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by aloer 1043 days ago
I've recently mentioned* that I believe the serverless model to be a great fit for self hosting needs.

It enables a kind of bring your own account (BYOA?) installation process. Where self-hostable services would be entirely built based on managed services.

- Infrastructure as code. The installer takes in any <cloud_vendor> account and provisions + configures the required components

- High availability built in

- no need to support old or niche hardware

- On-demand costs structure. Many self-hosted services don't need to run 24/7

My biggest fear with raspberry pi or VPS is the security. But self-hosting does not mean my-server-hosting. Some amount of vendor lock-in is acceptable and using the same APIs and processes as enterprise users sounds like a win. At least compared to not self-hosting at all.

Of course many things are still missing:

- self-hosted tools that actually work like this

- connection between data center and home. To integrate with smart home/IoT and similar things

- a reliable billing model for less technical users. It has to be impossible to rack up huge cloud bills

For now I guess it's just not yet mature enough. But I would like to see the serverless mentality finding it's way into self-hosted software communities.

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36986980

An example of what I mean: https://github.com/full-stack-serverless/conference-app-in-a...

I don't see any reason why that shouldn't also work for more typical self-hosted applications

1 comments

The problem for me is there's no "generic" serverless stack, so you're then locked into one single vendor which defeats a lot of the personal control appeal of self hosting for me.