Europe Deserves Better Serverless Hosting. So I'm Building It.
3 min read
599 words
(Or at least I will try to build it)
There is no hosting provider like AWS. Period. Their services are so advancement that European Hosters are faaaaar away from providing similar managed solutions. With the current advancements in politics, the need for such services increasing instead of decreasing.
For example serverless hosting solutions like AWS ECS Fargate. Simply push your Container image and configure your deployment like environment variables or ports, and the rest is done for you. "It just works"(mostly). Integration with VPCs, managed databases etc. is outstanding. (I know that there are a gazillion ways of hosting a container on AWS, but ECS Fargate is what I worked with a lot).
There are a couple of European companies coming up with such services:
Each have their own way of implementing serverless hosting. In researching a European platform to host containers without the infrastructure management needed, I could not find anything that matched my current needs.
To better understand the reason why and also to learn I am currently sketching out a concept and possible MVP of something similar. One reason for this is to understand the hurdles involved to provide such services. It probably won't work out or will be way too much for a single person in a reasonable time, but maybe? Maybe this is possible in a small scale setup. Even if it ends in me having a personal serverless platform to host my own applications.
Anyway the journey is interesting and there will be a lot of things to learn. Packaging OCI images into "regular" filesystems, managing virtual networks or even getting logs from Firecracker into a central service, where the user (me?) is able to view them. I am sure that it won't feel like a super integrated solution like AWS provides, but we have to start somewhere with true European and sovereign solutions. I want to provide my two cents of knowledge to push further a more European network of hosting solutions.
One company that I really look up to is fly.io, they are pretty much my ideal hosting platform. (I mean I've applied there last year). The technology underneath bases on the same idea that I follow. Having lots of Firecracker VMs that are isolated and therefore more secure by default. Fortunately they write transparently about learnings and mistakes of their platform work. Sadly they are officially an American company and with the Cloud Act in place it is not true European hosting, when using server locations here 🥲.
There will be loooots of moving parts that need to be integrated and understood. I know that, and it will lead to headaches but I love this field. Containers, microVMs and hosting solutions in general. (Everyone has their own weird interests.) However maybe that will lead to a working proof of concept, this is the first goal. Having something to play with is the next step. Configuring a deployment in a frontend, publishing it in a Firecracker VM and making it available on the internet.
Or maybe this is all a fantasy and there's a real reason why European hosters do not provide a true serverless container solution in a way that I imagine. But I've had this idea pop up every now and then for the last 2 or 3 years. So now it's the time to follow it and try to build something. I will try to publish my steps and notes to document the journey.