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Tau: Open-source PaaS – A self-hosted Vercel / Netlify / Cloudflare alternative

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Re: Tau: Open-source PaaS – A self-hosted Vercel / Netlify / Cloudflare alternative

#31

Post by satvikpendem »

ffsm8 wrote: post #8
bitpush wrote: post #3

First coolify[1] and now Tau. More competition the better for users. From the quick look it seems like coolify is more fully featured? [1]: https://coolify.io/

Before Coolify came CapRover and dokku. My toy server (64ram, ryzen 5600G 60tb HDD, 4tb NVMe) is currently running fedora/caprover, though I've been considering just putting truenas scale on it, as it added custom deployments as well...

I found CapRover and dokku to have some limitations such as lack of a GUI or long setup process. In contrast with Coolify, it Just Worked™. I'll have to check out Tau as well.

Re: Tau: Open-source PaaS – A self-hosted Vercel / Netlify / Cloudflare alternative

#32

Post by pdimitar »

memset wrote: post #11

This is really neat! I'm working a message queue in go (drop-in replacement for SQS) and also thinking about autoscaling. I've been playing with raft vs using a central store (ie, postgres) to coordinate. Can you tell me more about IPFS - I've never used it before. How has that been working, and can you tell me what you've observed when you have many nodes which need to coordinate?

Lately I've stumbled upon https://www.goqite.com/ but haven't had a good use case for it yet.

Re: Tau: Open-source PaaS – A self-hosted Vercel / Netlify / Cloudflare alternative

#33

Post by Ambroos »

turtlebits wrote: post #28

Looks compelling, but the docs are extremely vague and full of fluff. The "Why One Binary" is hilariously bad. Almost feels like content to impress managers/recruiters. https://tau.how/02-concepts/03-one-binary/#the-genesis-of-ta...

Pretty much all of the docs are very clearly the output of what the typical LLM produces. It's just words, no meaning.

Re: Tau: Open-source PaaS – A self-hosted Vercel / Netlify / Cloudflare alternative

#35

Post by llama052 »

joshmanders wrote: post #9

What's with the vilification of kubernetes? 99% of this document ( https://tau.how/99-Misc/kubernetes/01-k8s-cons/ ) boils down to "You have to understand what a pod, deployment, container, etc is" once you remove every line that discusses the cons of managing a cluster yourself, because nobody actually does that except extremely large orgs. All of these problems go away when you utilize a managed offering like DOKS,…

100% this.. There's also exciting projects like Talos, Rancher, and the like for self-hosting Kubernetes that makes it entirely more manageable.

So much saturation in this space of people trying to create one off solutions, which on some level I admire. However the further off the main path you go the more you lock yourself into problems you can't troubleshoot or edge cases that aren't supported.

Abstraction these days is alluring, and it's cool! However you want something well known, well supported, (from multiple companies ideally) and documented. The hate for understanding kubernetes is just hate for having to understand layers of orchestration, or worse the layers behind the application.

If it's too complicated then you might not need it. Any platform you use will have those same layers, it just depends on how much is assumed or exposed to you. If you don't want to see any dials or options then use a managed solution, not a roll your own platform tool. That's of course assuming a few virtual machines managed by hand doesn't satisfy your needs, but if that's the case you don't need a platform solution (and hopefully it's not production).

Re: Tau: Open-source PaaS – A self-hosted Vercel / Netlify / Cloudflare alternative

#36

Post by hosh »

sqeaky wrote: post #23

Self-hosted platform as a service?! Isn't the whole point of platforms as a service (from the customer perspective) that you don't need to do the hassle of self hosting. There are pros and cons to using an external service and to self hosting. And just throwing all these words at me together makes me feel like there isn't a coherent mental model of what this is trying to be, or if there is it isn't clearly communicat…

Further down on the README, it explains how it uses libp2p for network autodiscovery, IPFS for distributed storage, and how it can distribute and share routes and assets and automating load-balancing. It is Webassembly-native, so you don't have to mess with compiling dependencies or execution environments.

If it works as well as described, then the underlying technology (and the constraints they have) allows it to be self-hosted while having some of the benefits for a managed platform.

Re: Tau: Open-source PaaS – A self-hosted Vercel / Netlify / Cloudflare alternative

#37

Post by joshmanders »

cal85 wrote: post #27
VyseofArcadia wrote: post #21

I've been out of web dev for a few years, but my understanding of the appeal of serverless is that it is theoretically pay only for what you use. But if you're hosting Tau to do serverless via Tau, well, it's not really serverless anymore. You are now definitely paying for the server running the serverless infra. Why would anyone target Tau serverless, then? What am I missing?

That’s not the only appeal of serverless. In fact it’s not even really true - I pay Vercel a flat rate every month whether I’m heavily using it or not. The appeal of serverless for me is simplicity. It abstracts the server away. Less to think about, more brain capacity focused on unique business logic.

> The appeal of serverless for me is simplicity.

That's interesting, because serverless is far from simple and Vercel is about the same distance from simplicity as the sun is from the edge of the observable universe.

Re: Tau: Open-source PaaS – A self-hosted Vercel / Netlify / Cloudflare alternative

#40

Post by st3fan »

Kinrany wrote: post #30
sqeaky wrote: post #23

Self-hosted platform as a service?! Isn't the whole point of platforms as a service (from the customer perspective) that you don't need to do the hassle of self hosting. There are pros and cons to using an external service and to self hosting. And just throwing all these words at me together makes me feel like there isn't a coherent mental model of what this is trying to be, or if there is it isn't clearly communicat…

"Self-hostable as a service" is a common pattern because it provides the benefits of as-a-service without the threat of vendor lock-in. Plus you can run the same software in temporary or test environments.

Where Vendor can also be an open source project. The cost of moving away from a project like Tau can be equally high as a closed source PaaS of course.
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