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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

#61

Post by jpgvm »

joshmanders wrote: post #12
mynameisvlad wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If your goal is to self-host your own PaaS, why would you use a managed k8s offering?

Why wouldn't you? If you decide to not use a PaaS and self host your own servers would you reach for a VPS or would you manage your own rack in a colocated data center?

Precisely, it's just about which abstraction and responsibility level you want to engage with. Managed k8s (from good vendors) means the scheduler is as far as you need to go which is enough to do a great many "self hosted" things.

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

#62

Post by mplewis »

Ambroos wrote: post #33
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.

Nothing like “docs by LLM” to warn you about the quality of the code you’re about to trust your entire infrastructure to.

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

#63

Post by warkdarrior »

teruakohatu wrote: post #41
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...

I thought you were probably exaggerating… you were not.

But, but,...

"By emphasizing ease and simplification, Taubyte aspires to transform cloud computing into a catalyst for creativity and innovation"

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

#64

Post by WD-42 »

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...

Ouch. This is llm output.

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

#65

Post by andruby »

TechDebtDevin wrote: post #7
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/

Coolify needs a lot of work imho.

Do you mean it’s missing features or that it requires lots of maintenance and handholding?

I’m evaluating some of the options for toy projects so I’m curious to read people’s experiences.

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

#66

Post by sqeaky »

phendrenad2 wrote: post #54
seangrogg wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I think this is a valid take for the term "platform" I do think that "Platform as a Service" implies that someone else is running the platform and I don't have to deal with the headache of managing it, I just use it.

Yes, from the developer's perspective, someone else is running the platform (the platform team). (At least, as long as the developers can avoid assuming ownership of the platform by managing terraform files or something, which in practice I've yet to see anyone avoid...)

And this is true even if you're not using a product that bills itself "as a service", get somehow we never called the next machines that programmers never touched running a LAMP stack "platform as a service". It's almost as if the "as a service" part meant as a service to your organization.

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

#67

Post by hosh »

sqeaky wrote: post #45
hosh wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Thanks for digging in. Would be nice if READMEs opened up with what the thing was and maybe a one or two sentence problem and solution description.

Sometimes, it's hard to tell how significant something is, and the creators may not even know until hindsight, let alone articulate it in a concise, accessible way.

The initial marketing word usage such as "amazing" put me off at first ("Show me, don't tell me"), as well as how the author(s) poo-poo'ed on Kubernetes. (I've worked on both good and bad usage of K8S, so it isn't always a fairy tale, nor with a bad ending). However, it also read like someone who seemed to have a deeper understanding of infra writing about this, not just a vapid reinvention by someone who works mostly on the front-end, so I kept going with the README.

Having said that, while I am a big fan of IPFS, I know there are performance issues with it. (Maybe Tau set up a private IPFS that is only used within the cluster, which may help it work faster). It also sounds like they are working on general container support, not just Webassembly. Overall, if they keep iterating and improving things based on how things work in production, then they'll end up with a fairly robust system.

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

#68

Post by hosh »

makestuff wrote: post #58
Kinrany wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

It will be interesting to see how these companies evolve their business strategy once PE/VCs are pressuring them to IPO/get bought out. It seems like any customer that is large enough to have significant billing would just bring the platform in house instead of paying for the hosted version. I guess they could take the docker desktop approach with their licensing that >X million in revenue still requires a license of…

They are using technologies such that the system can self-heal, and self-deploy (with auto discovery) ... so there's a misalignment of incentives for the product and a hosting business.

I like the ideas they are trying, so I wish the best of luck to them. Hopefully, they'll find a business model that is better aligned with the product.

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

#69

Post by pif_ »

andruby wrote: post #65
TechDebtDevin wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Coolify needs a lot of work imho.

Do you mean it’s missing features or that it requires lots of maintenance and handholding? I’m evaluating some of the options for toy projects so I’m curious to read people’s experiences.

It's still in beta (under active development), so for fairly serious projects it's not yet viable in production in my opinion. But I'm using it for two personal sites, and it works perfectly. It's exactly the kind of tool I was looking for: open source, self-hosting, easy to install, easy to use and well maintained.

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

#70

Post by AgentME »

sneak wrote: post #16
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?

IPFS is slow and impractical. The design of the content addresssble system is cool, but having tried approximately annually to run it for production usage since it was released, I can say that it is still firmly in the “research project” category, a decade later.

The weakest part of IPFS in my experience is how long it takes one node to find another with the requested data across the internet through the public DHTs. I imagine it might work much better in this system if they're limiting it to only do lookups and fetches within your own network of nodes.
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