Ask HN: Is bring your own cloud considered self-hosting?

Hello,

We are creating a b2b SaaS app that will need access to your codebase. As you might imagine not all companies are happy with sharing their codebases with third parties.

I was researching self-hosting options but honestly, all of them seem kind of complicated. So decided to borrow the wisdom of the HN crowd.

Here are a few options I came up with:

1) Use docker-compose -> This is probably a no-go. We are e2e testing app running headless Chrome with codebase access. So you would need to give us quite a huge VM.

2) Packaged Kubernetes - This could work but we would need to run everything including the database inside the k8 cluster. And figure out a way to somehow package it including all of the operators etc

3) Bring your own cloud - For a small startup like ours (3 people) this seems like the most realistic option. You will give us a GCP project and we will point our terraform there. In a few minutes, you should have your deployment ready.

I should also mention that I know for HIPAA and very security-conscious companies cloud approach is a no-go. But we would first target smaller startups (20-100 engineers).

For those who work in such environments would you be ok with that?

Bonus question: Or would you share your codebase with a SaaS app that has SOC2 type II compliance?

3 comments

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kgdiem 2y ago ↗

If a customer has such stringent requirements, can’t you offer 2 & 3 then use the contract approval / signing period to get ready? Potentially even having the customer fund #2?

If you already have terraform it should be low-ish effort to do #3 as it is.

Ryner001 2y ago ↗

I am not sure how stringent the requirements are for most tech companies. For the ones I worked with, it would be probably fine to push for SaaS deployment or at most bring your own cloud. We used some tools that had complete access to repositories.

That said they were all startups with move fast mentality.

I am leaning towards #3 since we would use the same setup for SaaS and self-hosting but wanted to validate if that would be enough for people here.

Yep yep I’m working on #3 as well, that’s what the customers asked for.