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About

The Problem

Running production services requires repeatable deployments, TLS, firewalling, monitoring, secrets management, and a way to coordinate background work.
Teams often face a difficult choice:

  • Kubernetes — powerful but heavy for small clusters; sizable operational overhead.
  • Docker Compose — simple but locked to a single host and lacking production workflows.
  • Raw Docker Swarm — good primitives but few conventions or batteries included.

The gap is especially visible for small teams who want infrastructure that is:

  • Understandable end-to-end
  • Automatable
  • CI-friendly
  • Not beholden to cloud-specific control planes

The Idea

MiniPaaS provides a small set of open components that layer onto Docker Swarm:

  • CLI (minipaas-cli/): Orchestrates deployments, rollouts, routing, workers, jobs, cron, and secrets/configs — all from Compose files.
  • Ansible Role (minipaas-role/): Turns plain Linux hosts into secure Swarm nodes with TLS, firewalling, monitoring, syslog, Caddy, and swarm-cronjob.
  • SQL (minipaas-sql/): Adds durable queues and streams directly inside PostgreSQL to support background work and event pipelines.

Each component is standalone. You can adopt one, two, or all three.

Why Build It?

MiniPaaS aims to reduce infrastructure friction while keeping everything transparent:

  • Give small teams practical tooling that doesn’t require Kubernetes expertise.
  • Provide a consistent deployment workflow based on Compose files teams already use.
  • Standardize Swarm node provisioning with predictable security defaults.
  • Use Postgres for queues/streams to avoid maintaining extra infrastructure.
  • Keep migration paths open — nothing blocks moving to another platform later.

Principles

  • Small, composable parts — adopt what you need.
  • Explicit over implicit — no hidden control planes or magic.
  • Self-hosted by default — works offline, locally, and in CI.
  • Readable and auditable — everything is plain Go, Ansible, SQL, and YAML.

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