[HN Gopher] Show HN: Elestio - Managed platform for over 150 ope...
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Show HN: Elestio - Managed platform for over 150 open-source
software stacks
Hello Hacker News! We're Joseph, Kieran and David from elestio
(https://elest.io/). We've built a platform that offers open-source
software as a managed service - we take care of the OS and app
updates, security, SSL, networking, backups, the whole deal. In
2009, we started deploying open-source software for websites and
web apps we built, many for SMB and enterprise customers. Our
process was basically: spin up VM's from a hosting provider,
install the software we needed, then update it manually / when it
was needed / critical, etc. Once we hit > 100 servers/services
needing updates, backups, capacity monitoring and alerting, etc. we
saw that it was getting totally unmanageable... so we built what
would eventually become elestio. We've put a lot, a lot, a lot of
work into building something that allows us (and now you) to deploy
a new service in just a few minutes, with zero ongoing maintenance
/ devops overhead. We basically turned open-source software into a
SaaS experience. We update all the apps, respecting SemVer on the
branch you select, issue and renew SSL certs automatically (even
for your own domains, for free), automatically implement a 3-2-1
backup strategy, caching is handled and we put your service behind
a configurable firewall and rate limiter with sane defaults. We
have implemented Nebula to connect your services hosted in
different datacenters across regions and providers as if they were
on the same network and Borg backups to do deduplicated incremental
backups in a remote datacenter. There were many challenges in
building it... VM providers don't have homogenous or feature-
complete APIs for provisioning servers, we tested 6 different mesh
networking/VPN solutions to enable services running in different
datacenters, regions, or providers to connect to each other
securely, and we did a lot of work to create a sane templating
system that covers setup, security, backups, upgrade, migrations
and monitoring, lots of work to test the safest ways to update OS
and apps without breaking things... but we got there and it works
really well (we think)! Deployments are based on Docker, which
helped a lot to standardize everything. We've been using it to
deploy and maintain over 12,000 services for our own enterprise
clients and we've spent the last year making it user-friendly (and
even more bulletproof for end-user configs). Elestio can currently
deploy any one of over 150 open-source software stacks like
Postgres, MySQL, OpenSearch, Redis, Wordpress, NodeBB, Jitsi,
Uptime-kuma, Plausible, GitLab,, Strapi, Ghost, or even PowerDns,
Grafana, ClickHouse, etc. in about 3 minutes, flat. We currently
support AWS Lightsail, Linode, Hetzner, Vultr and Digital Ocean,
and BringYourOwnVM, if you want to run on your own provider account
or even on-premise but have all the features of managed services.
We are offering 1 BYOVM service per customer for free forever.
Something we really wanted to do was make sure we were part of a
healthy open-source ecosystem. To that end, elestio will donate
part of all revenue to the open-source projects our customers are
using. We will review this annually and if it's possible to
increase it, we will. This is a win-win-win to us. Open-source
developers and communities get more resources to improve their
software while our customers, our staff and other stakeholders know
that they are helping to support the open-source community. For
this launch we made a partnership with DigitalOcean, they are
offering $250 of free credits on Elestio if you go through this
link: https://try.digitalocean.com/elestio/ Alternatively you can
also register here and get $20 of free credits but not limited to
DO infrastructure: https://dash.elest.io/signup All your questions
and comments are welcome and if you want to share any devops horror
stories, please do! We're giving out free credits for the best
ones!! Joseph, Kieran and David
Author : js4ever
Score : 84 points
Date : 2022-02-23 13:00 UTC (10 hours ago)
| shrubble wrote:
| How does this compare to Softaculous.com 's offerings, would you
| say?
|
| I know and have used Softaculous to install and maintain
| Wordpress and other applications in the past.
| js4ever wrote:
| Hey shrubble, AFAIK Softaculous is focused on PHP softwares
| that can be hosted on sharedhosting. On our side we deploy any
| kind of open-source software with docker so we don't have any
| particular limitations or affinity to php softwares. And so our
| catalog of supported software is quite different :)
|
| Also Softaculous templates where a bit old and not always
| maintained, on our side we have a totally different
| implementation and we are doing semVer updates based on tags
| available on docker hub, monitoring, alerts, backups,
| migrations, security and more.
|
| We also have support for MySQL & KeyDB multi-master clusters,
| and we are going to introduce soon more cluster options
|
| https://doc.elest.io/books/database-clusters/page/mysql-clus...
| allisdust wrote:
| It's not very clear what kind of setup we get with something like
| postgres. Is the price quoted for HA setup or normal and what if
| there is a need for a replica.
|
| Can you elaborate a little.
| elefantastisch wrote:
| This sounds really cool. Immediately shared it with friends,
| but... now I'm just hitting a mess of UX around billing.
|
| I tried to go to billing, there is nothing in there at all. I
| went to my user profile, and there's a tab "payment options" that
| says I have no credit card added but doesn't give me the option
| to add one. There's also a tab "add credits" which lets me type
| in an amount to add and apparently click "pay now" despite not
| actually requesting any payment information.
|
| Finally I discovered by clicking around on everything that if I
| go to "services" there's a message to add a payment card. I click
| the button to add details and I'm given a prompt to accept terms
| and conditions and provide... not credit card details but a link
| to a social profile? Apparently this is some sort of fraud
| prevention thing? You want to see who I am? I have no idea what
| this is, but at this point, I'm frustrated with the user
| experience, don't see any path forward to actually trying the
| service, and don't trust you with any more information. No paid
| service I have ever used has asked for a link to a social
| profile.
|
| I'm really sorry. I wanted so much to try this out and love it,
| but the experience around actually getting set up to try it is so
| frustrating and confusing right now that I'm just done.
|
| I hope these are just growing pains that will be worked out
| because I think the concept here is great. I'll come back some
| day with an open mind and try again. I wish you nothing but the
| best in this journey.
| js4ever wrote:
| Hey elefantastisch, Thanks for your feedback about the UX!
|
| Indeed adding a card is done when clicking on pay now button
| (next step is a redirection to Stripe Checkout page), I
| definitely agree this should be enhanced and it will!
|
| About the social profile url, we are asking that to prevent
| fraud risks and also to avoid having to charge $1 to get a Risk
| score from Stripe. It's strange but I discovered the only way
| to get a risk score from Stripe radar is to do a real charge (a
| pre-auth or just adding a card is not enough). We also tried a
| strategy to charge $1 then auto refund it, but Stripe do not
| refund the transaction charge anymore.
|
| So we ended up with this social profile option as a fraud
| check, it's quite effective to keep hackers and abusers away
| ... unfortunately it seems it's also too much friction for new
| customers.
|
| I'll definitely rediscuss this point with the team tomorrow
| morning, please give us another chance in few days ;)
| allisdust wrote:
| Ya. I don't think anyone would want to provide their social
| profiles. You should just eat up the cost of risk score.
| js4ever wrote:
| I heard you, I will discuss this with the team and we will
| get this removed soon
| tamasnet wrote:
| The Bring-Your-Own-VM aspect is super interesting. I'd love to
| have this kind of stack/app management on my own hardware. Will
| have to run the numbers to see if it makes financial sense.
| ushakov wrote:
| very cool, but why isn't this platform open-source?
| js4ever wrote:
| Hey Ushakov We have published some parts of the platform in
| open-source here: https://github.com/elestio
|
| https://github.com/elestio/cloudgate
| https://github.com/elestio/nginx-auto-ssl
| https://github.com/elestio/ws-screenshot
| https://github.com/elestio/nebula-rest-api
|
| We are also going to publish our light live monitoring system
| (backend and agent) based on websockets
|
| More to come :)
| jitix wrote:
| You guys should probably add explicit (and imo restrictive)
| licenses to your open source repos. You don't want AWS or
| other providers to copy your code and offer this as part of
| their own offerings.
|
| Great job btw! Maintenance and support is one of the major
| issues preventing wider adoption of open source software.
| tempnow987 wrote:
| I wouldn't worry about open sourcing, I'd be more excited to
| see existing open source easier to use deploy and start
| generating a revenue stream for open source.
|
| I can't wait to check your setup out.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| this is also generating revenue by profiling and tracking
| individuals and use patterns, for interested parties who have
| budget?
| kobie12 wrote:
| Look like a wonderful project. I will check it out for sure!
| NooZ wrote:
| ...
| [deleted]
| ceesharp wrote:
| Looks nice. Great job. Can I deploy multiple services on the same
| instance?
| simplehuman wrote:
| For same instance, look into cloudron.io . That is not managed
| hosting though like this one is.
| js4ever wrote:
| Hey ceesharp, No, it's not possible for multiple reasons:
|
| 1) We want to avoid additional services having impacts on your
| main service, like one of the services, could use all the
| resources (cpu, ram, disk) and crash everything else.
|
| 2) We are offering several types of backups, including daily
| full VM snapshots, if you need to restore a VM snapshot this
| will impact all the software on the VM
|
| 3) Price overhead of having a single service per VM is
| acceptable for fully managed services, where ensuring the
| quality of service is worth the few more bucks to guarantee
| that.
|
| 4) We do provide root SSH access to the VM, so you are free to
| run some additional stuff, but we do management only on the
| software we support and the part we auto-deploy
| ceesharp wrote:
| Hey, thanks for the detailed answer.
| ccleve wrote:
| For services like this, I'm always suspicious about pricing. I
| see an hourly rate, but it's hard for me to figure out how much
| it's costing me to have you manage this instead of me. As a
| result, I rarely buy software at an hourly rate even though it
| might make economic sense to do so.
|
| Here's a suggestion: instead of quoting your own rate, instead
| say "we charge X% over and above our hourly cost for AWS, Digital
| Ocean, etc." That kind of price transparency would go a long way
| for me.
|
| I also wouldn't have to spend hours trying to figure out what
| instances you use, the hourly rate, what you're charging, am I
| getting ripped off, and redo the whole process every six months.
| js4ever wrote:
| Hey ccleve We do have the all-inclusive pricing, but we also
| offer a BringYourOwnVM plan where you pay yourself for the VM
| with your cloud provider and you pay to us only management
| fees.
|
| Management fees are based on the VM size you connect, we charge
| $5 per CPU + $2.5 per GB RAM + 0.25 per 10GB/disk. This is a
| monthly estimation but this is also billed per hour without any
| commitment.
|
| Let's take an example, if you have a VM with 1 CPU/1GB RAM/20GB
| disk, total per month for the management fees are 5+2.5+0.5 =
| $8 per month.
|
| And for that price you get automated OS & Software updates,
| alerts & monitoring, global private networking, automated
| remote backups with versioning in another DC, Migration
| capabilities and few other things.
| vasco wrote:
| It would be good to split out the base costs from the
| elest.io cost in the pricing page. There's no point in
| forcing the user to calculate this.
|
| For example for the micro option in digital ocean, the
| barebones droplet is $6/month. Your price is $16/month. If
| you showed this, I'd know I'm paying you $10 for the ease of
| use. If you don't show this, I have to calculate it. Unless
| your plans would be to offer your own hosting down the line -
| where it would make sense to have only a lump total cost, I
| don't see the advantage in keeping it hidden (specially since
| you're clearly open about showing how you're charging per
| CPU/RAM/disk here in the comments).
|
| Cool product!
| ctvo wrote:
| > It would be good to split out the base costs from the
| elest.io cost in the pricing page. There's no point in
| forcing the user to calculate this.
|
| What makes you think these folks pay full price for a VM
| with their partners? What value do you get out of it now
| knowing that? It's similar to asking any business to
| disclose to you their costs.
|
| I would disregard this and keep your pricing as is. If
| users find value in the CPU / RAM + service at price point
| X, great.
| pachico wrote:
| Congratulations and good luck! I really like the service.
|
| However, as someone who relies a lot on Hetzner and AWS, it would
| be hard to justify a X10 increase in cost. I run my ClickHouse
| clusters in ax101 servers in Hetzner for roughly 110EUR/month
| while similar specs seem to cost 1226 USD/month.
|
| Trust me, I'd like to externalise it but not at this cost :)
| js4ever wrote:
| Hey Pachico, Thanks a lot for your kind words :) Since you are
| able to deploy, secure, backup, and update/upgrade your os &
| software by yourself on a dedicated server, you are probably
| not our main target, or at least not for that extreme use case.
|
| But considering a smaller instance, does it make sense to do
| everything by yourself instead of paying $10 per month?
|
| Same question can be asked to businesses with less technical
| skills than you, how much are they ready to pay for this kind
| of fully managed services. AWS RDS for example is pretty
| expensive, with us you can have a multi-master MySQL 8 cluster
| for $20
| pachico wrote:
| Thanks for your interest on my use cases.
|
| It definitely wouldn't make sense to do the work you can
| outsource for 10 or even 100 euros a month and your example
| for MySQL 8 is indeed very good. (I run many RDS instances
| too so I'm familiar with the product and its price.)
|
| However, I would like you to consider people like me a
| potential target too for top-spec use cases. Would I be
| willing to consider to pay x3 times rather than x10? Maybe!
| Probably at the cost 1-3 year commitment, as AWS, I would.
| Who knows?
| js4ever wrote:
| Absolutely! It's something I'll discuss with the team.
| Thanks for raising it :)
| pachico wrote:
| And something else, for someone like me, one of the
| biggest PITAs are billing, signing up new providers,
| keeping track of expenses, etc. So, if I could just
| subscribe to your products via AWS marketplace it would
| be awesome!
|
| Usually big companies have a budget line and one of these
| is the cloud provider. They don't tend to scrutinize the
| bill, just the bottom line.
| js4ever wrote:
| Yes! This is also in our roadmap, the idea is to publish
| images of the softwares to the marketplaces (aws, azure,
| gcp) including the management fees. This way it will be
| deployable in a click from the marketplace and paid there
| on the existing cloud bill, but still fully managed and
| accessible through our dashboard.
| wdb wrote:
| Would be interesting if you would support PostHog too
| js4ever wrote:
| We are working on adding PostHog to our catalog ASAP :)
| pachico wrote:
| I keep looking at your proposal and as soon as you offer a
| commitment based price and a marketplace subscription I'll
| subscribe to 3-4 of your services.
|
| Great work!
| nickphx wrote:
| The pricing is unclear.
| js4ever wrote:
| Hey Nickphx,
|
| Our pricing is a combination of provider/Region/VM size. The
| lowest price is $0.014/hour for 1 vCPU/2GB RAM/20GB NVME, if
| you consider 730hours per month this means the monthly price
| will be ~ $10.22.
|
| But you can delete the service at any time and this will stop
| the billing immediately. There are no commitments, we only
| charge hourly.
| ctvo wrote:
| My biggest reservation with your service is I don't know if I can
| trust you to manage something as important to my business as a
| database. This is great for prototyping though.
|
| What if you roll out an update and bring us down? What are your
| service agreements? Your historical status page? Any known
| incidents or outages?
|
| Edit:
|
| > Our in-house monitoring and alerting tools allow us to provide
| up to 99.99% uptime guarantees for enterprise deployments.
|
| What does _enterprise_ deployments mean, for example? There 's no
| enterprise pricing as far as I can tell.
| js4ever wrote:
| Hey ctvo, I totally understand you, my team is doing this for
| thousands of projects since a long time now, but indeed we just
| launched this new platform and are not yet well known. I
| believe trust is something that is acquired over time and
| collective experience. So this will come with time ... and
| reviews :)
|
| I planned to publish on our blog technical articles about how
| we handle things at elestio (processes, backups, security,
| networking, ...), this should help potential customers to know
| our pratices and how serious we are with handling security,
| customer data and backups.
|
| Our upgrade process will install new versions only for the
| selected major branch of your software, also we always do
| backups just before the upgrade so you are able to revert in a
| click. Finally you can also test upgrades on a clone of your
| service in few clicks, because we do hourly billing this test
| will only cost a cent or two ;)
|
| We are going to publish soon our service agreements (there is 3
| versions based on the support plan selected), Standard, Premium
| and Enterprise, more details are available on our pricing page
| about that: https://elest.io/pricing (Elestio support plans, at
| end of the page)
|
| About the status page, yes it's something that we will make
| public this week as well (it's based on uptime kuma, a great
| OSS from our catalog)
| macilacilove wrote:
| Nice! I want may project start cheap, and then scale
| 'automatically' as demand grows. My nightmare is to have an
| outage when my project is most popular. How do you deal with this
| if I deploy with you?
|
| Very promising project, (and seems very good fit for HN too) keep
| up the good work!
| js4ever wrote:
| Hey macilacilove, thanks :)
|
| from the service dashboard you can rescale vertically your
| service at any time manually in few clicks, we also have an api
| that allow to do that (and anything else that can be done from
| our frontend).
|
| Doing it on a single node imply some downtime to rescale the
| instance. We do have an auto-rescale feature in our roadmap for
| later this year with our clusters plans
| br4m wrote:
| This looks very nice actually! Great job. What kind of networking
| options/capabilities do you have to make stuff communicate over a
| private network (and then perhaps even connect from my machine
| over VPN or connect it to a site or something like that)
| js4ever wrote:
| Thanks :) We are using Nebula[1] to provide an encrypted
| private meshed network per project, so each project have it's
| own network range. We have automated that with a rest api and
| have published it as an open source project[2]
|
| It's really cool because you have out of the box a private
| network across all cloud providers and also works for on-
| premise deployments
|
| [1] https://github.com/slackhq/nebula
|
| [2] https://github.com/elestio/nebula-rest-api
| alaintno wrote:
| The solution looks cool, but why is there flash on your website?
| js4ever wrote:
| Hey alaintno, what do you mean by flash? there is a background
| svg for the globe animation in the background, maybe that is
| not rendering well on your device/browser?
| alaintno wrote:
| My bad, I was pranked by some extension in my browser -_-'
| Dystopian wrote:
| Really like the idea - think there's a super decent market for
| this kind of solution.
|
| Only thing I'd be aware about though is making sure you're on the
| right side of licensing for all the vendors you're using (/
| possibly who you've talked with to make sure the usage is ok).
|
| Off the top I saw N8N on the homepage who are a little more
| strict about their licensing for cloud vendors. There's also
| Airbyte and Redpanda who use Elastic and BSL licenses to try and
| deter cloud vendors from packaging some parts of their services.
| js4ever wrote:
| Dystopian thanks for raising this point :)
|
| Yes, indeed, we are monitoring this and of course we have
| removed all SSPL softwares from our catalog.
|
| Airbyte license is MIT, and deploying elasticsearch as part of
| another software should not be an issue (but I'm not a lawyer
| and might be wrong), from my understanding what's forbidden is
| to offer Elasticsearch as a SaaS service but using it as part
| of a solution like Airbyte is OK. We don't offer Elasticsearch
| but we offer Opensearch as an alternative.
|
| N8N seems to be under Apache 2 license with Commons Clause
| (https://github.com/n8n-io/n8n/blob/master/LICENSE.md), I do
| see now that there is a specific clause about hosting fees, we
| do charge for management fees and also hosting fees. I'll try
| to contact them directly and check if we can sign a contract
| with them, if not it will definitely be removed from our
| catalog.
|
| We really want to be on the good side of this, we want to
| create a sustainable stream of revenue to open-source authors,
| not killing them. So we will definitely comply with licenses
| and law.
| wass08 wrote:
| Looks nice! Is there a way to manage easily dev/staging/prod
| environments?
| js4ever wrote:
| Hey wass08, we do have a clone feature that will allow you to
| clone and resync the clones from origin. This can be used to
| quickly duplicate an instance and resynchronize the content
| from the source at any time.
| pachico wrote:
| Some extra notes about the product categories. Wouldn't you
| consider MeiliSearch and Neo4j database products instead of being
| items of the Development category?
| js4ever wrote:
| Indeed, they are definitely databases, it was a debate to sort
| them in Development category, reason was they are not well know
| as DB but they are well know to developers (at least some of
| them). But I'll rediscuss this with the team :)
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