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.

Cheap, easy, powerful: choose any two.

- Cheap and easy: embed into one executable file SQLite, a KV store, a queue, and everything else. Trivial to self-host: download and run! But you're severely limited in the number of concurrent users, ways to back up the databases, visibility / monitoring. If a desktop-class solution is good for you, wonderful, but be aware of the limitations.

- Cheap and powerful: All open-source, built from well-known parts, requires several containers to run, e.g. databases, queues, web servers / proxies, build tools, etc. You get all the power, can scale an tweak to your heart's content while self-hosting. If you're not afraid to tackle all this, wonderful, but be aware of the breadth of the technical chops you'll need.

- Easy and powerful: the cloud. AWS / Azure / DO will manage things for you, providing redundancy, scaling, and very simple setup. You may even have some say in tuning specific components (that is, buying a more expensive tier for them). Beautiful, but it will cost you. If the cost is less than the value you get, wonderful. Be aware that you'll store your data on someone else's computers though.

There's no known (to me) way to obtain all three qualities.

sqlite can scale to thousands of concurrent users.

Personally for me the issue with all these new project management platforms is that the target demographic is either: - they're so small they can't afford to self-host - they're big enough they can afford the pro plans of more established tools

Small companies can get by perfectly with the free/cheap plans of other tools, like Trello+Google Workspace. Heck if you're a one-man team with occasional collaborators free Trello + Google Workspace (~$6/mo) is enough.

A box to provision the Huly stack might come out at more per month...