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.

Security

Critical PHP RCE (CVE-2026-109618): Updating on Elestio

If you run anything PHP on Elestio, here is the short version: two critical vulnerabilities in PHP itself were disclosed on 21 October, both scored CVSS 9.2, and both can lead to unauthenticated remote code execution. We are rebuilding every Elestio image that contains PHP. WordPress images are already

AI

Chrome DevTools MCP + Ubuntu Desktop: Watch Your Agent Work

Run your AI agent in a real Chrome on Ubuntu Desktop, with your extensions and logins, and watch it live so you can take over at 2FA or CAPTCHA.

Announcement

OVHcloud Is Now on Elestio: 35 Regions, 50% Off at Launch

OVHcloud is now a cloud provider on Elestio: 35 regions including 20 Local Zones, 400+ managed open-source services, and 50% off all OVH resources until January 1, 2027.

AI

Kestra vs Airflow: Which Should Your AI Agent Trigger?

Kestra 2.0 vs Airflow 3.3 for AI agents: built-in MCP server and opt-in tools vs a REST API you guard yourself. Auth, permissions, approvals and pricing compared.

AI

Maxun + MCP: Give Your AI Agent Scraping Robots

Record a Maxun scraping robot once, then let your AI agent replay it over MCP. Includes an 85-line Python MCP server with an allowlist, and why one Maxun instance is one trust zone.

Catalog Updates

Elestio Catalog Updates: 143 New Releases This Week (October 11-17, 2026)

One hundred and forty-three stable releases shipped across 48 services in the Elestio catalog between October 11 and October 17. Two of this week's updates can't be rolled back without a backup: Supabase's Storage migrations and InfluxDB 3.12's catalog only

Self-Hosted Weekly: Week 42, 2026. GitLab CVSS 10, Drupal RCE, Mattermost 12

This was a patch-first week. GitLab fixed a CVSS 10 flaw that let unauthenticated users run code on the server, Drupal shipped a critical remote code execution fix, and Keycloak closed 18 CVEs in one release. Mattermost 12 landed with removals that can stop a server from starting, and

S3 Storage for AI Agents: Scoped Keys, Undo and Audit Log

Here's the scenario that keeps me careful: you give a research agent S3 credentials so it can save its reports. A week later, it decides to "clean up old files" and works through the whole bucket, including the customer exports your billing job writes there. Nobody

Infinidisk: Turn an S3 Bucket Into a Linux Disk

Every disk I've ever provisioned was the wrong size. Too small, and you're resizing a volume at 2 a.m. while Postgres complains about free space. Too big, and you're paying every month for 400 GB of nothing. And when the machine dies, the

Elestio Object Storage: S3 Buckets With No Egress Fees

Most Elestio customers I talk to have the same awkward line in their architecture diagram. The apps run on Elestio. The backups, uploads, media files and exports go to a bucket somewhere else, on a different bill, with a different set of keys, and an egress charge that shows up

PrestaShop MCP Server: Connect Claude to Your Store

It's Monday morning, a supplier just raised prices on 40 products, and every one of them has descriptions in French, English and Spanish. You know exactly what needs to change. You just don't want to spend two hours clicking through the PrestaShop back office to do

New Elestio Documentation: What's Inside and Where to Start

I'll admit something slightly embarrassing for someone who writes about Elestio every day: I used to find answers in our old docs by Googling them. The content was there, but it was spread across "books" and "chapters", and unless you already knew that the

Catalog Updates

Elestio Catalog Updates: 125 New Releases This Week (October 4-10, 2026)

One hundred and twenty-five stable releases shipped across 51 services in the Elestio catalog between October 4 and October 10. A lot of this week's security work fixed the same kind of bug: a permission check that didn't hold. Vault, Portainer, Appwrite and ToolJet all

Self-Hosted Weekly: Week 41, 2026. WordPress 7.1.3, Vaultwarden Fixes, Supabase Buys Turso

AI labs had a hand in four of the seven bugs fixed in this week's WordPress security release. Vaultwarden fixed seven advisories and changed how it reads client IPs behind a proxy. Supabase raised $150 million and bought Turso. Two LTS releases also arrived, Moodle 5.3 and

WooCommerce

WooCommerce + MCP: Give AI Agents Read-Only Store Access

It's Monday morning and you run a small WooCommerce shop. Before coffee you want to know three things: which orders are stuck in "processing", which products have sold out, and whether that customer who emailed on Saturday actually placed an order. That's fifteen minutes

Jitsi

Jibri + Whisper: Record Jitsi Calls With Local Transcripts

Every team I know wants the same thing out of meetings: a searchable transcript and a short summary, without anyone taking notes. The SaaS answer is a bot from a note-taking startup that joins your call and ships the audio to someone else's servers. That's

CI/CD

Bitbucket + Elestio: Auto-Deploy Your Repo on Every Push

If your team lives in Bitbucket, you know how deployment usually goes. Someone writes a bitbucket-pipelines.yml that builds the app, then SSHes into a server and runs a deploy script that only one person fully understands. It works until that person goes on vacation, the SSH key gets

Apache NiFi

Apache NiFi Data Provenance: Trace RAG Chunks to the Source

Someone on the support team pastes a screenshot into Slack. The company chatbot told a customer the refund window is 60 days. It's 30, and it has been 30 since March. The question lands on your desk: which document did that answer come from, and why is it

Catalog Updates

Elestio Catalog Updates: 113 New Releases This Week (September 27 - October 3, 2026)

One hundred and thirteen stable releases shipped across 47 services in the Elestio catalog between September 27 and October 3. Most of the urgent work this week is in identity: Keycloak fixed 14 CVEs in one patch release, and Zitadel closed two account takeover bugs. If a project shipped one

Self-Hosted Weekly

Self-Hosted Weekly: Week 40, 2026. Gitea 28, Keycloak Agent Tokens, Weekly Ubuntu Kernels

Week 40: Gitea 28 routes Git traffic through an egress proxy, Keycloak 26.8 adds delegated tokens for AI agents, Ubuntu goes to weekly kernels.

MariaDB

Elestio Joins the MariaDB Foundation as a Silver Sponsor

Elestio is now a MariaDB Foundation Silver Sponsor. What the Foundation does, why we back it, and how to upgrade off end-of-life MariaDB 10.6.

HAProxy

HAProxy Rate Limiting for AI Crawlers and Runaway Agents

Rate-limit AI crawlers, runaway agents and API keys with HAProxy stick tables. A tested config with tarpits, 429s and Retry-After headers.

AI

Apache Answer + MCP: Give AI Agents Your Team's Answers

Your coding agent is confident. It will tell you exactly how your team deploys to staging, which Postgres flags you use, and why the billing service retries three times. It will be wrong about all three, because the real answers live in your team's heads and in a

Catalog Updates

Elestio Catalog Updates: 106 New Releases This Week (September 20-26, 2026)

One hundred and six stable releases shipped across 47 services in the Elestio catalog between September 20 and 26. The headline is security again: GitLab pushed a critical patch for two flaws in its regular expression engine, and WordPress 7.1.2 was being exploited the day it came out.

Self-Hosted Weekly

Self-Hosted Weekly: Week 39, 2026. WordPress Exploited, Portainer CE Frozen, Ubuntu Escape

WordPress shipped two security releases in five days, and attackers were probing the second fix within hours. Ubuntu has a container escape with a public exploit and no kernel patch. Portainer confirmed that its free edition stops at 2.x. Here's what mattered this week. 1. WordPress patches