Our website has been refreshed and should be more visually appealing. We are working with Webvoyant, a digital design and development agency, as well as our first customer. Their business is owned and operated by one of our founders.
Webvoyant is a customer that will use Bythos as a digital workshop and business portal for their web studio. They will also work with us on digital design and full-stack development of Bythos UI, something we started exploring with the Backstage framework.
For this website, we’re using a custom template with the Astro framework and currently hosting it on Cloudflare Pages. We use Cloudflare for domain names and DNS services and have already integrated it with Bythos via cert-manager and External DNS. We’ll see how it all scales with us as we expand the business and develop more dynamic functionality on our websites.
Alternatively, we built the CosmicForge mockup website with Next.js and Supabase and then deployed it to Vercel. The new website for that will be an example of Bythos powering a public developer platform for creative engineering. We may end up using the Cloudflare Zero Trust platform as a front end for projects we operate publicly, with Bythos as the back end, running elsewhere.
Platform updates
Bythos has reached a point where our focus is shifting to UI development with Backstage as the platform framework.
In our previous blog post, we mentioned migrating data from another lab server over to the Kubercraft. I’m happy to say that we’ve successfully converted a TrueNAS server that’s been serving us for ages into a backup server for the Kubercraft running Bythos, which is now the main server for that lab environment.
Primarily, that’s network storage via Samba with various services accessing the share. We run a mixed network of Linux and Microsoft machines and Samba plays well with both, in addition to macOS.
We’ve integrated the Samba Operator into Bythos, which provides local network access to the Ceph storage volumes.
Before that, we tested several applications to access the storage via a browser and settled on Nextcloud with Collabora and OnlyOffice, for now. Our goal is to find (or build) something simple, modern, and cloud native that allows both access to existing storage via PVCs and collaborative workspaces similar to Google.
Actually, the point of running Bythos is having all the tools at your disposal to build something like that from scratch, integrate it into the platform, and then share it as a Backstage plugin with the open source community.
There are quite a few other applications that we’ve integrated from the marketplace, but those are beyond the scope of this update. Since our focus is shifting to Backstage, any existing applications besides the core platform services will need to be developed as Backstage software templates and plugins.
Wrapping up
Development of the Bythos UI is a major project, forecasted to take 6–12 months or longer before we prepare to launch an initial prototype. At that point, we’ll set up a public demo of Bythos and release it as an open source project on GitHub.
Please stay tuned for updates related to UI development and other progress with the business!