The Co-op Cloud is made up of a few simple, composable pieces. The system does not rely on any one specific implementation: each part may be replaced and extended as needed.
Applications that you may already use in your daily life: [Nextcloud], [Jitsi], [Mediawiki], [Rocket.chat] and [many more]! These are tools that are created by volunteer communities who use [free software licenses] in order to build up the public software commons and offer more digital alternatives.
The communities who develop these softwares also publish them using containers. For example, here is the [Nextcloud hub.docker.com account] which allows end-users to quickly deploy a new Nextcloud instance.
The work required to take a new instance of an application and make it production ready is still too time intensive and often involves a duplication of effort. Each service provider needs to deal with the same problems: stable versioning, backup plan, secret management, upgrade plan, monitoring and the list goes on.
Therefore, the Co-op Cloud proposes a packaging format which describes the entire production state of the application in a single place. This format uses the existing [standards based compose specification]. This is a file format which is most commonly used by the [Docker compose] tool but Co-op Cloud **does not** require the use of Docker compose itself.
[Each application] that the Co-op cloud provides is described using the compose specification and makes use of the upstream project published container.
Once we have our application packaged, we need a deployment environment. Production deployments are typically expected to support a number of features which give hosters and end-users guarantees for uptime, stability and scale.
The Co-op cloud makes use of [Docker swarm] as a deployment environment. It offers an approriate feature set which allows us to support zero-down time upgrades, seamless application rollbacks, automatic deploy failure handling, scaling, hybrid cloud setups and maintain a decentralised design.
Finally, with an application and an application environment, we need a tool to read that package format and actually deploy it to the environment. For this, we have developed and published the [abra] command-line tool.
Abra aims at providing a simple command-line interface for managing your own co-op cloud. You can bootstrap machines with the required tools, create new applications, deploy them, back them up, restore them and so on.
