Huly – Open-source project management platform

Reading the deployment information, there's an interesting tension here with applications that target self-hosting.

Deploying this requires running 5 different open source servers (databases, proxies, etc), and 5 different services that form part of this suite. If I were self-hosting this in a company I now need to be an expert in lots of different systems and potentially how to scale them, back them up, etc. The trade-offs to be made here are very different to when architecting a typical SaaS backend, where this sort of architecture might be fine.

I've been going through this myself with a hobby project. I'm designing it for self-hosting, and it's a radically different way of working to what I'm used to (operating services just for my company). I've been using SQLite and local disk storage so that there's essentially just 2 components to operate and scale – application replicas, and shared disk storage (which is easy to backup too). I'd rather be using Postgres, I'd rather be using numerous other services, background queue processors, etc, but each of those components is something that my users would need to understand, and therefore something to be minimised far more strictly than if it were just me/one team.

Huly looks like a great product, but I'm not sure I'd want to self-host.

Seemingly unpopular opinion, but coming from more ops related background, I always appreciate configurable deployments. If I want to test-deploy the thing on my own workstation I hope the defaults will work, but in a corporate environment I may not only want, but actually require flexibility.

Infra, ops and dev intersect at different points in different orgs. Some may provide custom kubernetes operator and abstract the service away, some orgs may provide certain "managed" building blocks, e.g. postgres instance. Some will give you a VM and and iscsi volume. Some will allocate credits in cloud platform.

Having the ability to plug preexisting service into the deployment is an advantage in my book.

It's not an unpopular opinion, but as far as I can tell Huly is not a configurable deployment. It's a strict set of dependencies. If you can't run Mongo, Elastic, and a bunch of other bits, then you can't run it. The more pieces they add the more likely any one potential user can't run it.

The options are either to minimise the dependencies (the approach I advocated for in my parent comment), or to maximise the flexibility of those dependencies, like requiring a generic-SQL database rather than Mongo, requiring an S3 compatible object store rather than whatever they picked. This is however far more work.