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Show HN: Alien – Self-hosting with remote management (written in Rust)

106 points by alongub ↗ HN
Hi HN, I'm Alon, and I'm building Alien, an open-source platform for deploying your software into your customer's environment and keeping it fully managed.

In my previous startup, I heard the same question from every single enterprise customer over and over again: "My data is sensitive. Can I deploy your product to my own cloud account?"

Self-hosting is becoming very popular because it lets users keep their data private, local, and inside their own environment. Unfortunately, self-hosting breaks down when someone starts paying for your software. Especially if it's an enterprise customer.

Customers usually don't actually know how to operate your software. They might change something small — Postgres version, environment variables, IAM, firewall rules — and things start failing. From their perspective, the product is broken. And even if the root cause is on their side, it doesn't matter... the customer is always right, you're still the one expected to fix it.

But you can't. You don't have access to their environment. You don't have real visibility. You can't run anything yourself. So you're stuck debugging a system you don't control, through screenshots and copy-pasted logs on a Zoom call. You end up responsible for something you don't control.

I think there's a better model of paid self-hosting: the software runs in the customer's environment, but the developer can actually operate it. It's a win-win: for the customer, their data stays private and local, and the developer still has control over deployments, updates, and debugging.

Alien provides infrastructure to deploy and operate software inside your users' environments, while retaining centralized control over updates, monitoring, and lifecycle management. It currently supports AWS, GCP, and Azure targets.

GitHub: https://github.com/alienplatform/alien

Getting started: https://alien.dev/docs/quickstart

How it works: https://alien.dev/docs/how-alien-works

Excited to share Alien with everyone here – let me know what you think!

14 comments

[ 1294 ms ] story [ 854 ms ] thread
msteffen
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”
gsgreen
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.

antonvs
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”.

nickmonad
> 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.

nhatcher
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/

munksbeer
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?

irickt
The signal works both ways. "Written in Java" would save a lot of clicks. So the Java author may omit the label for the same reason. /s
huksley
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.

pruthviraja
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?
tanki
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

i_think_so
Account created yesterday, exactly one comment.

Meta: I presume youngish accounts like mine (who can't downvote yet) have no role to play in policing astroturfing like this, correct?

dvirsegev
I’ve been waiting for a solution like this for too long, can’t wait to try it!