Discussion

msteffen: IIUC this kind of thing is usually called “managed deployment.” Minio used to have a slick implementation of this, and I think databricks does as well. Usually it’s less “execute arbitrary commands on customer hosts,” and more “send metrics and logs to shared repository and send RPCs to customer deployment”

cassianoleal: RCE into my environment? No, thanks.

alongub: It's not RCE. The commands are predefined RPCs written into the deployed code. Customers can review and approve them. Trust between the vendor and the customer is still required and Alien doesn't make it unnecessary.

antonvs: I worked for a few years on an on-premise deployment of a system that was otherwise SaaS. Many enterprise customers simply won’t allow something like this - particularly big financials, aviation, healthcare etc.Realistically, the game ends up being - see what you can get away with until someone notices. Given that, you might want to rename the product to something more boring than “Alien”.