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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

#81

Post by langcss »

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…

Not sure of Tau's exact features but one nice thing about the Vercels and Netlifys is the integration with Github and easy CI /CD setup.

Having CI taken care of by just installing a single package on your own server is compelling.

The main think that they take care of that this probably can't on bare metal is redundancy and uptime and scaling.

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

#82

Post by threecheese »

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…

Replying just to “isn't a coherent mental model”:

I just took a deep dive into the documentation- which is comprehensive - and I feel the complete opposite; the author has a very well refined mental model of a PaaS and has created a modularized source-code expression of that model that I found very interesting. The CI module is called “patrick”, which gave me a chuckle.

You have some good feedback in your post, but I feel like the author may not be trying to replace hosted PaaS; they are essentially using tiny-go to build small distributable wasm modules that can interoperate in a distributed network, which aligns very closely with the localfirst ethos that brings compute and storage out of the datacenter. Does it feel a bit silly to even SAY “client-side CI”? Objectively, yes, but if a future architecture might need to safely deliver code to clients in a mesh this is a really interesting way to experiment with solutions.

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

#83

Post by threecheese »

hosh wrote: post #36
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…

I don’t know if the author intended to be “local first- adjacent” with this project, but I am seeing a lot of wasm-target projects lately, including replicated databases, and I wonder if this project isn’t a peek at what a truly distributed (browser-to-browser) workload might look like. This project persists the system config in GitHub, but if the components are wasm then there’s at a chance that they can use that provision themselves in every browser.

Imagine a workload where a client does their own compute, by provisioning worker components locally and retrieving only shared data from your systems - how much cheaper would your hosting costs be?!

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

#84

Post by threecheese »

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...

Agree the author should not lead with THAT copy! If you dig down though (I did) there’s quite a bit of technical documentation that I found interesting. “Different” for sure.

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

#85

Post by kachapopopow »

Isn't the entire point of vercel/netlify/cloudflare is that you *don't* have to self-host? The issue is the price of it, not the actual software.

Waking up to a 10k vercel bill is pretty common, especially when a DDoS goes undetected. That 10k bill is roughly $50 dedi from hetzner, but the problem with that is that you need a distributed system, for that you need something more advanced that tau, let's say kubernetes, then you need multi-site storage ok so ceph and then you realize you need a degree in openssh and bluestack to continue on and realize that the hassle from all of that and instead just hire a sysops employee that costs 10k a month and spend $1000+/month on hardware for geo-distribution.

Take this from personal experience. I've personally seen someone go k8s with very little experience and their general consensus was that they just want to go "managed" hosting instead.

Still better than 10k bill once your app becomes large enough, but it's simply not something devs that just want to get something out there want to bother with. In the end even with the insane hosting costs compared to the revenue they bring in is tiny. $10/month service user only racks in around $1 of api usage a month, heavily depends on the app though.

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

#86

Post by stavros »

hosh wrote: post #36
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…

If it works as well as described (ie as well as can be expected with IPFS as a storage layer), it doesn't work.

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

#87

Post by j45 »

kachapopopow wrote: post #85

Isn't the entire point of vercel/netlify/cloudflare is that you *don't* have to self-host? The issue is the price of it, not the actual software. Waking up to a 10k vercel bill is pretty common, especially when a DDoS goes undetected. That 10k bill is roughly $50 dedi from hetzner, but the problem with that is that you need a distributed system, for that you need something more advanced that tau, let's say kubernetes…

The point of the first two seems to be to host static files at the least, and in the case of cloudflare, cache existing hosting for the most part.

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

#88

Post by nstart »

kachapopopow wrote: post #85

Isn't the entire point of vercel/netlify/cloudflare is that you *don't* have to self-host? The issue is the price of it, not the actual software. Waking up to a 10k vercel bill is pretty common, especially when a DDoS goes undetected. That 10k bill is roughly $50 dedi from hetzner, but the problem with that is that you need a distributed system, for that you need something more advanced that tau, let's say kubernetes…

> Isn't the entire point of vercel/netlify/cloudflare is that you don't have to self-host?

No. There are two pieces to those platforms. The first is a platform that supports git commit as a deploy method out of the box. That’s the big one.

The second is auto scaling. That’s where not having to self host is actually a big deal. But that’s also where the bills come. A lot of smaller builders are right now looking to have the same deploy experience but on their own cheap hetzner/DO server without crazy bandwidth and scaling bills that they can get hit with the moment they let their guard down.

A decent sized player in this field right now is Coolify. They offer a hosted version of their PaaS but without the servers. So the PaaS part itself, coolify, is managed by them but it deploys to hardware that you control. The existence and usage of this plan is evidence of the needs of this market imo.

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

#89

Post by kachapopopow »

j45 wrote: post #87
kachapopopow wrote: post #85

Isn't the entire point of vercel/netlify/cloudflare is that you *don't* have to self-host? The issue is the price of it, not the actual software. Waking up to a 10k vercel bill is pretty common, especially when a DDoS goes undetected. That 10k bill is roughly $50 dedi from hetzner, but the problem with that is that you need a distributed system, for that you need something more advanced that tau, let's say kubernetes…

The point of the first two seems to be to host static files at the least, and in the case of cloudflare, cache existing hosting for the most part.

talking about cloudflare workers here

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

#90

Post by kachapopopow »

nstart wrote: post #88
kachapopopow wrote: post #85

Isn't the entire point of vercel/netlify/cloudflare is that you *don't* have to self-host? The issue is the price of it, not the actual software. Waking up to a 10k vercel bill is pretty common, especially when a DDoS goes undetected. That 10k bill is roughly $50 dedi from hetzner, but the problem with that is that you need a distributed system, for that you need something more advanced that tau, let's say kubernetes…

> Isn't the entire point of vercel/netlify/cloudflare is that you don't have to self-host? No. There are two pieces to those platforms. The first is a platform that supports git commit as a deploy method out of the box. That’s the big one. The second is auto scaling. That’s where not having to self host is actually a big deal. But that’s also where the bills come. A lot of smaller builders are right now looking to ha…

The management when something goes wrong (take this from experience) is very time consuming, especially if you lack experience and/or dedicated staff.

Git history deployments is a simple k8s controller, pretty sure there's a helm chart for that.

Autoscaling is what I mean by kubernetes so yes totally agree.

Coolify seems pretty neat. Still has the overhead of management when dealing with clustering and multi-site.

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