HACKER Q&A
📣 Ryner001

Is bring your own cloud considered self-hosting?


Hello,

We are creating a b2b SaaS app that will need access to your codebase. As you might imagine not all companies are happy with sharing their codebases with third parties.

I was researching self-hosting options but honestly, all of them seem kind of complicated. So decided to borrow the wisdom of the HN crowd.

Here are a few options I came up with:

1) Use docker-compose -> This is probably a no-go. We are e2e testing app running headless Chrome with codebase access. So you would need to give us quite a huge VM.

2) Packaged Kubernetes - This could work but we would need to run everything including the database inside the k8 cluster. And figure out a way to somehow package it including all of the operators etc

3) Bring your own cloud - For a small startup like ours (3 people) this seems like the most realistic option. You will give us a GCP project and we will point our terraform there. In a few minutes, you should have your deployment ready.

I should also mention that I know for HIPAA and very security-conscious companies cloud approach is a no-go. But we would first target smaller startups (20-100 engineers).

For those who work in such environments would you be ok with that?

Bonus question: Or would you share your codebase with a SaaS app that has SOC2 type II compliance?


  👤 kgdiem Accepted Answer ✓
If a customer has such stringent requirements, can’t you offer 2 & 3 then use the contract approval / signing period to get ready? Potentially even having the customer fund #2?

If you already have terraform it should be low-ish effort to do #3 as it is.