British Software

Structura: Platform-agnostic operations framework for integrated software systems

Every operating system needs to manage long-running processes in the background. While supervisors do this, software systems need more than a simple config file — they need to follow attended installation and upgrade routines and require a more refined control (like careful phazing out of old services). Structura helps to design and run modular, process-oriented software (systemas) natively on the host OS by giving them coherent structure.

Structura allows to supplement software with interactive installers and perform patch-driven (as opposed to image-driven) upgrades; to design pluggable systems that support user extensions; to configure and orchestrate services in a cross-platform, supervisor-agnostic way (i.e., launchd or systemd are now only targets). Great for those traditionalist engineers and in-house administrators who need to manage a server, not a cloud.

Moderne: Pluggable PaSS to make self-hosting of web apps super-easy, without Docker

While it might seem that all of today's web deployment problems can be solved with Docker and cloud, there is a growing number of people who just want to run a reverse proxy (Nginx, Apache) on their server in the old-school way and connect it to apps on the same server. They are OK with installing a few system-wide dependencies by hand, but they need zero-downtime deploys, webhook-triggered automated releases, and a way to abstract defining proxy infra.

Moderne is a systema for Structura (see above) that helps to do just that. As an alternative to Dokku, which builds and releases Docker images, it doesn't jump on the containerisation band-wagon and solves the problem in a more classical way by giving each app a user and setting up permissions — since there are no other tenants who can escalate privileges on your own server, this is generally enough for a self-hosted PaSS with minimal complexity.