I'm looking for feedback from people who selfhost their own environment.
I'm building a tool to simplify deployment and management and make it feel more like a PaaS. I was also frustrated by the speed of CI/CD runners.
Here's what I've settled on:
- Docker compose files to describe services
- Docker swarm as an orchestrator
- One command to setup a new server and add it to cluster
- Secrets and server credentials are encrypted with age and stored inside the repository alongside the code
- Easy way to add secrets and config files to your service
I built it initially for myself, so I'm probably missing some pain points other teams have. A few questions for anyone running their own infra:
1. What's the orchestrator you're using - k8s, docker swarm, etc.? Or none at all?
2. How do you manage secrets?
3. Where do you store images - self-hosted registry, GHCR/Docker Hub or no registry at all?
4. How long does your CI/CD pipeline take end to end?
5. What's the size of your team?
Anything you wish existed but doesn't? Or anything I'm clearly getting wrong?
https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/1lutdul/we_buil...
tldr; We built an open-source, MIT-licensed PaaS that:
Lets you scale beyond a single server.
Uses API keys for team access, not SSH keys.
Has a simple CLI and web UI without overwhelming configuration.
Includes built-in database management (disco postgres create).
Is funded by optional managed services, so that the code can remain free and open.
Dokku: Great, but locked us to single servers and required managing SSH access for teams.
Coolify: Powerful, but we found the sheer number of configuration options overwhelming.
Kamal: Brilliant for deployment, but we wanted integrated database management and other platform features built-in.
All containers. Some just docker/podman, some one k8s cluster. Mainly it's just for fun. Except the cloud and local backups for our phones/Gcloud, which my wife will get really mad if it doesn't work.