by nickmonad
3 subcomments
- > So you're stuck debugging a system you don't control, through screenshots and copy-pasted logs on a Zoom call.
This is very real.
I work with a deployment that operates in this fashion. Although unfortunately, we can't maintain _any_ connection back to our servers. Pull or push, doesn't matter.
The goal right now is to build out tooling to export logs and telemetry data from an environment, such that a customer could trigger that export on our request, or (ideally) as part of the support ticketing process. Then our engineers can analyze async. This can be a ton of data though, so we're trying to figure out what to compress and how. We also have the challenge of figuring out how to scrub logs of any potentially sensitive information. Even IDs, file names, etc that only matter to customers.
- Even when you do control the environment, infra isn’t as stable as people think.
Same VPS, same config, but under sustained load you’ll see latency creep or throughput drift depending on the host / routing / neighbors.
Short tests almost never show it — only shows up after a few minutes.
- IIUC this kind of thing is usually called “managed deployment.” Minio used to have a slick implementation of this, and I think databricks does as well. Usually it’s less “execute arbitrary commands on customer hosts,” and more “send metrics and logs to shared repository and send RPCs to customer deployment”
by pruthviraja
1 subcomments
- Interesting approach. The managed self-hosting gap is real..we have run into this exact pain point with kubernetes based deployments where customers modify their cluster configs and things break silently. If I may ask how does Alien handle rollback if an update fails in a customer environment?is there any plan for on-prem/bare metal support beyond the big three clouds?
- Is it for managing my software deployed in the customer's cloud environment? Would you support simpler deployment targets, like on premises VMs etc?
At DollarDeploy we developing the platform to deploy apps to VMs with managed services provided, kind of like Vercel for your own servers. Would be interesting to try alien for enterprise customers.
- I like it! I think if we are moving to a world (that is a big if) with more people self-hosting ideas like this one might have a future.
A different take: https://www.cloudron.io/
by cassianoleal
1 subcomments
- RCE into my environment? No, thanks.
- I’ve been waiting for a solution like this for too long, can’t wait to try it!
by munksbeer
1 subcomments
- I very seldom, if ever, see a "Show HN" title with a suffix of "written in Java" or "written in python" or "written in Go".
"Written in Rust" seems to be a very popular thing to add.
My assumption is that people know it will get the thread more visibility?
- I worked for a few years on an on-premise deployment of a system that was otherwise SaaS. Many enterprise customers simply won’t allow something like this - particularly big financials, aviation, healthcare etc.
Realistically, the game ends up being - see what you can get away with until someone notices. Given that, you might want to rename the product to something more boring than “Alien”.
- Such a big pain, I’ve experienced those issue first hand in my last two startups and it took so much time and effort
Super cool product, I’ve gotta try it
by EverMemory
0 subcomment
- [dead]
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