(Hi! I'm the author of the blog post & maintainer of the Sandcats service.)
I'm excited about Sandstorm eventually helping people tackle issues like port forwarding. There's enough to do that it's not something I'm personally prioritizing, but it would definitely be very interesting. I can imagine the initial version of this feature working using UPnP for example, for routers that support it.
Thanks for taking an interest in Sandstorm!
As for ngrok-style tunneling, that's something I'm less interested in hosting/maintaining as part of the Sandcats toolkit for Sandstorm self-hosters. I'd be happy to see Sandstorm grow the ability to integrate with services that offer something ngrok-like, though.
Somewhat hilariously, a Tor hidden service is easy to set up and has built-in NAT traversal, if I understand things correctly, so maybe one day we'll see a "Run your Sandstorm server as a Tor hidden service" feature purely for the connectivity conveniences.
Hello! PageKite is "ngrok-like" (we pre-date them by a fair bit), I'd be happy to work with you guys on exploring whether we can integrate and make it as easy to spin up as Sandcats. Feel free to mail me, bre at pagekite.net if you're interested in exploring this further.
Have you folks considered partnerships with Synology, QNAP, etc? Syno have just embraced Docker in their latest OS version, although that is limited to their Intel-based NAS range. Sandstorm might have an opportunity to provide a platform for lower-end and high-end NAS to run web applications.
We are exploring this direction but don't have anything firm yet. We don't aim to enter the hardware business ourselves so we're happy to partner with anyone building hardware. :)
Sandstorm is limited to x86_64 for probably the same reason Docker is -- our app packages contain binaries and we don't want to burden developers with supporting multiple architectures, at least for now.
I'm biased, obviously, but Docker on Synology strikes me as an odd fit. Docker is optimized for massive SaaS-scale deployments of stateless servers, not so much one-off small-scale stateful app deployments.
I'm excited about Sandstorm eventually helping people tackle issues like port forwarding. There's enough to do that it's not something I'm personally prioritizing, but it would definitely be very interesting. I can imagine the initial version of this feature working using UPnP for example, for routers that support it.
Thanks for taking an interest in Sandstorm!
As for ngrok-style tunneling, that's something I'm less interested in hosting/maintaining as part of the Sandcats toolkit for Sandstorm self-hosters. I'd be happy to see Sandstorm grow the ability to integrate with services that offer something ngrok-like, though.
Somewhat hilariously, a Tor hidden service is easy to set up and has built-in NAT traversal, if I understand things correctly, so maybe one day we'll see a "Run your Sandstorm server as a Tor hidden service" feature purely for the connectivity conveniences.