Tau: Open-source PaaS – A self-hosted Vercel / Netlify / Cloudflare alternative

Tau’s ability to self host platforms could be a huge boon to regulated industries because it avoids sending data and exposing connections. Great idea, keep it up!

Right now as I understand it, if you want to connect Vercel securely to a database with more than a password, you need to “contact sales” about “enterprise” (no self service option for demos and MVPs)

Might be a tech issue but imho needing to contact sales about enterprise level deals just for basic security stuff is not the best move since it forces people to expose their stuff or wait around and pay a bunch of money.

Dunno about you guys but I don’t ever click “contact sales” I just go to something else where my dev work isn’t gated by salespeople (even if it’s significantly more complicated) and I say this as a big proponent of Vercel, I wish I could use it more, but expecting users to wait around for sales to invoice them just to have a secure database connection is a dealbreaker for my use case regardless of my opinions or preferences of liking their stuff.

Sources

[1] https://github.com/orgs/vercel/discussions/42

[2] https://github.com/orgs/vercel/discussions/7323

[3] https://archive.ph/fQwMz

There are some neat ideas here -- building a PAAS off of p2p technologies to enable network autodiscovery, automated load-balancing, distributed storage, Webassembly-native, etc.

Having put stuff through production though, I'm a bit skeptical about how well it works out in the wild, though I am interested in learning how well it does and what its failure modes are. If it works well-enough, it has the potential for democratizing production apps.

I'm not sure how they are going to make money with their enterprise offering though.

First coolify[1] and now Tau. More competition the better for users.

From the quick look it seems like coolify is more fully featured?

[1]: https://coolify.io/

I've been reading through the docs and skipping through the one recentish YouTube tutorial trying to make sense of what this actually is. While it seems like an impressive thing for what appears to be a one-man-project, the almost complete lack of documentation makes it feel like a bit of a hard no in the current state. There seems to be a history of it being heavily linked to Web3 things that also feels weird.

Some suggestions for this to be able to succeed:

- Documentation, documentation, documentation, the only place where I could that the three supported ways to write a serverless function are with Go, Rust and AssemblyScript is somewhere hidden in a tutorial. It all has to compile to WebAssembly so I guess that's the limiting factor.

- Examples?

- Using git as source of truth for the configuration/state of a system is cool. Please link to sample repos so I can see what a system with a website, some functions that touch DB and files, and the configuration etc looks like.

- How does the database part work? Client SDKs?

- There are lots of protocols with unclear names that are only briefly mentioned here but then seen in random places in configuration: https://tau.how/01-getting-started/01-local-cloud/#protocols

- The Concepts part of the documentation is buzzword soup, it's impossible to derive any meaning from it other than that the author dislikes Kubernetes and probably used some generative AI for the content.

- Roadmap, plans, versioning, plans on how Tau version upgrades should go, ...

Looks compelling, but the docs are extremely vague and full of fluff. The "Why One Binary" is hilariously bad. Almost feels like content to impress managers/recruiters.

https://tau.how/02-concepts/03-one-binary/#the-genesis-of-ta...

Isn't the entire point of vercel/netlify/cloudflare is that you *don't* have to self-host? The issue is the price of it, not the actual software.

Waking up to a 10k vercel bill is pretty common, especially when a DDoS goes undetected. That 10k bill is roughly $50 dedi from hetzner, but the problem with that is that you need a distributed system, for that you need something more advanced that tau, let's say kubernetes, then you need multi-site storage ok so ceph and then you realize you need a degree in openssh and bluestack to continue on and realize that the hassle from all of that and instead just hire a sysops employee that costs 10k a month and spend $1000+/month on hardware for geo-distribution.

Take this from personal experience. I've personally seen someone go k8s with very little experience and their general consensus was that they just want to go "managed" hosting instead.

Still better than 10k bill once your app becomes large enough, but it's simply not something devs that just want to get something out there want to bother with. In the end even with the insane hosting costs compared to the revenue they bring in is tiny. $10/month service user only racks in around $1 of api usage a month, heavily depends on the app though.

This is really neat! I'm working a message queue in go (drop-in replacement for SQS) and also thinking about autoscaling. I've been playing with raft vs using a central store (ie, postgres) to coordinate.

Can you tell me more about IPFS - I've never used it before. How has that been working, and can you tell me what you've observed when you have many nodes which need to coordinate?

Don't call this a Cloudflare alternative because it simply isn't.

very interesting... here is a comparison of the community and enterprise offering

https://taubyte.com/pricing/

who is actually behind this?

If it’s a single binary why is there an installer, and why does it need to be curl-piped to sh? Looking at the installer script, why does it create directories in the root dir, instead of /opt or /usr/local? Also, I couldn’t find the install script in the linked repo.

Would this be a good combo to combine with Hetzner server auctions, or just too much trouble ? or even with todays connections having a server at home ? any success stories ?

Is the advantage of this, that you only have to keep the one binary up to date, in contrast to e.g. a host with docker-compose and the containers therein?

I've been out of web dev for a few years, but my understanding of the appeal of serverless is that it is theoretically pay only for what you use. But if you're hosting Tau to do serverless via Tau, well, it's not really serverless anymore. You are now definitely paying for the server running the serverless infra.

Why would anyone target Tau serverless, then? What am I missing?

Am I wrong, or all this ends up doing is round-robin DNS, which is no good for a geographic CDN?

Wouldn't using talos be better than having to run this on custom managed ubuntu servers?

I love the verbiage. When I see a folder in the source named "dream", then files named "Universe" and "multiverse", it pulls me in :).

I also love the single binary in Go. That's on my todo list for a few things.

Well done!

how is this achieving scale-up and scale-to-zero ? from my (rudimentary) investigation only knative k8s had scale-to-zero implemented well enough.

and if you dont have scale-to-zero, you cant claim a vercel alternative.

What key features make Tau a compelling self-hosted PaaS alternative?

how does this compare to coolify and caprover already established and mature PaaS ? this is a welcome addition

Missing SHOW HN: ?

Self-hosted platform as a service?!

Isn't the whole point of platforms as a service (from the customer perspective) that you don't need to do the hassle of self hosting.

There are pros and cons to using an external service and to self hosting. And just throwing all these words at me together makes me feel like there isn't a coherent mental model of what this is trying to be, or if there is it isn't clearly communicated.

If this is some sort of CDN software or attempt at running Lambda-like code Snippets on your own distributed cluster that's cool. But a description of that would be nice.

The GitHub read me jump straight into how this is just a single binary and how deploying it is easy, but not what the hell it is. CloudFlare can do like a million things, which features from cloudflare is this competing with? I just really want to know what the pros and cons of this are compared to other ways of rolling my own servers or renting out someone else's platform?

What's with the vilification of kubernetes? 99% of this document (https://tau.how/99-Misc/kubernetes/01-k8s-cons/) boils down to "You have to understand what a pod, deployment, container, etc is" once you remove every line that discusses the cons of managing a cluster yourself, because nobody actually does that except extremely large orgs. All of these problems go away when you utilize a managed offering like DOKS, EKS, AKS or GKE.