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.

Quickwit + S3: Sub-Second Log Search Without Elasticsearch

I got a cloud bill once where the log storage line was bigger than the compute line. Not the app servers, not the database. The logs. We were paying premium block-storage prices to keep three replicas of data nobody looked at until something broke. If you have ever run

Catalog Updates

Elestio Catalog Updates: 26 New Releases This Week (July 12-18, 2026)

Another busy week across the Elestio catalog. Twenty-six stable releases landed between July 12 and 18, with a heavy run of identity and database updates, a fresh Ghost, and a major Paperless-ngx beta on the horizon. Here's everything worth updating for, grouped by category. Security note

Self-Hosted Weekly

Self-Hosted Weekly: Week 29, 2026. SharePoint Zero-Day, Nextcloud Migration, KVM Escape

Some weeks the theme picks itself. This week it was trust: who you hand your infrastructure to, and what happens when that trust turns out to be misplaced. Microsoft shipped a SharePoint zero-day that was already being exploited, a German state walked away from SharePoint entirely in the same

AI

OpenHands: A Sandbox for Your Coding Agent, Not Your Laptop

Here's a question I kept dodging until it bit me: when your coding agent runs rm -rf, whose machine is it running on? For most of last year, the honest answer for me was "my laptop." I'd point Claude Code or the OpenHands agent

DevOps

Self-Host NATS: Lightweight Messaging for Your Apps and AI Agents

Every distributed system I've ever built started the same way: two services talking over HTTP. Then it's five services, each one hardcoding the others' URLs, and one restarts during a deploy while three callers time out. Suddenly you're bolting retry loops and circuit

DevOps

Self-Host Infisical: A Secrets Manager for Your Apps and Agents

Here's a confession: for years my idea of "secrets management" was a .env file that lived in three places, drifted out of sync in all of them, and occasionally got pasted into a Slack thread so a teammate could unblock themselves. Then someone rotates a database

DevOps

Self-Host Gotenberg: A PDF Rendering API for Your Apps and Agents

Sooner or later every app needs to spit out a PDF. An invoice, a monthly report, a signed contract, a receipt an AI agent just generated. And every time, you reach for the same cursed toolbox: bundle a headless Chrome into your container, or wrestle wkhtmltopdf, or npm-install Puppeteer

Catalog Updates

Elestio Catalog Updates: 12 New Releases This Week (July 5-11, 2026)

Another busy week across the catalog. Twelve services in the Elestio catalog shipped new versions between July 5 and July 11, and this batch leans heavily toward security hardening and observability. Keycloak added a preview SCIM API, SigNoz pushed a big dashboard overhaul, and Immich kept its rapid v3 cadence

Self-Hosted

Self-Hosted Weekly: Week 28, 2026. Ollama's $65M, Chatto Goes Open Source, Camel CVEs

Another week, another pile of releases, funding rounds, and CVEs to sort through. This week the money kept flowing into open-source AI, a genuinely nice self-hosted chat app dropped its source, and Apache Camel handed everyone a reason to patch on a Monday. Here are the eight stories

AI

Give Your AI Agent Private Web Search: Self-Host SearXNG

Here's a problem nobody warns you about until you hit it: the moment your AI agent needs to look something up on the web, you're suddenly on the hook for a search API. Google's Custom Search caps you at 100 free queries a day

AI

What Actually Happens When an AI Agent Calls an MCP Tool

Your agent "used a tool." You watched it check the weather, query a database, or open a file, and it felt like magic. It isn't. Underneath that one line in the transcript is a small, boring, completely knowable exchange of JSON messages. Once you've

Self-Hosting

You Spend More Time Managing Self-Hosted Tools Than Using Them?

You know the drill. You spin up n8n to automate a few workflows, Grafana to keep an eye on things, maybe Supabase for a side project's backend. It feels great for about a week. Then a CVE lands, a backup you assumed was running turns out not to

AI

Give Your AI Agent a Browser: Self-Host Browserless

Here's a problem you hit about five minutes into building anything with an AI agent: the model can reason all day, but it can't actually open a web page. It can't log into a dashboard, wait for the JavaScript to render, screenshot the result,

Catalog Updates

Elestio Catalog Updates: 9 New Releases This Week (June 29 - July 5, 2026)

A quieter week than the last, but a meaningful one. Immich shipped its long-awaited v3, Ollama made Gemma 4 dramatically faster on Apple Silicon, and a handful of developer platforms landed security hardening worth applying. Here's everything that shipped across the Elestio catalog from June 29 to

AI

Self-Host LiteLLM: One API Gateway for Every LLM

Here's a mess I got myself into last year. One service was calling OpenAI. Another used Anthropic. A batch job talked to a local Ollama box to save money. Each had its own SDK, its own auth, its own quirks. API keys were scattered across three .env files

Self-Hosted Weekly

Self-Hosted Weekly: Week 27, 2026. TrueNAS 26, Grafana RCE, Gemma 4

Another week, another reminder that "self-hosted" and "AI agents" are quietly becoming the same conversation. This week gave us a homelab NAS that keeps eating Proxmox's lunch, two security patches you should apply before the weekend, a fresh batch of open models you

DevOps

Elestio AI DevOps Now Runs in Your Browser (and Costs Less)

It's late, your site is throwing a 502, and you're staring at a terminal you'd rather not be staring at. You know the fix is probably five commands away. You also know that one wrong command at this hour is how a small outage

DevOps

Grafana + Loki: Set Up Centralized Logging on Elestio

Picture the 2 a.m. version of you. Something is down, you have five servers, and your "logging strategy" is SSH plus grep plus a lot of hope. You tail one box, then another, then lose track of which terminal is which. Meanwhile the actual error scrolled past

Self-Hosted

Self-Host Stirling-PDF: 50+ Private PDF Tools on Your Server

You need to merge two PDFs, or strip a password, or OCR a scanned contract. So you do what everyone does: you Google "merge PDF free," click the first result, and upload a document with your client's signature and bank details to a server you know

Catalog Updates

Elestio Catalog Updates: 9 New Releases This Week (June 22-28, 2026)

If last week was quiet, this one made up for it. Nine services in the Elestio catalog shipped releases between June 22 and 28, and the dominant theme was security: Grafana cleared a stack of CVEs, Meilisearch and Mastodon both pushed urgent patches, and Weaviate closed an SSRF hole. If

Self-Hosted Weekly

Self-Hosted Weekly: Week 26, 2026. n8n RCE, Ingress-Nginx Retired, KubeCon Goes Agent

Two remote-code-execution holes in tools you probably run, a Kubernetes mainstay officially put in the ground, and the whole industry deciding that agents need their own infrastructure. This was not a quiet week. If you only do one thing after reading this, patch n8n and Open WebUI. Then

AI

Less Dashboard, More Agent: Day-2 Ops with the Elestio MCP

I have a confession: I used to keep the Elestio dashboard pinned in a browser tab all day. Deploy something here, resize a database there, hunt through logs when a service started throwing 502s. It works. It is also a lot of clicking for things I could describe in one

Catalog Updates

Elestio Catalog Updates: 9 New Releases This Week (June 15-21, 2026)

After a busy run of major releases in early June, this week was quieter and more about hardening than headlines. Nine services in the Elestio catalog shipped updates between June 15 and 21, with a clear theme: security patches across team-chat tools, resilience fixes in automation, and steady progress

Self-Hosted Weekly

Self-Hosted Weekly: Week 25, 2026. Mastra npm Attack, Euro-Office Ships, Pangolin 1.19

Another week, another reminder that self-hosting is half about the software you run and half about the supply chain it rides in on. This week handed us a nasty npm compromise, a genuine European answer to Microsoft Office, a Pangolin release that quietly turns your browser into a remote

Formbricks

Formbricks vs LimeSurvey: Which Self-Hosted Survey Tool in 2026?

You want to run a survey without handing your respondents' answers to Typeform or Qualtrics, so you go looking for something self-hosted. Two open-source names come up again and again: Formbricks and LimeSurvey. On the surface they do the same thing, collect responses, but they are built