alt Hacker NewsShow HN: Alien – Self-hosting with remote management (written in Rust)
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!
Comments
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”
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”.
> 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.