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Show HN: Elestio – Managed platform for over 150 open-source software stacks
108 points by js4ever on Feb 23, 2022 | hide | past | favorite | 51 comments
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



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.


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 ;)


Ya. I don't think anyone would want to provide their social profiles. You should just eat up the cost of risk score.


I heard you, I will discuss this with the team and we will get this removed soon


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.


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.


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.


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.


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!


> 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.


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 110€/month while similar specs seem to cost 1226 USD/month.

Trust me, I'd like to externalise it but not at this cost :)


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


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?


Absolutely! It's something I'll discuss with the team. Thanks for raising it :)


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.


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.


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.


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)


Congratulations on the launch Joseph! I've talked to Joseph about this project and gotten a sneak peak and it's super impressive what he's built.

The list of apps offered is impressive and the service is expansive and gives back to F/OSS. Excited to see elestio succeed in the future.

For people who want to use F/OSS software but not necessarily to host it themselves and have to worry about updates/etc, elestio is perfect


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)


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


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.


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!


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!


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


Looks nice! Is there a way to manage easily dev/staging/prod environments?


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.


A project that I really like. I will follow it very closely, and I will use it for sure, for my next developments


Looks nice. Great job. Can I deploy multiple services on the same instance?


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


Hey, thanks for the detailed answer.


For same instance, look into cloudron.io . That is not managed hosting though like this one is.


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.


Some extra notes about the product categories. Wouldn't you consider MeiliSearch and Neo4j database products instead of being items of the Development category?


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 :)


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.


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...


Look like a wonderful project. I will check it out for sure!


The pricing is unclear.


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.


Would be interesting if you would support PostHog too


We are working on adding PostHog to our catalog ASAP :)


very cool, but why isn't this platform open-source?


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 :)


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.


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.


this is also generating revenue by profiling and tracking individuals and use patterns, for interested parties who have budget?


The solution looks cool, but why is there flash on your website?


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?


My bad, I was pranked by some extension in my browser -_-'


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