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?
> 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.
I also used to work with on-premise installs of Kubernetes and their “security” postures prevented any in-bound access. It was a painful process of requesting access, getting on a zoom call and then controlling their screen via a Windows client and putty. It’s was beyond painful and frustrating. I tried to pitch using a tool like Twingate which doesn’t open any inbound ports, can be locked down very tight using SSO, 2fa, access control rules, and IP limiting but to no avail. They were stuck in their Windows based IT mentally.
> 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.
This is fundamentally a data modeling problem. Currently computer telemetry data are just little bags of utf-8 bytes, or at best something like list<map<bytes, bytes>>. IMO this needs to change from the ground up. Logging libraries should emit structured data, conforming to a user supplied schema. Not some open-ended schema that tries to be everything to everyone. Then it's easy to solve both problems--each field is a typed column which can be compressed optimally, and marking a field as "safe" is something encoded in its type. So upon export, only the safe fields make it off the box, or out of the VPC, or whatever--note you can have a richer ACL structure than just "safe yes/no".
I applaud the industry for trying so hard for so long to make everything backwards compatible with the unstructured bytes base case, but I'm not sure that's ever really been the right north star.
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.
same, I think there are a few folks who are starting to see the feasibility and the desirability in hosting their own solutions. I have been working on an idea to solve this, called minima host[0].
It is intended to be simple:
- with the power of a mac mini, you can host (almost) anything
- pay for the mini, it is your machine to do with as you please (we will host it for you)
- if you decide you no longer need hosting, we will mail you back the machine that rightfully belongs to you
if anyone is interested in becoming a partner, shoot me a message, felipe@ind3x.games
Right, and that's when you do control the environment. Now imagine debugging that when it's your customer's infra, you have no access, and you're relying on them to copy-paste logs on a Zoom call.
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”
It's heavily inspired by Databricks' deployment model. And you're right that it's not "execute arbitrary commands". Commands are predefined functions in the deployed code that the developer defines upfront and customers can review.
The metrics/logs part is also core to Alien... telemetry flows back to the vendor's control plane so you actually have visibility into what's running.
It's not RCE. The commands are predefined RPCs written into the deployed code. Customers can review and approve them. Trust between the vendor and the customer is still required and Alien doesn't make it unnecessary.
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”.
In practice, unmanaged self-hosting is often less secure, because you end up with outdated versions, unpatched vulnerabilities, and no one responsible for keeping things healthy.
More and more enterprise CISOs are starting to understand this.
The model here is closer to what companies like Databricks already do inside highly regulated environments. It's not new... it's just becoming more structured and accessible to smaller vendors.
Both are real risks. But supply chain attacks exist whether you self-host or not... you're still running the vendor's code either way. The question is whether you also want that code to stay up to date and properly managed, or drift silently.
I agree that keeping things up to date is a good practice, and it would be nice if enterprise CISOs would get on board with that. One challenge we've seen is that other aspects of the business don't want things to be updated automatically, in the same way a fully-managed SaaS would be. This is especially true if the product sits in a revenue generation stream. We deal with "customer XYZ is going to update to version 23 next Tuesday at 6pm eastern" all the time.
This is true even with fully-managed SaaS though. There are always users who don't want the new UI, the changed workflow, the moved button. But the update mechanism isn't really the problem IMO, feature flags and gradual rollouts solve this much better than version pinning
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?
> 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.
> Although unfortunately, we can't maintain _any_ connection back to our servers. Pull or push, doesn't matter.
We're working on something for this! Stay tuned.
I also used to work with on-premise installs of Kubernetes and their “security” postures prevented any in-bound access. It was a painful process of requesting access, getting on a zoom call and then controlling their screen via a Windows client and putty. It’s was beyond painful and frustrating. I tried to pitch using a tool like Twingate which doesn’t open any inbound ports, can be locked down very tight using SSO, 2fa, access control rules, and IP limiting but to no avail. They were stuck in their Windows based IT mentally.
At least they didn't ask you to TeamViewer into a Windows Server 2012 box and open Event Viewer..
> 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.
This is fundamentally a data modeling problem. Currently computer telemetry data are just little bags of utf-8 bytes, or at best something like list<map<bytes, bytes>>. IMO this needs to change from the ground up. Logging libraries should emit structured data, conforming to a user supplied schema. Not some open-ended schema that tries to be everything to everyone. Then it's easy to solve both problems--each field is a typed column which can be compressed optimally, and marking a field as "safe" is something encoded in its type. So upon export, only the safe fields make it off the box, or out of the VPC, or whatever--note you can have a richer ACL structure than just "safe yes/no".
I applaud the industry for trying so hard for so long to make everything backwards compatible with the unstructured bytes base case, but I'm not sure that's ever really been the right north star.
The problem with grand solutions is that they require broad coordination.
And they often devolve back into a modified-but-equivalent version of the previous problem. :(
Stream-of-bytes is really really difficult to escape. Many have tried.
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?
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.
> Would you support simpler deployment targets, like on premises VMs etc?
https://github.com/alienplatform/alien/blob/main/crates/alie... :)
Yep, I work for small companies and already have a sync server that wish to manage centrally for more than just updates
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/
same, I think there are a few folks who are starting to see the feasibility and the desirability in hosting their own solutions. I have been working on an idea to solve this, called minima host[0].
It is intended to be simple: - with the power of a mac mini, you can host (almost) anything - pay for the mini, it is your machine to do with as you please (we will host it for you) - if you decide you no longer need hosting, we will mail you back the machine that rightfully belongs to you
if anyone is interested in becoming a partner, shoot me a message, felipe@ind3x.games
- [0] https://www.minimahost.com/
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.
Right, and that's when you do control the environment. Now imagine debugging that when it's your customer's infra, you have no access, and you're relying on them to copy-paste logs on a Zoom call.
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”
It's heavily inspired by Databricks' deployment model. And you're right that it's not "execute arbitrary commands". Commands are predefined functions in the deployed code that the developer defines upfront and customers can review.
The metrics/logs part is also core to Alien... telemetry flows back to the vendor's control plane so you actually have visibility into what's running.
RCE into my environment? No, thanks.
It's not RCE. The commands are predefined RPCs written into the deployed code. Customers can review and approve them. Trust between the vendor and the customer is still required and Alien doesn't make it unnecessary.
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”.
In practice, unmanaged self-hosting is often less secure, because you end up with outdated versions, unpatched vulnerabilities, and no one responsible for keeping things healthy.
More and more enterprise CISOs are starting to understand this.
The model here is closer to what companies like Databricks already do inside highly regulated environments. It's not new... it's just becoming more structured and accessible to smaller vendors.
I don't agree, I see supply chains attacks as a bigger risk than outdated systems exposed only in the lan.
Both are real risks. But supply chain attacks exist whether you self-host or not... you're still running the vendor's code either way. The question is whether you also want that code to stay up to date and properly managed, or drift silently.
I agree that keeping things up to date is a good practice, and it would be nice if enterprise CISOs would get on board with that. One challenge we've seen is that other aspects of the business don't want things to be updated automatically, in the same way a fully-managed SaaS would be. This is especially true if the product sits in a revenue generation stream. We deal with "customer XYZ is going to update to version 23 next Tuesday at 6pm eastern" all the time.
This is true even with fully-managed SaaS though. There are always users who don't want the new UI, the changed workflow, the moved button. But the update mechanism isn't really the problem IMO, feature flags and gradual rollouts solve this much better than version pinning
agreed, this architecture is a non-starter for many enterprise orgs