8 ms·

The future is self-hosted

26 points by alexlazar97 2y ago

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
mooreds 2y ago
As someone who works for a company with a product that can be both self-hosted and used as a SaaS, SaaS is where its at. When you use a SaaS solution, you are taking on risk, sure, but you are able to move much faster. There's no servers to set up and, more importantly maintain. By outsourcing of lot of operational complexity, your team can focus on building unique differentiated features and marketing them. I love self-hosting and think you can learn a lot by operating your own infra. For certain use cases (really small apps, personal software, stable state) it can make sense. But I feel like SaaS is becoming the default and is definitely 'the future'.
- alexlazar97 2y ago
  to be completely honest, i don't really think "self-hosted is the future" as in "it will take over SaaS majority", I just think it will be more of a thing because it's easier to deploy apps nowadays.
- JohnFen 2y ago
  I think it all depends on what tradeoffs you prefer. SaaS is more expensive, and I've seen many people get burned in various ways with it. I've never seen one get burned by self-hosting. I self-host everything specifically because I remain in control of everything and I maintain physical custody of my data, and the software I'm relying on won't change underneath me. Maintenance isn't a big deal. When something goes wrong, I can fix it immediately rather than waiting a random amount of time for some external entity to do it. Setup costs don't matter to me because they're a one-time thing. That said, I know people that I'd recommend SaaS instead of self-hosting to.
  - gjsman-1000 2y ago
    > I've never seen one get burned by self-hosting. Then, I have no idea where your neck of the woods is, but that’s crazy. If I had a nickel for every company that self-hosted but didn’t update in time, or self-hosted but had a flawed backup strategy, or self-hosted and hit scaling problems, or self-hosted and suffered a natural disaster, or self-hosted and experienced theft, I would be a millionaire.
    - JohnFen 2y ago
      Let me clarify -- by "get burned", I mean "suffered serious data loss or loss of services for a meaningful amount of time". I didn't mean "have some sort of problem". Regardless of whether you self-host or not, you're going to have problems. Just different ones, depending on which way you go.
      - TheNewsIsHere 2y ago
        Quite right. A lack of functional backups isn’t a self-hosted problem, it’s an implementation problem. Plenty of SaaS companies out there variously 1) don’t have backups; 2) conflate backup and sync; 3) don’t test backups; or 4) have perfectly functional and tested backups that cover a level that isn’t useful if a single customer needs a restore. And all of that could well be the case in any self-hosted environment too. Bad design, lazy or incomplete implementation, and good old fashioned negligence is at home and well in both SaaS and self-hosted shops the world over. At least with self-hosted you can be either consummately diligent, entirely negligent, or somewhere in between all by yourself.
  - alexlazar97 2y ago
    I agree with everything you said. If you're that small 1% or 5% of the world that is willing to figure out how to self-host, it makes a lot of sense. If you're the average non computer literate person, it's likely not for you.
- whazor 2y ago
  Self-Hosted as a Service can also become a big industry. In fact, there are already many providers who are essentially SaaS-ing some opensource solutions. Think of WordPress hosting.
  - alexlazar97 2y ago
    Really any cloud provider that supports easily deploying Docker already does this. And, truth be told, hosting Docker apps is damn easy.
  - turtleyacht 2y ago
    There could be SHaaS businesses around maintaining systems on behalf of next of kin. All that time poured into a home lab, a bespoke thing that family and friends may rely on. Legal counseling for a trust or will for the hardware and software. Training and on-call support. The challenge is keeping the tech in line with what the owner intended, staying off the cloud and preserving their values. That could mean anything from staying on legacy Java to maintaining an automated lawnmower written in embedded Tcl.
- BigParm 2y ago
  No money -> Self hosted Some money -> SaaS All the money -> Self hosted Anything they give you, they can take it away.
- XCSme 2y ago
  I think self-hosting is the future, but products can't be both SaaS + self-hosted. The way to self-host would be using self-hosted only products, that are made for easy installation, maintenance and come with support. Most SaaS offerings provide a self-hosted option just as a marketing tactic, they don't want it to be easy to install.
- m463 2y ago
  You have a self-selecting population of customers though. I can see using SaaS for exceptional/overflow traffic though.
- nunez 2y ago
  Same, and agreed. The minute you go self-hosted, your complexity goes up 10x, as does the services you'll need to provide to maintain it, and the hiring needed to fulfill that need. WFH is super divisive right now. Imagine telling engineers "how do you feel about flying to Nebraska for a few weeks?" Doesn't work.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
hamilyon2 2y ago
>your infra costs are much lower Last time I checked TCO was higher unless you are sort of big enterprise or individual who values her time zero. Do not get me started on capex
- alexlazar97 2y ago
  From my experience, you don't have to value your time at zero to make it make sense. Some software/infra genuinely requires very little to no maintenance.
  - 8organicbits 2y ago
    Any examples? As a software developer by day and parent all other hours, I've shifted away from self-hosting things. Even stuff like a pi-hole; it stopped working once and my wife couldn't get online, so I turned it off instead of debugging it.
    - alexlazar97 2y ago
      I self-host Nextcloud, a personal finance app called Expensio + all of my websites (personal and commercial). Maybe about ~8 or so things in total. I only really spend time on maintaining them when I want to update them which is usually just a git pull and a docker compose command.
danielovichdk 2y ago
The relative cost will determine and control the market, I believe. Hosting is very complicated, I tend to use an analogy about energy-production, where you can make your own energy or you can plug into the decentralised options. Some things you might want to host, but the economic trajectory is telling us that the decentralised options are here to stay.
- chadsix 2y ago
  We help people self host hands free [1] so different factors guide decisions for them. :) [1] https://ipv6.rs/cloudseeder https://ipv6.rs/cloudseeder
- alexlazar97 2y ago
  > The relative cost will determine and control the market, I believe. I agree there. > Hosting is very complicated But not here. Docker, imho, and cloud providers that make deploying Docker apps easy are making it very easy. I don't really know what you mean by "decentralised" options though. Using an existent SaaS is far from decentralised imho.
photochemsyn 2y ago
The rentier class doesn't want to lose the ability to extract rents from users in perpetuity, so they - shareholders and investors in the tech sector - are not going to support a model where the user has complete control of their hardware and software once an initial purchase is made. It's gotten pretty ridiculous - let's say you buy a hammer. But to keep using the hammer, you have to pay a monthly subscription or the hammer stops working. And this is considered normal? Of course there are some tools that are so complex that you don't want to have to buy them and maintain them, so renting makes much more sense - but if your whole world is structured that way, you're just being bled.
- alexlazar97 2y ago
  I agree. Big co and VC funded startups will find it hard to do the self-hosted model. But small software companies or "indie hackers" (like me) can make it make sense. It's also a good way for us to differentiate ourselves and have an angle in the bigger markets. If I and 5 other devs go and make Dropbox, for example, you won't look at us. Dropbox will be much better. But if we offer a self-hosted version, we might just be able to carve a small portion of the market for ourselves through that angle.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
meiraleal 2y ago
Local-first is the future. Most cases don't even need a backend to self-host.
- alexlazar97 2y ago
  That's an interesting take and I have thought about local-first a lot too. There are tradeoffs, the core cons I find are: - complex code, complex architecture vs traditional web apps - hard(er) to update app versions across users The core selling point (hiding latency) is big I think. But, if you self-host, the user/business can put their server very close and reduce latency to unnoticeable levels. I think local-first is cool, really cool and makes beautiful apps. But I think it's only worth it for a small subset of software, far smaller then self-hosted.
rcarmo 2y ago
That’s all fine and good until you drop into your average European business that has no IT whatsoever except the owner’s nephew. I just don’t see any small non-technical business doing self-hosting… even things like NextCloud are infinitesimally present in that kind of market…
- alexlazar97 2y ago
  I think any business where the owner/team can figure out how to host something like WordPress can also figure out how to throw a Docker app in one of the many providers that just auto-deploy Docker apps, for example.
nunez 2y ago
This might be true in a world where people actually give a shit about privacy.
xnx 2y ago
Even with Docker self hosting apps is still unnecessarily complex compared to installing an app on iOS, Android, Windows or Mac.
- alexlazar97 2y ago
  Compared to that, yes, I agree. But it's way easier than it used to be and I think it's within the skill set of most computer literate people.
  - DougN7 2y ago
    I’m not sure. I’m an older developer that has never used Docker until this weekend. I was going through the beginning tutorials and something didn’t work and I was stuck. There is so much magic going on I wasn’t even sure where to look. I think you need to be a Linux-computer literate person, and that’s still a small niche outside of IT.
banish-m4 2y ago
The crux of SH is 6-pronged: - Deployment and configuration management - Platform maintenance (not app upgrades) - App upgrades - Security - Performance monitoring - Data backup and disaster recovery When considering taking on SH, it's important to be wise about all of the implications. Automating these, standardization, and making them more portable are what would make SH cheaper and more doable. Definitely create runbooks and detailed notes that are kept current, organized, and could be used to reconstruct production without automation.
- TheNewsIsHere 2y ago
  Being able to reconstruct production without either automation or, well, production, is a line I spend time to not cross. I have seen that so much though. It’s unfortunately common to find that the BCDR strategy, if it exists, has a reliance on production even if production is unavailable. So now you have to spend time manually reconstructing whatever dependencies exist in require production to be available. How well is that documented? If you have circular dependencies like that, probably not very well.
  - banish-m4 2y ago
    Then it's fraud or corporate BS. Bare-metal recovery means: - a BOM that's shot to a major hardware vendor or already having network and server device spares; Dell is able to meet this sort of need - a USB boot device to kickstart a rebuild, restore environment - some sort of initial restore media or equivalent containing encrypted backups - encrypted offline backup of the infrastructure wiki - n-person split password key material to decrypt backups. DR/BCP also requires thoughtful derisking by inventorying, identifying dependencies, prioritizing restoration (DNS, DHCP, AD, etc.), and removing/untangling cyclic dependencies if they happen up or down the stack. There are semi-automated tools to help with most of this, and infrastructure automation should assist it as much as possible, because if you can't rebuild it with confidence, then you don't have anything. It requires significant thought, effort, standardization, continuous maintenance, and practiced at least yearly by someone(s) like SREs and with regular input of front-line IT-equivalent owners.

26 points by alexlazar97 2y ago

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

As someone who works for a company with a product that can be both self-hosted and used as a SaaS, SaaS is where its at. When you use a SaaS solution, you are taking on risk, sure, but you are able to move much faster. There's no servers to set up and, more importantly maintain. By outsourcing of lot of operational complexity, your team can focus on building unique differentiated features and marketing them. I love self-hosting and think you can learn a lot by operating your own infra. For certain use cases (really small apps, personal software, stable state) it can make sense. But I feel like SaaS is becoming the default and is definitely 'the future'.

alexlazar97 2y ago
to be completely honest, i don't really think "self-hosted is the future" as in "it will take over SaaS majority", I just think it will be more of a thing because it's easier to deploy apps nowadays.
JohnFen 2y ago
I think it all depends on what tradeoffs you prefer. SaaS is more expensive, and I've seen many people get burned in various ways with it. I've never seen one get burned by self-hosting. I self-host everything specifically because I remain in control of everything and I maintain physical custody of my data, and the software I'm relying on won't change underneath me. Maintenance isn't a big deal. When something goes wrong, I can fix it immediately rather than waiting a random amount of time for some external entity to do it. Setup costs don't matter to me because they're a one-time thing. That said, I know people that I'd recommend SaaS instead of self-hosting to.
- gjsman-1000 2y ago
  > I've never seen one get burned by self-hosting. Then, I have no idea where your neck of the woods is, but that’s crazy. If I had a nickel for every company that self-hosted but didn’t update in time, or self-hosted but had a flawed backup strategy, or self-hosted and hit scaling problems, or self-hosted and suffered a natural disaster, or self-hosted and experienced theft, I would be a millionaire.
  - JohnFen 2y ago
    Let me clarify -- by "get burned", I mean "suffered serious data loss or loss of services for a meaningful amount of time". I didn't mean "have some sort of problem". Regardless of whether you self-host or not, you're going to have problems. Just different ones, depending on which way you go.
    - TheNewsIsHere 2y ago
      Quite right. A lack of functional backups isn’t a self-hosted problem, it’s an implementation problem. Plenty of SaaS companies out there variously 1) don’t have backups; 2) conflate backup and sync; 3) don’t test backups; or 4) have perfectly functional and tested backups that cover a level that isn’t useful if a single customer needs a restore. And all of that could well be the case in any self-hosted environment too. Bad design, lazy or incomplete implementation, and good old fashioned negligence is at home and well in both SaaS and self-hosted shops the world over. At least with self-hosted you can be either consummately diligent, entirely negligent, or somewhere in between all by yourself.
- alexlazar97 2y ago
  I agree with everything you said. If you're that small 1% or 5% of the world that is willing to figure out how to self-host, it makes a lot of sense. If you're the average non computer literate person, it's likely not for you.
whazor 2y ago
Self-Hosted as a Service can also become a big industry. In fact, there are already many providers who are essentially SaaS-ing some opensource solutions. Think of WordPress hosting.
- alexlazar97 2y ago
  Really any cloud provider that supports easily deploying Docker already does this. And, truth be told, hosting Docker apps is damn easy.
- turtleyacht 2y ago
  There could be SHaaS businesses around maintaining systems on behalf of next of kin. All that time poured into a home lab, a bespoke thing that family and friends may rely on. Legal counseling for a trust or will for the hardware and software. Training and on-call support. The challenge is keeping the tech in line with what the owner intended, staying off the cloud and preserving their values. That could mean anything from staying on legacy Java to maintaining an automated lawnmower written in embedded Tcl.
BigParm 2y ago
No money -> Self hosted Some money -> SaaS All the money -> Self hosted Anything they give you, they can take it away.
XCSme 2y ago
I think self-hosting is the future, but products can't be both SaaS + self-hosted. The way to self-host would be using self-hosted only products, that are made for easy installation, maintenance and come with support. Most SaaS offerings provide a self-hosted option just as a marketing tactic, they don't want it to be easy to install.
m463 2y ago
You have a self-selecting population of customers though. I can see using SaaS for exceptional/overflow traffic though.
nunez 2y ago
Same, and agreed. The minute you go self-hosted, your complexity goes up 10x, as does the services you'll need to provide to maintain it, and the hiring needed to fulfill that need. WFH is super divisive right now. Imagine telling engineers "how do you feel about flying to Nebraska for a few weeks?" Doesn't work.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

hamilyon2 2y ago

>your infra costs are much lower Last time I checked TCO was higher unless you are sort of big enterprise or individual who values her time zero. Do not get me started on capex

alexlazar97 2y ago
From my experience, you don't have to value your time at zero to make it make sense. Some software/infra genuinely requires very little to no maintenance.
- 8organicbits 2y ago
  Any examples? As a software developer by day and parent all other hours, I've shifted away from self-hosting things. Even stuff like a pi-hole; it stopped working once and my wife couldn't get online, so I turned it off instead of debugging it.
  - alexlazar97 2y ago
    I self-host Nextcloud, a personal finance app called Expensio + all of my websites (personal and commercial). Maybe about ~8 or so things in total. I only really spend time on maintaining them when I want to update them which is usually just a git pull and a docker compose command.

danielovichdk 2y ago

The relative cost will determine and control the market, I believe. Hosting is very complicated, I tend to use an analogy about energy-production, where you can make your own energy or you can plug into the decentralised options. Some things you might want to host, but the economic trajectory is telling us that the decentralised options are here to stay.

chadsix 2y ago
We help people self host hands free [1] so different factors guide decisions for them. :) [1] https://ipv6.rs/cloudseeder https://ipv6.rs/cloudseeder
alexlazar97 2y ago
> The relative cost will determine and control the market, I believe. I agree there. > Hosting is very complicated But not here. Docker, imho, and cloud providers that make deploying Docker apps easy are making it very easy. I don't really know what you mean by "decentralised" options though. Using an existent SaaS is far from decentralised imho.

photochemsyn 2y ago

The rentier class doesn't want to lose the ability to extract rents from users in perpetuity, so they - shareholders and investors in the tech sector - are not going to support a model where the user has complete control of their hardware and software once an initial purchase is made. It's gotten pretty ridiculous - let's say you buy a hammer. But to keep using the hammer, you have to pay a monthly subscription or the hammer stops working. And this is considered normal? Of course there are some tools that are so complex that you don't want to have to buy them and maintain them, so renting makes much more sense - but if your whole world is structured that way, you're just being bled.

alexlazar97 2y ago
I agree. Big co and VC funded startups will find it hard to do the self-hosted model. But small software companies or "indie hackers" (like me) can make it make sense. It's also a good way for us to differentiate ourselves and have an angle in the bigger markets. If I and 5 other devs go and make Dropbox, for example, you won't look at us. Dropbox will be much better. But if we offer a self-hosted version, we might just be able to carve a small portion of the market for ourselves through that angle.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

meiraleal 2y ago

Local-first is the future. Most cases don't even need a backend to self-host.

alexlazar97 2y ago
That's an interesting take and I have thought about local-first a lot too. There are tradeoffs, the core cons I find are: - complex code, complex architecture vs traditional web apps - hard(er) to update app versions across users The core selling point (hiding latency) is big I think. But, if you self-host, the user/business can put their server very close and reduce latency to unnoticeable levels. I think local-first is cool, really cool and makes beautiful apps. But I think it's only worth it for a small subset of software, far smaller then self-hosted.

rcarmo 2y ago

That’s all fine and good until you drop into your average European business that has no IT whatsoever except the owner’s nephew. I just don’t see any small non-technical business doing self-hosting… even things like NextCloud are infinitesimally present in that kind of market…

alexlazar97 2y ago
I think any business where the owner/team can figure out how to host something like WordPress can also figure out how to throw a Docker app in one of the many providers that just auto-deploy Docker apps, for example.

nunez 2y ago

This might be true in a world where people actually give a shit about privacy.

xnx 2y ago

Even with Docker self hosting apps is still unnecessarily complex compared to installing an app on iOS, Android, Windows or Mac.

alexlazar97 2y ago
Compared to that, yes, I agree. But it's way easier than it used to be and I think it's within the skill set of most computer literate people.
- DougN7 2y ago
  I’m not sure. I’m an older developer that has never used Docker until this weekend. I was going through the beginning tutorials and something didn’t work and I was stuck. There is so much magic going on I wasn’t even sure where to look. I think you need to be a Linux-computer literate person, and that’s still a small niche outside of IT.

banish-m4 2y ago

The crux of SH is 6-pronged: - Deployment and configuration management - Platform maintenance (not app upgrades) - App upgrades - Security - Performance monitoring - Data backup and disaster recovery When considering taking on SH, it's important to be wise about all of the implications. Automating these, standardization, and making them more portable are what would make SH cheaper and more doable. Definitely create runbooks and detailed notes that are kept current, organized, and could be used to reconstruct production without automation.

TheNewsIsHere 2y ago
Being able to reconstruct production without either automation or, well, production, is a line I spend time to not cross. I have seen that so much though. It’s unfortunately common to find that the BCDR strategy, if it exists, has a reliance on production even if production is unavailable. So now you have to spend time manually reconstructing whatever dependencies exist in require production to be available. How well is that documented? If you have circular dependencies like that, probably not very well.
- banish-m4 2y ago
  Then it's fraud or corporate BS. Bare-metal recovery means: - a BOM that's shot to a major hardware vendor or already having network and server device spares; Dell is able to meet this sort of need - a USB boot device to kickstart a rebuild, restore environment - some sort of initial restore media or equivalent containing encrypted backups - encrypted offline backup of the infrastructure wiki - n-person split password key material to decrypt backups. DR/BCP also requires thoughtful derisking by inventorying, identifying dependencies, prioritizing restoration (DNS, DHCP, AD, etc.), and removing/untangling cyclic dependencies if they happen up or down the stack. There are semi-automated tools to help with most of this, and infrastructure automation should assist it as much as possible, because if you can't rebuild it with confidence, then you don't have anything. It requires significant thought, effort, standardization, continuous maintenance, and practiced at least yearly by someone(s) like SREs and with regular input of front-line IT-equivalent owners.