Nuon Goes Open Source

Today, I'm happy to share that Nuon has officially moved to an open-source model under the AGPLv3 license. In this post, I'll share a bit about our decision and why we think this will help the Bring Your Own Cloud (BYOC) community grow into not just a way to deploy software, but a standard.

The GitHub repository is nuonco/nuon.

The Road That Led Us Here

Just a little over four years ago, we started building Nuon. It took us nearly two years of iterating on our core product until we had something that delivered on our original mission of enabling developers to run software in customer cloud accounts, and make it feel like SaaS.

Our goal was — and continues to be — to allow any developer to take their existing application and create a SaaS-like experience in any customer's cloud.

It’s hard to offer BYOC for a single product, let alone generalizable infrastructure that can be used by anyone to offer BYOC. This generalizable infrastructure has to be good at things like packaging, come with a sane security model, and the right primitives for different architectures.

Along the way, we had to solve a lot of different problems such as packaging, supporting bespoke customer configurations and environments, and creating a way to debug, operate and mitigate issues in external accounts. While solving these problems, we found the hardest challenge to be creating a secure operational model that enabled developers and vendors to create a SaaS-like experience, without requiring what essentially amounts to “direct root access” in a customer’s environment. Things like policies, audit logs, release windows and more are not optional for end customers.

Today, we are deciding to make this generalizable infrastructure open source, for everyone.

On Trust

Today we are happy to share that many software vendors are using Nuon to deploy into customer accounts, and offering the BYOC model. We offer both Nuon Cloud, where we host and run the platform, and a Nuon BYOC offering, where we run Nuon in vendor accounts.

Along the way, as we have talked to many large enterprises who are demanding BYOC, and vendors who are considering building on our platform, we started to realize that not only was our platform itself valuable, but that the decisions we were making on how to package, deploy, and operate software in customer accounts were as important as the resulting product.

Nuon offers a security model that enables customers to run untrusted code in a SaaS-like fashion in their account. Nuon provides tooling for toggling permissions, governing application updates with policies, release windows, and more. While this security model is useful for many software vendors and their customers, it also represents a set of decisions and context around why and how to deliver BYOC deployments that many find useful.

Further, as Nuon has become a more critical piece of infrastructure with both customers and vendors, we began to realize that we risk Nuon being something that has to be trusted by both customers and vendors. While this is the case with all infrastructure products, Nuon risks being an even more critical part of the chain of trust, because of the layer of the stack we are building for.

The Need for a Standard

Outside of trust, we have also learned over the past four years that there are many different approaches and methodologies of deploying and operating software in customer accounts. Depending on the customer comfort level, some customers might want a full SaaS experience, while others prefer more manual upgrades and something closer to self-hosted. At the same time, as vendors consider offering a BYOC model, they are forced to reckon with security requirements, how to handle updates, and how to deliver their model.

We believe that a standard is needed that creates both a set of tools and decisions that can be used to help vendors and customers think about the BYOC model.

Nuon Goes Open Source

Today, after over four years of engineering effort from the team at Nuon, we are open-sourcing our entire product under the AGPLv3 license. You can find our repo here, and are welcome to join our community. Moving forward, we’ll be building in the open using GitHub Discussions for new features, together with the community in order to deliver on our mission of helping BYOC become a standard way to deploy and consume software.

A Sustainable Business Model

Today, we have two supported deployment models for Nuon:

• Nuon Cloud — in Nuon’s account, managed by the Nuon team.
• Nuon BYOC — in your account, managed by the Nuon team.

We believe that long-term, most users will want a managed BYOC experience for powering production installs. For self-hosted customers, we intend to have licenses for custom support and enterprise add-ons designed as extensions to our current core platform.

Between these two options, we hope to build a long-term and sustainable business model that enables Nuon to continue being a trusted piece of infrastructure for the BYOC community.

Thank You

Finally, we’d like to say thank you to our customers, investors, and the BYOC community at large. Over the last four years, we have had the opportunity to work with a wonderful community of people who have trusted us to power some of their most meaningful production workloads and customer relationships.

Also explore more from Nuon:
→ Join our Community
→ Check out our Event Calendar
→ X/Twitter | LinkedIn | YouTube | Docs