Frequently Asked Questions

How does Fortino compare to existing and historical efforts?

Fortino aims to enable institutions, cooperatives and universities to self host critical workloads on sovereign infrastructure. No existing project currently offers the full feature set Fortino targets.

Yunohost is arguably the most influential self hosting project and a genuine inspiration for Fortino's accessibility ambitions. It allows non technical users to deploy web applications on a single Debian machine. Its limitations are that: it doesn't support rollbacks as it predates functional OS advances, uses a custom package format separate from Debian packages, acts imperatively on the host (making outcomes order dependent), and cannot manage remote machines. Fortino addresses all of these: no separate package repository is needed, no new stack to learn, and fleet management is a first class feature.

Building on the work of existing projects, Fortino goes further in solving the following challenges:

• In Fortino, everything is a capability object: every resource in Fortino (services, generations, secrets) is an unforgeable capability object. Granting access means handing out a reference, revoking means deleting it. No centralized ACL (Access Control List) database required.
• The architecture allows to create adapters inside the Fortino agent to support most functional and immutable distros, including NixOS.
• A single declarative language across the stack, with rollback always available.
• Central control of OS configuration across many nodes
• Built on Guix, Bonfire and Spritely which are established projects with clear governance