Over the past few years, We’ve been rather we have leveraged our own “DIY Cloud Tools” — a collection of self-hosted tools that has replaced our SaaS subscriptions.
Self-hosting isn’t just about saving money. It’s about ownership, flexibility, and the freedom to define your own set of tools and how they would interact to cater to your needs.
Here’s a sneak peek at the self hosted tools We are using for many years now.
Grafana – Monitoring at a Glance
We are using Grafana for many years now. It’s a great observability platform. Almost since their launch, I am following as well as using it. It gives me again build your own dashboards that can help tracking tracking various building blocks, server health, uptime, and app performance from our product platform. This has been even suggested to our esteemed clients as well.
Strapi – Our GO-TO Content Hub
We have been working with NextJS based content platforms as well as websites a while now. For one of the clients, we were needed to work on content along with data driven application. Mainly the content like posts, images, blogs would be authored via separate teams. And rest was a data driven application. Strapi was leveraged with it;s self hosted option as our headless CMS. We not only used it to author and manage content but seamlessly integrated with our NextJS application. We have our Strapi running on Amazon Lightsail.
n8n – Automation Glue
Repetitive tasks become sometimes boring and can lead to errors and mistakes. That’s where n8n helps us. For certain tasks like Lead Generations, Gmail Integrations and even a newsletter generation workflows we leverage n8n.
LLMs – Your own instance of LLMs
Large Language Models have become essential for brainstorming, drafting ideas, and even helping with code. When it comes to your own enterprise data, instead of relying on external providers, we leverage our own instances of LLMs. This helps us in experimenting and prompt engineering as well keeping our data private.
It feels like having your own DIY AI lab on cloud.
Building such DIY cloud based tools not only serves the purpose going lean with budgets but also empowers you with your ownership and control of a data.
Self hosting such tools with their great Open Source Support is a great place to start.
And you know, the best part of it? You’ll learn a ton along the way.
Enjoy The Journey!!!