 and welcome to the session on Reclaim Cloud and Domain of One's Own Strategies. So during this session, Taylor and I will talk to you a little bit about A, what Reclaim Cloud is, and then B, how and why you would use it with your faculty, staff, students, etc. So Reclaim Cloud is a robust addition to what we already provide Domain of One's Own Schools with C-Panel. So one of the things we ran up against early when we were running C-Panel for schools was, you know, can I run X? Can I run Y? And as long as your environments run on PHP, like WordPress, Omega, Scalar, the question, the answer is always yes. At the point you get into different programming languages, whether it's Python, whether it's Ruby, Node.js, that's kind of where you hit the limits of Domain of One's Own. Historically, we've had a workaround called Cloud Linux, which allowed folks to actually install certain Ruby apps, certain Node.js apps, certain Python apps, but it was very, very clunky. It was difficult. Very limited, too. The number of Ruby apps across all of them was a very limited number Instead of something like Cloud Linux, we decided to push out an entirely new offering called Reclaim Cloud. And Reclaim Cloud, to be clear, is distinct and separate from Domain of One's Own. The two are not integrated at this point at all, so that when you get a Reclaim Cloud account, and we can talk about how and why you would do that, what you're basically getting is access to a cloud infrastructure that will allow you to effectively install a wide variety of applications that don't play nice in the Lamp environment. So that is a kind of brief introduction about what Reclaim Cloud is. It's a distinct product that is not part of Domain of One's Own, but really works in parallel to Domain of One's Own to help you all deal with applications that may not run in Domain of One's Own. So that kind of begs the question of when would that be, and why would you actually go to Reclaim Cloud? Is that fair, Taylor? Yeah, totally fair. And in some of it, you mentioned that there are a number of applications that you may want to run that web applications, things that run on Linux servers or whatever, kind of like Domain of One's Own, but that won't run in a Lamp environment like that. And it can be, most often, it is the language stuff that you mentioned. However, there's some exceptions, too. There are definitely apps that are just not a great fit for a shared web hosting environment because they're asking too much of a single account on a shared server, right? There's things like Zeracast is one that you and I are big fans of for web radio. That's a PHP MySQL thing. On paper, it looks like you could do that in Domain of One's Own, but when you look into it, the resources you'd need would take up a lot of a single Domain of One's Own server in some cases in terms of RAM and stuff like that. You know, that's a great point and it reminds me of a good instance of why Wesleyan University reached out and they were running a basically a WordPress site that was an open course that they ran for their alumnus and 3,000 people signed up. Now, Domain of One's Own is pretty robust, but when you have, you know, two to 3,000 people hitting a site at a given time, it is going to put major pressure on that server. So if you have a very high intensity sign up, you know, everyone's hitting the course at once, Reclaim Cloud is a great option because it scales. So even for something like WordPress to your point, Taylor, that you can run fine in Domain of One's Own, if it's a high-performance, intense traffic site, it's far better off in Reclaim Cloud. Yeah. And so one of the reasons why it is better in Reclaim Cloud, like we kind of have been talking about here, is not just because you can run a number of different things, but also because you have flexibility in defining the server environment basically. And so Reclaim Cloud uses containerization technology, sort of based on Docker for most things, if you're into container stuff. But really what that means is you can set up an environment, you have access to install whatever software you want, you have actual root access and your users can have root access to their own little environment. And you can define how big and small that environment gets. So you can say, I want this thing to be able to scale up to this size. And then the beautiful part about that is you actually pay for what you use, not what you want to be prepared for, basically. If you've ever done any work with provisioning servers locally, like on your campus or in a cloud service, you might be familiar with the idea of like, hey, we need to have this thing be X large, we need a big server just in case our thing might get a lot of traffic at any time. And in Reclaim Cloud, you can actually define a limit and you only pay for what you use at a given time. So instead of paying for eight gigs of RAM all month, you only pay for the two gigabytes you used. And then for the one hour where there's a bunch of traffic, you pay a little bit more for that larger server during that time. So a lot of this can be really get in the weeds really fast. But we do have a great pricing page that I'm looking at right now that kind of explains how the pricing is broken down and how that all works. We also have a trial. So Reclaim Cloud, you can go to the sign up page and just sign up for an account. And you can try things out. This is really great to get an idea for what a particular application might cost. So with all that said, this... And we do recommend that you use a .edu email for that, because we try and limit it. We can give you a workaround if you have a gmail.com, but to prevent spamming and minors, we have limited to .edu domains. So that kind of puts us in... All right, it's flexible environments that can get big or small as you need. You can do a lot of different things in them. Where does that kind of fit on your utility belt when you're talking to faculty or students who are asking you to do a thing? Well, you need to be keeping in mind a lot of things we said right now in terms of what domain and one zones limits are. If you're talking about a project that is a lot of traffic, that may not be a great fit for domain and one zone. If you're talking about a project that uses a programming language that's not available, that's another good fit. If you're talking about a project where you have a rather technical user who wants to be able to control some of the specifics of their server environment, this may also be a good option. It doesn't have to be any... It could be any one of those three or any combination of those three. It doesn't have to be a super technical user or it doesn't have to be a high traffic site. Basically, pick one or more of those three reasons and that's when you'll probably find Reclaim Cloud being a pretty good fit. That's an excellent point. I think on top of that, one of the things to think about as admins for domain and one zone, you'll have people come into you saying, can I do this here? Can I do that here? Depending upon, let's say it's a grant funded project or let's say it's coming from a different kind of funding source, one of the nice things about Reclaim Cloud is you can separate funding for particular environments and folks who do want to run a research project or a grant funded project and then take it with them. It's not like you're keeping the environment and then figuring out how to disentangle this from our teaching and learning resources for a grant project. I find that has been very useful for keeping funding and environments separate. Yeah, there's really great features for that in Reclaim Cloud, some of which I wish we had that C panel had better equivalents to. Actually, it's one of the things that Cloud does really well and we'll demo some of those after we jump in and show the interface and do some things in here. I think I hear you calling my name. This analyzing is paralyzing. Let's play this dang thing. This is the Reclaim Cloud environment. As Taylor already pointed out, you would go to Reclaim.Cloud, sign up for a free trial. We'll talk about what it means to add resources, etc. This is what you'll see when you jump on to a Reclaim Cloud environment. There are two buttons I want to point your attention to right away. One is Marketplace and the other is New Environments. These are the two important ones that I'll focus on for this point. The Marketplace is nice because if you click on it, you get, as it's suggested, a marketplace of applications that you can install with one click, some of which have been authored by Taylor himself, which is pretty impressive. We'll look at one of those. Here's WikiJS. AzuraCast is that web radio we talked about. Etherpad can be very popular for I love PeerTube, which is Peer YouTube clone. There are more familiar ones as well, Drupal, WordPress cluster, which is a very highly performant WordPress instance. Ghost, which is one of Taylor's installers, Omega S, etc. We'll go through what that looks like, but these are all applications like in CPanel with Installtron. You can click and install with one click. Like I said, we will demonstrate that to show you what that looks like, but there are many and you can search here to see if an application your faculty, students, or staff asked for is available as a one click. The other option is to create a brand new environment. This is a little bit more involved because at this point when you click New Environment, you're actually creating an environment for a specific programming language. You'll see up top, I can create a PHP environment. I can also create a Ruby environment, a Node.js environment, a Python environment, a Golang environment, and a Java environment. It gives you an idea that whereas the Lamp environment would pretty much be this tab, the Reclaim Cloud gives you all these other options. Beyond that, which is quite powerful, you have the ability to create custom environments. Oftentimes, but not always, but I think oftentimes if I'm right, Taylor, this means Docker Engine or a custom container that you can find on Docker Hub and actually install a custom Docker image right here, right now. We won't get too deep into that, but it really points to the thing you said earlier, Taylor, that this is a container-driven infrastructure and containers that are on Docker Hub can very easily be loaded and run on Reclaim Cloud. The catch is you got to know something about Docker and you have to have some experience there, but if you have someone who's like, I want to run this Docker environment, this is a great place. They have instructions on Docker. That's the great thing about running things in Docker is Docker is not a Reclaim Cloud-specific technology. It is, at this point, very industry standard. A lot of times you will find an app that will say, oh yeah, we run in Docker. Here's the five commands. You can get started that way. One other thing I wanted to mention in there too, and I can show it, is there's also, if you have someone, again, if you have a particularly technical user who's like, can you just give me access to a Linux server and I will install the things I need, that is also an option too. There's an option in the environment thing called DPS and they can deploy Ubuntu or Debian. That doesn't mean anything to you. Don't worry about it. It's just flavors of Linux, but that's something that I ran into as an admin frequently with working with compsci faculty who are like, look, I know what I need. I just need access to something. That's a really good point, and I can show that real quickly. I didn't get too deep into building these custom environments. Again, that would be almost like another advanced session that we can look at, but to your point, Taylor, which is an excellent one, is right here, kind of like you'd go on Digital Ocean or some other and spin up a virtual VPS or a VPS, you can do the same here. Whether it's Debian, Ubuntu, CentOS, or a Docker image, you have the ability here to spin up a VPS and then you would have to do all of the kind of setting up the VPS, making sure it's safe, making sure you have login, all the stuff you would do if you were setting up a server, but you can do that here. That's an excellent point. Yeah, it's often the slowest way, right? A little nice thing about the marketplace is it gets you what you need really quick, but if you have something particularly really specific, it's a good option. I agree. No, that's right. Yeah, so let's deploy some stuff. Do it. Show off your awesome installer. Cool. Yeah, let me... Here we go. A couple things. Here's my environment. I've got not a ton going on here at the moment, but what we're going to do is use a ghost installer to make a ghost blog, and then we're going to map a domain to it. For that, we're going to use our state university account in this case. I wanted to do that to demonstrate, while these two domain in one's own and Recklin Cloud platforms are parallel, as Jim said, they can be used together through the magic and power of DNS. I'm going to be positive. We're going to be DNS positive today, because DNS is so often a scary thing. The black magic of DNS. We're going to be very DNS positive and show why it allows us to do really interesting things like this. Run two things completely separately and make them look like they're not separate. I'm going to use the marketplace button here, and I'll just search for ghost. Here's ghost. In this case, we can give it an environment name. This is going to be the URL we'll visit it at before we map a domain. It's not particularly important, but I'll call it my ghost app. How about that? You can pick a region. You can pick one closest to you. Honestly, for a lot of use cases, this isn't particularly important, but we like to give people an option. Sometimes people have restrictions on needing to have something hosted in their particular country. It's a real common thing to need. There's a bunch of options here. I'm going to pick Canada, and then it's going to deploy. This is going to take a little bit, because this isn't like Installatron where it's basically setting up a database and downloading a few files for you. That's oversimplifying what Installatron does. It does a little bit more than that, but that's mostly what it does. Whereas this is actually deploying an entire server environment for you. It will take a few minutes. That's just one of the trade-offs of a technology like this. You're doing things from whole cloth in some cases. While this runs, I'm going to actually dismiss it. When it's done, we'll check back in on it. I also will have instructions and things in here about how to use the app. I'll also get that email. It's important to note that pretty much every notification message that ReclinCloud gives you in one of these little boxes gets sent to your email as well. I just dismissed that little window that I was looking at, this one down here. I just wanted to mention that you can do that. You can even deploy multiple things at a time. Here's some of the different spaces I'm doing. This is where our radio station is for reclaim. I'm doing a masked-down instance for reclaim, which Taylor did a one-click installer for, which is awesome. Here's some peer-tube stuff. These are all different environments. You can start to see as I open them up in the interface that they all run in different ways. One, this one is in a Docker engine. This is also a Docker instance with a load balancer. This is Node.js for the peer-tube command line interface. Then this is in Apache instance. That's just a straight-up simple Apache server that's running the listen reclaim radio site. It's just basically an HTML page. Then here is the ReclinMastodon, which is using a VPS in this instance. I spun up a Debbie in VPS. In this one window, you get a sense of all the different possibilities in ReclinCloud, which I think is pretty amazing, whether it's Docker engine, a VPS, a load balancer. All of these are containers, but there are different varieties and containers running different environments and running different languages, which is pretty powerful. Let's say, for example, now to get to the collaboration piece, I want to minimize everything else. I just want to give Taylor access to reclaim radio. I would click on my settings here. That's reclaimed carry. Let me be clear here. Let me close that. This is reclaim radio. I would click here on my little settings button. It gives me a couple of things, like domain binding, SSH access, which is a really nice point. You can do web SSH into any of these environments. There's firewall options, endpoints. The one we want to look at here is two, collaboration, which is I'm adding a collaborator who can also access this environment and do what they need to do, or changing ownership. At the point where you're a school who's been helping someone set up an environment and then they set up their own ReclinCloud account, you can literally transfer that account fully in that environment, fully to them, and that's over. It's brilliant and very simple. A lot of folks who use ReclinCloud in that way love that. Collaboration is simply me saying, okay, I want to give Taylor at Reclaim hosting. Basically, I'm going to create a new role. I'm going to give him full power over the environment, and I'm going to add this. This is new, at least new to me, that they added all of these granular roles. You can even, those little arrows expand even further. It gets very almost any button can be turned on and off, honestly. I'm giving him full control over that environment. Then I will click here, add, and that would happen. I'm going to just name this environment admin because they're asking me to name it, and then I'm going to put that in, and Taylor will get an email, which is basically saying, oh, Taylor, you're now an environmental admin who has direct access to it. You'll see that this happened very quickly. Taylor had to approve it, and that may have already happened beforehand, but as you can see, I'm not the only one now who can access environment. This is really important because say that you set up a series of environments for faculty, staff, and students in your ReclinCloud account. You can actually set up an environment, give them admin access, and they will use the resources you add, financial resources, and then they will use that and not have to worry about adding money. They can actually just admin the environment that's in your account. Obviously, there's going to be a little bit of negotiation about what is the average cost, and we can look at that on Cloudlets, but this collaboration tool allows you to basically give faculty, staff, or students access to an environment, or even to create an environment based on the access level you give them. Does that make sense, Taylor? Am I missing anything there? No, that makes perfect sense. Between that collaboration and the whole change ownership, just about all of the scenarios that I've run into of like, we need this person to manage it fully, but this person has to pay for it, are possible, and that's really nice in a pretty seamless way. You can't really make a mistake of like, we set it up this way, and now we have to manually migrate. It's like, no, just change the owner. It's not a big deal. When you change the owner, it doesn't even restart the application because it's all still running in the same physical server. It's just attributing it to a new person. It's a really great system for that. If there's some combination of options where you're like, I don't know how to do this. We are paying for it, and these three people need SSH access, and this student should be able to restart it, but not do anything else. Just let us know. We can help you come up with how to do that. If this is at all interesting, this isn't the last word we'll have with you about how to do it. The other piece is, you would add X amount of funds. People will say, well, how do I found something that's variable pricing? Well, the easiest way around it is you work with your purchasing department and say, I want to add X amount of dollars to Reclaim Cloud, and then you will use that regularly over time until that amount goes. Depending on the environments, that could be different amounts at different times, but over time, it will start to be predictable. I think that's where to start with X amount, see what that prediction is, and then go back to purchasing and say this will roughly cost $50 a month. We won't really have time to demo it, but there are also really great tools to let you look historically at what things have cost. That's really the best. Exactly. Run something for a little bit, say, hey, that cost $5 that week or $2 that week or whatever, and you can even do that in a trial account where you don't have to add a payment method. You can really have a student or faculty member just run something for two weeks and see what did that cost week one and week two, and based on that extrapolate. There's a lot of options. Yeah, that's a great point. Let me go back to my cloud dashboard here. Ghost is deployed now. Eventually, it let me know I was done. I just realized that I actually accidentally dismissed that email, so let me pull it up, but this is what it said when it was done. Sorry, I dismissed the notification, but I also get it being email. It says, hey, your ghost has been successfully deployed. Here's a URL for it right now. You can set up the application because if you want to change the domain name from myghostapp.ca.reclaim.cloud, not the most elegant domain name, right? You probably don't want your blog there forever. You probably want to own that domain. You'll point an A record at this IP address and then use the domain configuration add-on, and then we have an article that talks about more information about what they just said and other things to know about ghosts, right? So this is great. If you're using Ghost in particular, we have this documented pretty well, but let's do what it just said. So I'm going to visit my ghost app here. The Reclaim Cloud Environment URL is right here, so I can click on that and see my ghost blog, and here it is. And so go Taylor's ghost blog, TaylorJDN, I'll put my email address in, and I'll set a password. So I set up my ghost blog, right? All done with that. Now I need to map a custom domain to it. So what I'll need is that IP address that it sent in the email. I can also find it right here. I'm going to copy it. I'm going to go to StateU. Let's go in and go into our DNS zone editor. And so I have the domain with StateU. It's Taylor-Reclaim.StateU.org. So let's do maybe Ghost.Taylor.flash-Reclaim, right? So I'll add an A record. We'll name it Ghost.TaylorReclaim.StateU.org, and I'm going to paste that IP address in. And if I try to visit that URL, it's not going to quite work yet because I haven't told Ghost about this change. But I will say that it resolves. So that's good. It means it's getting somewhere. So now if I go back to actually the Reclaim Cloud Dashboard, I can use this add-on. This is all documented, like I said. And I can use the domain configuration add-on, change, and I'm going to put in my domain name. Ghost.Taylor-Reclaim.StateU.org, hit yes, and this will take, I don't know, like 15 seconds or so. It's going to restart Ghost, tell Ghost about the new URL, and it's going to set up HTTPS for us all at once. That, those add-ons are not only for mapping a domain and domain configuration and getting the SSL cert, but also for making sure it works with third-party mail, as well as with updating a Ghost to the next version, which is pretty amazing. Yeah. And like in the nice thing here, so you'll see while Jim was talking, I visited the URL and it didn't work right away. That's because it needed to issue the let's encrypt cert and that takes like eight seconds. I'm pretty antsy. So I refreshed about eight times in that eight seconds and it came back online automatically. So there we go. We've got a new domain now for this Ghost.Taylor-Reclaim.StateU.org. I can sign in with my credentials that I already have. I just realize that that's not the right login button. That's for like a subscriber. I have to go to slash Ghost. But yeah, I've got my Ghost blog. I can log in and do my blogging. And it looks like it's at StateU. This is that integration I was talking about. We can use DNS to kind of map a domain here that maybe someone's got as part of their domain in one's own account, or maybe they have an actual top level domain that they've paid for. All of those are options. I did a subdomain. You could map the root domain. That's possible too. You just change the A record that's already in the DNS zone editor. And again, not going to demo that particular operation, but just to say it is possible to do. Yeah. And I think that's the point is Ghost when we were trying to do it on domain of one's own was using cloud Linux. It was a terrible workaround. It was impossible to update here. It's a one click installer. You can map a domain. You can also update cleanly through add-ons and then deal with mail. So it's like it's a brave new world for making these next generation applications run using one click. And that's really the direction to reclaim cloud. And that's why we think it's a really nice adjunct or even how would I say, compliment to a domain of one's own as it is now, right? Absolutely. But anything else before we sign off for the session? No, I think we did it. I think we nailed it. I think so too. See you all next session.