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I think the problem is essentially one of scaling. When folks talk about scaling they usually talk about "being able to do more"; but this often comes at the ex

I think the problem is essentially one of scaling. When folks talk about scaling they usually talk about "being able to do more"; but this often comes at the expense of more simple use cases. Most business software I worked at would be horrible to self-host: maybe 3 or 4 services, if not more, requires PostgreSQL, ElasticSearch, Redis, maybe some queue system, etc. In short: "scaling up" often comes at the expensive of "scaling down". The current model for a lot of self-hosted software is "make money with a SaaS offering", which is a fine model IMO, but now you have to cater to two different scales: the small "downscale" of the self-hosted user, and the larger "upscale" one of your SaaS offering. I actually work on one of those "open source with SaaS offering" things, and it's a real challenge to unify these two use cases because the involved tools are quite different, and I don't want to implement everything twice. Docker can offer a solution to abstract the complexities that are required, although I agree it's not a good solution to 100% rely on it (which is why I don't do it).

dotnet00 4y ago
Yes, I understand that there are tradeoffs there, especially for a lot of federated services, which even without SaaS have to be able to scale well. My complaints mainly stem from how docker is often kind of finnicky, eg in a previous setup of my server, I had to put everything through a VPN, but Docker didn't play well with a VPN running on the main system, so I had to limit myself to things I could install without Docker until I had to migrate to a new install. Another issue I ran into with migrating servers was restoring a Postgres db dump to docker, which similarly didn't have much documentation, so for that I had to resort to a traditional setup. Which made me pretty happy that they at least support traditional setups, even if they lean more towards Docker.
superkuh 4y ago
I know this is HN, but we're talking about self-hosting. We aren't talking about bringing work home to show we can do it to potential employers so we can get hired somewhere using those tools makes sense. Scaling is simply not a problem at all in this context.

dotnet00 4y ago

Yes, I understand that there are tradeoffs there, especially for a lot of federated services, which even without SaaS have to be able to scale well. My complaints mainly stem from how docker is often kind of finnicky, eg in a previous setup of my server, I had to put everything through a VPN, but Docker didn't play well with a VPN running on the main system, so I had to limit myself to things I could install without Docker until I had to migrate to a new install. Another issue I ran into with migrating servers was restoring a Postgres db dump to docker, which similarly didn't have much documentation, so for that I had to resort to a traditional setup. Which made me pretty happy that they at least support traditional setups, even if they lean more towards Docker.

superkuh 4y ago

I know this is HN, but we're talking about self-hosting. We aren't talking about bringing work home to show we can do it to potential employers so we can get hired somewhere using those tools makes sense. Scaling is simply not a problem at all in this context.