reisr3

The OSS model for collaborating on code is broadly understood. I'm curious if anyone has been successful in deploying and hosting a SaaS app in an open-source way, using community or public user funding.

For example, many of us use Calendly. There are many for-profit Calendly alternatives. Could we band together and create an open-source, truly free Calendly alternative where users split hosting costs in a fair way? The cost for functionality would go down to pennies per user, since no one expects to make a profit. I don't necessarily want to take on the whole burden of self-hosting an open-source platform, but would be happy to pay for usage if those funds only go towards keeping the platform online.

Just curious if some such experiment has been successful, or perhaps why they fail.

I've been frustrated with the developer experience using AWS S3. The Node SDK is awful. Not sure if I'm missing something, but according to AWS versioning, it was last updated in 2006 - and it shows.

Are there better alternatives available for object storage? Specifically, with a nice modern SDK or library? This seems like an easy experience to improve upon!

My company needs a highly reliable way to report downtime to our users. We've been using statuspage.io. The problem is that it seems to be dependent on AWS. So when the bi-monthly AWS outage takes our application down, we're not able to effectively report to our users!

Can anyone recommend a better solution?

There are plenty of good resources for how to do domain-driven design, microservices, cloud functions, and event-driven architecture. I understand why these paradigms are useful for rapidly scaling an application. Queueing, the ability to adjust resources per service, and enabling separate teams to build their microservice differently.

However, they also add quite a bit of complexity. Using pub/sub breaks execution context, cloud functions are difficult to debug/test/develop locally, etc. I'm having trouble finding quality dissenting opinions online around this topic. Most resources I've found are geared towards how to implement these technologies properly.

In what scenarios would you NOT recommend event-driven architecture?

My extended family has several terabytes of family photos and videos from over the years. We've mostly digitized everything, but some segments are just sitting on external hard drives in closets - waiting to eventually break or become corrupted.

My current methodology for our immediate family is aligned with the common back up advice - one local copy, one off-site copy (at grandma's house,) and one in cloud storage. We're using Google Photos for cloud storage. The easy integration with Nest Hubs makes for nice digital picture frames around the family homes.

What is your system for backing up family photos and videos to stand the test of time? Is it adequate to put everything in cloud storage and forget about it? Do you reassess every couple years and adjust to the new landscape of storage services? Is it unavoidable that we'll be paying $100+/year forever for a [presumably increasing] few terabytes of cloud storage?

Is there a good solution for posterity? For example, once I die, and if my family were to become unable to pay the hosting bill, is there any way to guarantee these heirlooms remain intact and available?