September 26, 2025
Introducing a Calmer Personal Cloud
Overview
Cluster is a personal cloud orchestrator focused on simplicity, local ownership, and calm aesthetics. This beta experience explores the narrative behind the project—why it exists, what problems it solves, and how its design philosophy embraces natural quiet over dashboard noise. The layout here mirrors long-form product essays: a narrow reading column, gentle typography, and a persistent table of contents for effortless orientation.
Why Context Matters
Most self-hosting tools emphasize raw feature density. Cluster leans in the opposite direction—surfacing only the information you need in the moment. Context is preserved through declarative configuration and a predictable storage model. Instead of burying actions behind nested panels, Cluster aligns structure with how you naturally think aboutfiles,appsand access.
Key Features
- Self-hosted core — keep every byte under your control.
- End-to-end encryption for transport & at-rest content.
- Composable services instead of monolith lock-in.
- Zero noise UI designed around focus and motion restraint.
- CLI + API symmetry for automation & reproducibility.
Comparison
Unlike traditional consumer clouds, Cluster avoids black-box sync logic and silent mutation. Compared to heavier self-hosting stacks, it resists feature creep and invasive telemetry. Think of it as a cultivated garden rather than an industrial warehouse—curated primitives you can extend, not an ever-expanding surface you must tame.
Architecture Shape
Cluster favors a layered, inspectable shape rather than an opaque stack. Each layer is intentionally narrow so you can swap or script around it without unraveling the rest.
- Storage Plane: Flat, content-addressable blobs + human legible metadata; no hidden derivative stores.
- Execution Plane: Ephemeral containers / tasks launched from declarative manifests; zero orchestration ceremony.
- Network Exposure: Tight ingress surface, explicit service boundaries, internal endpoints stay private by default.
- State Projection: Everything reducible to a plain text spec you can version control; runtime drift is detectable.
- Extension Spine: Events + minimal RPC (not a plugin megabus) so you can bolt on automation without patching core.
Direction & Focus Areas
The next phase is less about adding shiny widgets and more about hardening the spine that makes Cluster dependable over years. Work is organized along a small set of slow-changing pillars:
- Deterministic State — Collapse all mutable runtime into a versionable spec so recovery and drift detection become boring.
- Resource Grace — Keep idle footprint tiny; introduce adaptive throttles for networks, power, and thermals on edge boxes.
- Integrity & Provenance — Hash trails, signed export bundles, and trust metadata for generated or transformed artifacts.
- Ambient Automation — Policy primitives (retain, replicate, redact, archive) driven by events—not cron soup.
- Human Quiet — Interface delighters are deferred unless they reduce cognitive or operational noise measurably.
Progress intentionally favors depth over surface area; some features wait so foundations don't ossify brittle.
What's Next
Short term focus is on shipping the first fully reproducible node spec (infra + services + secrets envelope) and a minimal integrity ledger for exported collections.
Immediately after: encrypted selective sharing, incremental block replication, and an event stream you can subscribe to with a plain WebSocket or CLI tail—no proprietary bus.
Longer horizon items (adaptive scheduling, policy engine UI, offline-first merge helpers) will stage behind those core reliability pieces.
Want to influence ordering? Open a discussion or tag an issue; roadmap sequencing is deliberately flexible while fundamentals settle.
FAQ
Open source forever.
Licensed under MIT.