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

sqeaky
27 replies
1d1h

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 communicated.

If this is some sort of CDN software or attempt at running Lambda-like code Snippets on your own distributed cluster that's cool. But a description of that would be nice.

The GitHub read me jump straight into how this is just a single binary and how deploying it is easy, but not what the hell it is. CloudFlare can do like a million things, which features from cloudflare is this competing with? I just really want to know what the pros and cons of this are compared to other ways of rolling my own servers or renting out someone else's platform?

hosh
6 replies
1d

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.

threecheese
1 replies
18h34m

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?!

hosh
0 replies
4h44m

Thanks for articulating that. I was groping around for something along those lines — going beyond easy self-hosted to local-first deployment. Considering the web3 origins, I wonder if the project founders had that in mind as well.

There was a different, recent HN post about scoped propogators, which I find to have a lot of good potential for people to write and apply local customizations for their own apps.

I don’t know if those are the killer use case for this, but I think ideas along these lines takes it further out of alignment with incentives for business models.

sqeaky
1 replies
1d

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.

hosh
0 replies
22h18m

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.

stavros
0 replies
17h32m

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

hinkley
0 replies
14h38m

We used to call those “turn-key solutions”.

Kinrany
6 replies
1d

"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.

makestuff
2 replies
23h37m

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 some sort.

hosh
1 replies
22h16m

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.

godzillabrennus
0 replies
19h48m

Maybe they’ll become consultants helping big customers use the platform to fund its development.

st3fan
1 replies
1d

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.

rrix2
0 replies
1d

and if that cost of moving away is high enough, a team or org "locked in" to a FOSS solution can continue to pay humans to support it internally while evaluating off-ramps instead of being told they need to re-arch their cloud stack in three months' time.

echelon
0 replies
5h46m

Amazon and the hyperscalers will eventually pick something like this up and offer it for free.

jauntywundrkind
4 replies
1d

The point of platform isn't just that someone else hosts it. It's that it's a consistent target for your teams & different projects, with a well defined set of capabilities.

Having patterns to deploy & ship software, that also can bring up & manage other resources along the way (databases, load balancers, geo-reicatikn, etc etc).

seangrogg
3 replies
1d

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.

phendrenad2
1 replies
23h47m

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...)

sqeaky
0 replies
22h31m

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.

mlaretallack
0 replies
23h39m

In a company, there may me multiple teams, each doing there own projects, PaaS can be within the same company and provide a common way to do stuff without each team having to start from scratch each time.

threecheese
0 replies
18h45m

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.

revskill
0 replies
23h36m

Yes, so that one doesn't need to learn those helly AWS config.

pyeri
0 replies
15h49m

Exactly. If one has to self-host actually, it's best to deal with the direct infrastructure (IAAS) layers and get its efficiency instead of going through additional layer overhead.

I don't know much about NodeJS/React world but to compare with PHP, this is the equivalent of self-hosting an open source CPanel instead of creating a LAMP setup on VPS and working with Linux and PHP directly?

ozim
0 replies
12h38m

When you have an infrastructure team at your company - that is basically what they do - changing IaaS or your bare metal into PaaS. But yes that is only useful at certain scale of operations.

Maybe with such tooling as original post it will be useful in smaller scale.

langcss
0 replies
18h50m

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.

kgeist
0 replies
21h5m

Two large marketplaces in my country I know of have their own self-hosted PaaS (I know some of their devs personally). They're microservice-driven and have many small teams. One of their devs showcased me their platform where a small team can launch a new microservice with a few simple configs/CLI commands without having to know anything about infrastructure (it has built-in monitoring, logging, scalability options, discovery etc., full package). I guess it lowers costs because they have a lot of traffic. And they made it super easy to use for small teams with no cloud expertise. Faster deployments because each small team manages their microservices on their own. Plus, no vendor lock-in. I can imagine the pain of migrating 3000 microservices off a vendor. However, I think for small companies self-hosted PaaS is an overkill. Those companies have dedicated teams who work solely on PaaS.

bbor
0 replies
13h47m

Nah, this is just Dokku 2 and I love Dokku. I think you’re mistaking a software component “service” and a business model “service”

TZubiri
0 replies
7h11m

Self hosted gmail P2P netflix server Bank account + bank combo Mortgage Hertz DIY concierge service Fast food from scratch Bootcamp taking bootcamp Oxygen Farm

joshmanders
15 replies
1d1h

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, EKS, AKS or GKE.

mynameisvlad
4 replies
1d1h

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

joshmanders
1 replies
1d1h

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?

jpgvm
0 replies
23h29m

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.

abound
1 replies
1d1h

"Self-hosting" doesn't necessarily mean you own the hardware. Many people self-host on cloud providers at different levels (Fly, Digital Ocean/Hetzner, GCP/Azure/AWS), and most of those have some managed K8s offering.

anonzzzies
0 replies
11h46m

Yeah and, as I see with my clients, you are always overpaying for that service. We run a one binary CL (save and die) cluster for $50/mo without containers that makes us millions $ profit a month. Even if it would cost $1000 (it would be far more); a) I rather give that to someone on the street b) it would be far far more busy work for no benefit. Anyone can do what they want; I like profit and I simply don’t like giving these companies money. But each their own. Tau seems the same philosophy as us, so I will add them to our sponsor list.

thinkxl
2 replies
1d1h

What's with the vilification of kubernetes?

because a well-configured k8s cluster nullifies the need for this project. also hi!

tln
1 replies
23h55m

There's a fair amount of friction to going from 0 to a well-configured k8s cluster with gitops and a local dev story....

jpgvm
0 replies
23h31m

Gitops and a local dev story are more about your application than your deployment environment. Especially because along the way you need to consider building, testing, CI, etc.

It's really hard to fault k8s these days, all the original problems are solved and all that remains is necessary complexity that can't be abstracted without lowering power.

That doesn't mean you can't abstract over it, you can and should but you should do so in the scope of your team or organisation where you already know which pieces of power you need/want or otherwise know the way you which you want to leak those capabilities.

aduwah
1 replies
1d

I disagree hard with this. I love kubernetes to bits, but managing complex networking issues, having proper security, or just simply rightsizing the nodes is definitely not going away with having a managed control plane.

akvadrako
0 replies
20h1m

Google's autopilot takes care of that stuff for average use cases. You just point a few yaml files at it any your app is running.

It's not like netlify does better in terms of rightizing nodes.

zerkten
0 replies
1d1h

I found it interesting that this was the focus when users of Vercel etc. have probably decided against k8s already. For me, a k8s comparison would make sense if this was a platform for running containers/VMs in a more traditional server model.

philippemnoel
0 replies
23h39m

"What's with the vilification of kubernetes?" I ask myself that question every day

phantomathkg
0 replies
13h2m

Nothing wrong with vilification of a mature product. Everyone trying to sell you an alternative will try to differentiate itself from a mature competitor in the market very hard.

p-o
0 replies
1d

I like your take on this. I think K8s offers a _lot_ and it has a bad reputation because of its early days. Kubernetes has room to improve, like everything else, but the API now are becoming a lot easier to work with and the Custom Resources allows folks to extend Kubernetes.

I still think that projects like this one come from necessity. Folks want to have an alternative for vendor lock-in.

I'm building something like that too (https://github.com/pier-oliviert/sequencer) for Kubernetes, and it's also out of necessity.

Vercel, Heroku and others have a lot of helpful tools that are empower developers, and I think people want to have those without being locked-in.

It goes without saying that I'm totally bias :)

llama052
0 replies
1d

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).

bitpush
14 replies
1d1h

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/

ffsm8
8 replies
1d1h

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...

udev4096
3 replies
1d1h

That's a beast server. What are you using it for?

ffsm8
2 replies
1d1h

It sounds bigger then it is, raid 10 cuts it in half after all (30tb HDD, 2tb NVMe)

It's mostly just for the *arr stack, various self hosted services like vaultwarden, seafile etc and my personal toy projects. I.e. a pwa book reader along with the occasional dev tool I wanna experiment with.

Tiberium
1 replies
19h19m

What HDDs do you have for it to be 60TB in total?

ffsm8
0 replies
13h31m

6x6GB + 2x12gb

satvikpendem
2 replies
1d

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.

adparadox
1 replies
8m

CapRover has a UI to install new apps or configure existing ones.

satvikpendem
0 replies
2m

CapRover set up was kind of annoying last I used it.

bibstha
0 replies
1d

Love Caprover. Using this on production to host many docker containers.

TechDebtDevin
4 replies
1d1h

Coolify needs a lot of work imho.

andruby
3 replies
23h11m

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.

TechDebtDevin
1 replies
14h42m

IMO it adds a bunch of complexity (as these types of catch all frontend solutions usually do) to a problem that can be easily solved by becoming proficient in using Docker/Podman and spending a little bit of time reading the documentation for the services you want to run. Its a cool idea but uncessary IMO. There are also a ton of people that like it and I'm just one opinion.

I reccomend you try it but I also think you'll realize you could host that hobby project with half the hardware requirements and half the effort with something like docker-compose or swarm.

andruby
0 replies
12h58m

I’ve been using docker-compose on a vm for half a decade. Works very well with a reverse proxy + letsencrypt.

pif_
0 replies
22h13m

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.

teruakohatu
1 replies
1d

I thought you were probably exaggerating… you were not.

warkdarrior
0 replies
23h19m

But, but,...

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

candleknight
1 replies
19h26m

Starting off with "In the realm of..." instantly gave it away

Ambroos
1 replies
1d

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

mplewis
0 replies
23h28m

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

threecheese
0 replies
18h32m

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.

lbltavares
0 replies
20h10m

"Taubyte's single binary philosophy advocates for a future where the full potential of cloud computing is unlocked through its accessibility and efficiency"

WD-42
0 replies
23h19m

Ouch. This is llm output.

kachapopopow
6 replies
17h45m

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.

nstart
2 replies
16h25m

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.

kachapopopow
1 replies
16h17m

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.

nstart
0 replies
14h53m

Some good points to discuss here.

Firstly the git history managed via a controller / helm chart. That’s sufficiently complex. The mindset of k8s/cloudnative doesn’t translate easily from the pet vps control server which comes with its own disk and persistence. So conceptually a management layer like cooling is objectively easier.

But that’s a nit really.

I think the idea of management being time consuming is more interesting. It’s true. And I think it’s true no matter what you do.

Time consuming management applies to any sufficiently complex infrastructure or team. No matter what you have these questions to answer.

How is access ma aged?

How does debugging a broken build work?

How does secret and config management work?

How does disaster recovery work?

If you are storing config as code, how are you managing deployment of that?

If you use k8s, how do you manage feature deprecation across versions? Even a managed version won’t help you resolve having to move from some kind of resource/v1beta to resource/v1.

I don’t say this as a slam dunk against anything. I think there are different levels of comfort with certain paradigms depending on what you’ve been exposed to over your lifetime. And the solution that feels most convenient to you is what you’ll want to work with. And for each type of preference we are going to see different solutions. All of which will be time consuming to manage in their own ways at a sufficient level of complexity or scale. Basically I prefer talking in these terms because it shifts the conversation away from broad comparisons to something more tangible which is “where does the time complexity lie for this particular approach”. Teams can put that down on paper and decide which one is more palatable and then go with that.

j45
1 replies
16h53m

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.

kachapopopow
0 replies
16h20m

talking about cloudflare workers here

matus_congrady
0 replies
10h47m

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.

There's also a third way, which we're trying to do at stacktape[1].

We've built a PaaS platform on top of AWS, running in your own account. So you get all of the stability, flexibility and reliability of AWS, yet the deployment process is easy as using something like Heroku.

Also, compared to Vercel, the pricing is just a % on top of AWS fees, and not a sudden $10k bill, or $550/TB Netflify egress costs.

[1]: https://stacktape.com

taraparo
3 replies
1d1h

Wouldn't using talos be better than having to run this on custom managed ubuntu servers?

pdimitar
2 replies
1d

Which Talos, can you send a link?

llama052
0 replies
1d

I assume https://www.talos.dev/

Basically a small OS that will prop itself up and allow you to create/adopt into a Kubernetes cluster. Seems to work well from my experience and pretty easy to get set up on.

memset
3 replies
1d1h

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?

sneak
1 replies
1d1h

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.

AgentME
0 replies
22h11m

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.

pdimitar
0 replies
1d

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

VyseofArcadia
2 replies
1d1h

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?

cal85
1 replies
1d

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.

joshmanders
0 replies
1d

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.

yayr
1 replies
1d2h

very interesting... here is a comparison of the community and enterprise offering

https://taubyte.com/pricing/

who is actually behind this?

alfonsodev
1 replies
1d1h

Would this be a good combo to combine with Hetzner server auctions, or just too much trouble ? or even with todays connections having a server at home ? any success stories ?

winrid
0 replies
1d1h

They only auction servers in one region

KomoD
1 replies
1d

Don't call this a Cloudflare alternative because it simply isn't.

OJFord
0 replies
23h39m

Cloudflare Pages I assumed, from the title, since it already didn't make sense to compare Cloudflare (overall) to 'Vercel / Netlify'

trollied
0 replies
21h11m

Am I wrong, or all this ends up doing is round-robin DNS, which is no good for a geographic CDN?

slillibri
0 replies
1h26m

If it’s a single binary why is there an installer, and why does it need to be curl-piped to sh? Looking at the installer script, why does it create directories in the root dir, instead of /opt or /usr/local? Also, I couldn’t find the install script in the linked repo.

sandGorgon
0 replies
1d

how is this achieving scale-up and scale-to-zero ? from my (rudimentary) investigation only knative k8s had scale-to-zero implemented well enough.

and if you dont have scale-to-zero, you cant claim a vercel alternative.

localfirst
0 replies
1d

how does this compare to coolify and caprover already established and mature PaaS ? this is a welcome addition

lagrange77
0 replies
9h19m

Is the advantage of this, that you only have to keep the one binary up to date, in contrast to e.g. a host with docker-compose and the containers therein?

hosh
0 replies
1d1h

There are some neat ideas here -- building a PAAS off of p2p technologies to enable network autodiscovery, automated load-balancing, distributed storage, Webassembly-native, etc.

Having put stuff through production though, I'm a bit skeptical about how well it works out in the wild, though I am interested in learning how well it does and what its failure modes are. If it works well-enough, it has the potential for democratizing production apps.

I'm not sure how they are going to make money with their enterprise offering though.

breck
0 replies
1d1h

I love the verbiage. When I see a folder in the source named "dream", then files named "Universe" and "multiverse", it pulls me in :).

I also love the single binary in Go. That's on my todo list for a few things.

Well done!

bionhoward
0 replies
8h13m

Tau’s ability to self host platforms could be a huge boon to regulated industries because it avoids sending data and exposing connections. Great idea, keep it up!

Right now as I understand it, if you want to connect Vercel securely to a database with more than a password, you need to “contact sales” about “enterprise” (no self service option for demos and MVPs)

Might be a tech issue but imho needing to contact sales about enterprise level deals just for basic security stuff is not the best move since it forces people to expose their stuff or wait around and pay a bunch of money.

Dunno about you guys but I don’t ever click “contact sales” I just go to something else where my dev work isn’t gated by salespeople (even if it’s significantly more complicated) and I say this as a big proponent of Vercel, I wish I could use it more, but expecting users to wait around for sales to invoice them just to have a secure database connection is a dealbreaker for my use case regardless of my opinions or preferences of liking their stuff.

Sources

[1] https://github.com/orgs/vercel/discussions/42

[2] https://github.com/orgs/vercel/discussions/7323

[3] https://archive.ph/fQwMz

TheAnkurTyagi
0 replies
1d

What key features make Tau a compelling self-hosted PaaS alternative?

AnnaMere
0 replies
11h18m

Missing SHOW HN: ?

Ambroos
0 replies
1d1h

I've been reading through the docs and skipping through the one recentish YouTube tutorial trying to make sense of what this actually is. While it seems like an impressive thing for what appears to be a one-man-project, the almost complete lack of documentation makes it feel like a bit of a hard no in the current state. There seems to be a history of it being heavily linked to Web3 things that also feels weird.

Some suggestions for this to be able to succeed:

- Documentation, documentation, documentation, the only place where I could that the three supported ways to write a serverless function are with Go, Rust and AssemblyScript is somewhere hidden in a tutorial. It all has to compile to WebAssembly so I guess that's the limiting factor.

- Examples?

- Using git as source of truth for the configuration/state of a system is cool. Please link to sample repos so I can see what a system with a website, some functions that touch DB and files, and the configuration etc looks like.

- How does the database part work? Client SDKs?

- There are lots of protocols with unclear names that are only briefly mentioned here but then seen in random places in configuration: https://tau.how/01-getting-started/01-local-cloud/#protocols

- The Concepts part of the documentation is buzzword soup, it's impossible to derive any meaning from it other than that the author dislikes Kubernetes and probably used some generative AI for the content.

- Roadmap, plans, versioning, plans on how Tau version upgrades should go, ...