ajayvk (u/ajayvk) - Readit News

ajayvk commented on Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (Nov 2025) · Posted by u/david927

ajayvk · 2 months ago

Building https://github.com/openrundev/openrun, a platform for declarative deployment of web apps.

OpenRun runs as a web server, which does GitOps driven app deployments. You can currently deploy apps on a standalone machine, on top of Docker/Podman. Working on adding support for deploying on top of Kubernetes. On Kubernetes, OpenRun will replace your build jobs (Jenkins/Actions etc), CD (ArgoCD etc) and IDP (Backstage etc). The same declarative config which works on a standalone machine will work on Kubernetes, with no YAML to maintain.

ajayvk commented on Replacing a $3000/mo Heroku bill with a $55/mo server disco.cloud/blog/how-idea... · Posted by u/jryio

odie5533 · 2 months ago

There's quite a few now. Coolify, Dokku, CapRover, Kamal.

ajayvk · 2 months ago

https://devpu.sh/ is another alternative, it has a nice UI built with Hypermedia (HTMX).

I am building https://github.com/openrundev/openrun/. Main difference is that OpenRun has a declarative interface, no need for manual CLI commands or UI operations to manage apps. Another difference is that OpenRun is implemented as a proxy, it does not depend on Traefik/Nginx etc. This allows OpenRun to implement features like scaling down to zero, RBAC access control for app access, audit logs etc.

Downside with OpenRun is that is does not plan to support deploying pre-packaged apps, no Docker compose support. Streamlit/Gradio/FastHTML/Shiny/NiceGUI apps for teams are the target use case. Coolify has the best support and catalog of pre-packaged apps.

ajayvk commented on Python as a Configuration Language Using Starlark openrun.dev/blog/starlark... · Posted by u/ajayvk

ajayvk · 2 months ago

This post looks at the experience with using Starlark as against YAML for deployment configuration.

Starlark can result in much more concise and flexible config. It does require extra work on the part of the developers who are writing the code (to read the config), but it can make things easier for end users writing the config.

ajayvk commented on Python as a Configuration Language Using Starlark openrun.dev/blog/starlark... · Posted by u/ajayvk

ajayvk · 2 months ago

There has been lots of discussions about the issues with YAML and other config languages. This post looks at the experience with using Starlark as the configuration language for infrastructure deployment using OpenRun.

Starlark can result in much more concise and flexible config for end-users. It does require extra work on the part of the developers who are writing the code which reads the Starlark based config.

ajayvk commented on Scaling request logging with ClickHouse, Kafka, and Vector geocod.io/code-and-coordi... · Posted by u/mjwhansen

devmor · 2 months ago

There were a lot of simpler options that came to mind while reading through this, frankly.

But I imagine the writeup eschews myriad future concerns and does not entirely illustrate the pressure and stress of trying to solve such a high-scale problem.

Ultimately, going with a somewhat more complex solution that involves additional architecture but has been tried and tested by a 3rd party that you trust can sometimes be the more fitting end result. Assurance often weighs more than simplicity, I think.

ajayvk · 2 months ago

Yes, had similar questions. Wouldn't tuning the settings for the buffer table have helped avoid the TOO_MANY_LINKS error?

ajayvk commented on AWS Service Availability Updates aws.amazon.com/about-aws/... · Posted by u/dabinat

freshnode · 2 months ago

They should get real and include App Runner on this list.

So much promise as a Heroku alternative with all the AWS integrations but it's basically dead now. Not a peep from them on their public roadmap over at github.

We're having to go back to Fargate with all the operational overhead that entails.

ajayvk · 2 months ago

If you are fine with running lots of apps on one beefy machine, the project I am building https://github.com/openrundev/openrun provides a similar abstraction as App Runner and Cloud Run (automatically deploy web apps from source). It supports scaling down to zero, but does not yet scale an app beyond one container.

ajayvk commented on Ask HN: What are you working on? (October 2025) · Posted by u/david927

ajayvk · 2 months ago

I have been building OpenRun, a declarative web app deployment platform https://github.com/openrundev/openrun. It is an open source alternative to Google Cloud Run and AWS App Runner, running on your own hardware.

OpenRun allows defining your web app configuration in a declarative config using Starlark (which is like a subset of Python). Setting up a full GitOps workflow is just one command:

  openrun sync schedule --approve --promote github.com/openrundev/openrun/examples/utils.star

This will set up a scheduled sync, which will look for new apps in the config and create them. It will also apply any config updates on existing apps and reload apps with the latest source code. After this, no further CLI operations are required, all updates are done declaratively. For containerized apps, OpenRun will directly talk to Docker/Podman to manage the container build and startup. There are lots of tools which simplify web app deployment. Most of them use a UI driven approach or an imperative CLI approach. That makes it difficult to recreate an environment. Managing these tools when multiple people need to coordinate changes is also difficult.

Any repo which has a Dockerfile can be deployed directly. For frameworks like Streamlit/Gradio/FastHTML/Shiny/Reflex/Flask/FastAPI, OpenRun supports zero-config deployments, there is no need to even have a Dockerfile. Domain based deployment is supported for all apps. Path based deployment is also supported for most frameworks, which makes DNS routing and certificate management easier.

OpenRun currently runs on a single machine with an embedded SQLite database or on multiple machines with an external Postgres database. I plan to support OpenRun as a service on top of Kubernetes, to support auto-scaling. OpenRun implements its own web server, instead of using Traefik/Nginx. That makes it possible to implement features like scaling down to zero and RBAC. The goal with OpenRun is to support declarative deployment for web apps while removing the complexity of maintaining multiple YAML config files. See https://github.com/openrundev/openrun/blob/main/examples/uti... for an example config, each app is just one or two lines of config.

OpenRun makes it easy to set up OAuth/OIDC/SAML based auth, with RBAC. See https://openrun.dev/docs/use-cases/ for a couple of use cases examples: sharing apps with family and sharing across a team. Outside of managed services, I have found it difficult to implement this type of RBAC with any other open source solution.

ajayvk commented on Show HN: OpenRun - Deploy web apps declaratively github.com/openrundev/ope... · Posted by u/ajayvk

ajayvk · 2 months ago

Any repo which has a Dockerfile can be deployed directly. For frameworks like Streamlit/Gradio/FastHTML/Shiny/Reflex/Flask/FastAPI, OpenRun supports zero-config deployments, there is no need to even have a Dockerfile. Domain based deployment is supported for all apps. Path based deployment is also supported for most frameworks, which makes DNS routing and certificate management easier.