invented hipstering before it was cool yes it's right and Martha Burtis and Martha Burtis knows this and she fights me on it but I did invent hipsterism alright well another thing that I did not know about you big fan baby big fan well thank you for bringing up the topic this this has been really cool and it's a good chance for us I think to start playing around more with the stuff because like you said this is definitely something the community is asking for or they're even asking for without knowing that's what they're asking for they're asking to go beyond the limits of what cPanel can provide you know and they're they're asking to run applications that are out there on github repos and they don't know how to install them and doing that kind of stuff so what tools can we provide what information can we provide on what's the best way to get this stuff up and running so that we can so that most people can get back to what they really want to do is to teach and to learn with these things rather than to have to be you know the mountain do sysadmin so exactly exactly alright man thanks for bringing it up and you know hey enjoy the rest of your day you too but see you soon