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.

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

Self-Hosting

The Self-Hosting Market Is Exploding: $85.2B Projected by 2034 (What's Driving the Surge)

Every year, some analyst publishes a report about a "booming market" and everyone nods politely before forgetting about it. But this one caught my attention: the self-hosting market is projected to hit $85.2 billion by 2034, up from $15.6 billion in 2024. That's an

self-hosted

Headscale: Run Your Own Tailscale Control Server (Zero Cloud Dependency)

Mesh VPNs changed everything. Instead of routing all traffic through a central server (and paying for that privilege), your devices connect directly to each other. Tailscale made this magic accessible to everyone with a slick UI and zero-config setup. But there's a catch. Your connection metadata still flows

AI

LiteLLM: One API Gateway to Control 100+ LLM Providers (Virtual Keys, Routing, and Guardrails)

Your team is burning through $50k/month in LLM API costs and you have no idea who's responsible. Sound familiar? Every developer has their own API key. Some are testing with GPT-4 when GPT-3.5 would suffice. Others forgot to remove debugging loops that hammer the API. And

self-hosted

EU Data Residency Laws Are Breaking Your SaaS Stack (Here's How to Fix It)

If you're running a European business on American SaaS tools, you might have a compliance problem you don't even know about yet. The regulatory landscape shifted dramatically in the past two years. GDPR enforcement got teeth. The EU-US Data Privacy Framework faces ongoing legal challenges. And

AI

Why Vector Databases Are the Missing Piece in Your Self-Hosted AI Stack

You've probably heard the buzz about running your own AI. Maybe you've already got Ollama humming along on a spare machine, serving up Llama or Mistral models. You ask it questions, it gives you answers. Magic. But here's the thing: those local LLMs have

ollama

175,000 Ollama Servers Are Wide Open Right Now (Is Yours One of Them?)

Researchers from SentinelOne and Censys just dropped a report that should make every self-hosted AI enthusiast nervous: 175,108 Ollama instances across 130 countries are sitting on the public internet with zero authentication. No password, no API key, no nothing. Nearly half of them have tool-calling capabilities enabled. Attackers are

stirling-pdf

Stirling PDF: The Open-Source Tool That Finally Lets You Delete Adobe Acrobat

Every business deals with PDFs. Contracts to sign, invoices to merge, reports to compress, scanned documents to make searchable. And for most teams, that means one of two things: paying Adobe $20/month per user, or uploading sensitive files to some random free website you found on Google. Neither option

object-storage

MinIO Is in Maintenance Mode: Your Guide to S3-Compatible Storage Alternatives

If you've been running MinIO in production, you probably felt a chill run down your spine in December 2025. The project quietly entered maintenance mode. No fanfare, no migration guide, just a commit to the README and a locked GitHub issue with 29 thumbs-down reactions. Here's