Michael Soto

I'm a senior content strategist & technical writer working for Elest.io. I turn complex self-hosted solutions into clear, actionable guides. 7 years crafting developer content. Coffee-fueled, deadline-ready, obsessed with finding the right words.

Self-Hosted Weekly: Week 11, 2026. Dify Raises $30M, Rust Is Stable in the Linux Kernel, and FOSS Gets an Endowment

Look, it's been one of those weeks where the open-source ecosystem flexed in every direction at once. Dify closed a $30M round. Rust in the Linux kernel isn't experimental anymore. And someone finally came up with a funding model for FOSS that doesn't involve

Valkey vs Redis vs KeyDB: Which In-Memory Store After the License Change?

Look, if you've been in the Redis ecosystem for any length of time, the last two years have felt like a soap opera. License changes, community forks, corporate drama — the whole deal. And now you're staring at three options that all look suspiciously similar: Valkey, Redis,

Qdrant vs Weaviate vs Milvus: Which Vector Database for Your RAG Pipeline?

You've decided your AI app needs a vector database. Great. Now you're staring at three open-source options — Qdrant, Weaviate, and Milvus — and they all claim to be the fastest, most scalable, most production-ready choice. I've spent the last few months testing all three, and

meilisearch

Meilisearch vs Typesense vs Algolia: Which Search Engine Fits Your Stack?

You need search. Not "maybe eventually" search — real, typo-tolerant, sub-50ms, search-as-you-type search. The kind where your users start typing "runnng shoes" and instantly see running shoes. The question is: which engine do you pick? Meilisearch, Typesense, and Algolia are the three names that keep coming up.

paperless-ngx

Paperless-ngx on Elestio: Automating Document Ingestion, OCR Processing, and Smart Tagging

Paperless-ngx can ingest your documents. You already knew that. But most people stop at "drop PDF in folder, let OCR do its thing" and never touch the automation engine sitting right underneath. That's a mistake. The workflow system, matching algorithms, and storage path templates can turn

open-webui

Open WebUI Just Gave Your AI a Real Computer

Most AI chat interfaces let you talk to a model. Open WebUI lets you hand it a terminal and say "figure it out." That's not hyperbole. With the Open Terminal feature, your LLM can install packages, run scripts in any language, manage files, and spin up

metabase

Your Team Doesn't Need Tableau: How Metabase Turns Any Database Into a Dashboard Anyone Can Use

Tableau charges $75 per user per month. Looker averages $150,000 per year. Power BI just raised its prices by 40%. Meanwhile, over 4,200 companies are running Metabase, an open-source analytics tool that does 80% of what those platforms do, and it costs nothing in license fees. If your

mautic

Mautic on Elestio: Building Automated Email Campaigns, Lead Scoring, and Multi-Channel Workflows

HubSpot charges $890/month for their Professional tier with 10,000 contacts. Mautic gives you every feature, unlimited contacts, and full data ownership for the cost of a server. If you've been putting off self-hosting your marketing automation, this is the guide that gets you from zero to

open-source

OpenClaw Explained: How the Fastest-Growing Open-Source Project Became a Self-Hosted AI Agent for Everyone

You've probably heard the name by now. OpenClaw went from zero to 250,000 GitHub stars in roughly 60 days, surpassing React as the most-starred software project on the platform. React took over a decade to get there. OpenClaw did it before most people figured out what it

Self-Hosted Weekly

Self-Hosted Weekly: Week 10, 2026. NGINX Ingress Is Gone, the Pentagon Goes Open Source, and AI Code Gets Banned Again

Welcome back to Self-Hosted Weekly, your Friday roundup of everything that matters in the open-source and self-hosting world. This week: a major Kubernetes retirement finally hits, the Pentagon goes open source, and the AI-generated code debate escalates again. 1. NGINX Ingress Is Officially Dead The March 2026 retirement deadline for

Azure

Elestio Now Supports Custom Azure VNet and Subnet Selection

If you've ever deployed infrastructure on Azure and thought "I really wish I could keep everything inside my own network," you're not alone. One of the most requested features from our Azure users just landed: you can now select your own Resource Group, Virtual

SCALE 23x Takeaways: What North America's Biggest Open-Source Conference Tells Us About Self-Hosting in 2026

If you want to understand where self-hosting is headed, skip the analyst reports. Go to Pasadena. SCALE 23x, North America's largest community-run open-source conference, is happening right now (March 5-8, 2026) at the Pasadena Convention Center. Over 3,500 attendees, 120+ exhibitors, and 16 co-located events are packed

Gitea vs GitLab: Why Small Teams Are Choosing a 170MB Binary Over a 4GB Monolith

GitLab is a fantastic platform. It's also a 4GB monolith that wants 8-16GB of RAM just to sit there and wait for your five-person team to push code. For a lot of teams, that's like renting a stadium to play pickup basketball. Gitea is the opposite

ClickHouse vs TimescaleDB vs InfluxDB: Picking the Right Analytics Database for Your Self-Hosted Stack

Not all data moves the same way. Some arrives in steady streams from IoT sensors. Some lands in massive batches from event pipelines. Some sits quietly for months until someone needs a year-over-year comparison on a Tuesday afternoon. The database you pick for analytics determines how painful that Tuesday afternoon

Why Every Growing Brand Needs a Community Forum (And How Discourse Makes It Easy)

Your community is already talking about you. The question is whether those conversations are happening in a place you own, or scattered across Reddit threads, Discord servers, and Slack channels you'll never find again. For growing brands, this is more than a branding problem. It's a

DevOps

Promtail Is Dead: How to Migrate Your Log Pipeline to Grafana Alloy Before It Breaks

Promtail hit end-of-life on March 2, 2026. If you're still running it, your log pipeline is now officially unsupported. No more security patches, no more bug fixes, no more updates. Grafana merged Promtail's code into Alloy over a year ago, and the Loki Helm chart is

Self-Hosted Weekly

Self-Hosted Weekly: Week 9, 2026. MinIO Is Dead, the Open Source Endowment Launches, and AI Slop Hits Maintainers

It's been a big week in the self-hosted world. MinIO, one of the most relied-upon S3-compatible storage solutions, got officially archived. A new nonprofit wants to throw $100M at open source funding. And AI-generated contributions are pushing maintainers to the breaking point. Here are the 8 stories you

Supabase on Elestio: Self-Host Your Backend with Auth, Realtime Subscriptions, and Edge Functions

Firebase changed the game for backend development. Then it changed its pricing, and suddenly that "free tier" wasn't looking so free anymore. If you've ever watched your Firebase bill climb while your app barely scaled, you already know why developers are looking for alternatives.

Self-Hosting

The Great SaaS Exodus: Why Companies Are Moving Entire Stacks to Self-Hosted in 2026

Something satisfying happened this year. A German state ditched Microsoft, a nonprofit told Slack to take a hike, and French schools banned Google Workspace. These aren't isolated incidents. They're symptoms of the same disease, and companies everywhere are finally reaching for the cure. The SaaS model

Airflow

Airflow 3 on Elestio: Build Production Data Pipelines with TaskFlow API, Dynamic Task Mapping, and Deferrable Operators

Every data team I've talked to in the past year has the same story: they started with cron jobs, graduated to a janky Python script runner, and eventually hit a wall when pipeline number forty-seven failed silently at 3 AM. That's the moment most teams discover

Platform Engineering

The 2026 Platform Engineering Stack: What Open-Source Tools Companies Are Actually Running

Every engineering team eventually hits the same wall. You've got five SaaS subscriptions for CI/CD, three more for monitoring, a separate secrets manager, and somehow you're still SSHing into production to check logs. Sound familiar? The platform engineering movement isn't about adding more

Zammad

Zammad Ticket Automation: Building Custom Triggers, Webhooks, and Macros for Your Support Workflow

Every support team hits the same wall. Tickets pile up, agents spend half their day routing emails to the right queue, and somehow a high-priority issue from your biggest client sits untouched for six hours because nobody saw it. You don't need more agents. You need Zammad'

Dify

Dify on Elestio: Build Custom AI Agents with RAG, Workflows, and Tool Calling

You know what's funny about the AI agent hype? Everyone's building agents that can write code, analyze data, and draft emails. But ask them where their RAG pipeline runs, who owns the data, or how much they're paying OpenAI per month, and you get

Elestio

Elestio CLI & Agent Skill: Let AI Agents Deploy and Manage Your Infrastructure

Two months ago, we started asking ourselves a simple question: what if your AI coding assistant could deploy infrastructure the same way it writes code? Not through a dashboard. Not by generating Terraform files you have to review and apply. Just... deploy it. Say "I need a PostgreSQL database&

Outline

Outline + Keycloak SSO: Build a Secure Team Wiki with Single Sign-On

I spent two days setting up Outline for my team's documentation. Beautiful wiki, real-time collaboration, Markdown support. Then someone asked: "How do we log in?" That's when I realized Outline doesn't have built-in authentication. No username/password form. Nothing. You need an