Self-host Atlos

Atlos is open source, and you are welcome to self-host it on your own infrastructure.

Should I self-host?

Self-hosting is a great option for larger organizations that have dedicated, experienced technical teams that can help maintain the infrastructure. While we work hard to keep Atlos simple, self-hosting the platform does require significant technical expertise. We generally only recommend self-hosting Atlos for organizations with:

• A dedicated technical team who can manage the infrastructure
• Special data security or governance requirements that prevent the use of our hosted platform

While anyone is welcome to self-host, we recommend against self-hosting for most organizations. (We also discourage self-hosting for organizations that do so principally to save on the costs of using our hosted version; the cost of managing and purchasing/renting your own servers to run Atlos robustly is almost certainly going to be more expensive than our hosted version.) Our hosted version is designed to be secure, reliable, and easy to use, and we recommend that most organizations use it.

How to self-host

For organizations that do self-host, we encourage you to follow roughly the same deployment steps that we use for our hosted version, though you will have to adapt those steps to your own infrastructure.

At a high level, here are the infrastructure components you’ll need:

• A PostgreSQL database
• Some way to run a containerized web application on the internet (e.g., Azure Container Apps, Fly.io, Heroku, etc.)
• S3-compatible object storage for media (e.g., Amazon AWS)

For more information on self-hosting, refer to our development and architecture guide on GitHub.

Security recommendations

When self-hosting, we highly recommend that you:

• Enable S3 object versioning and deletion protection to ensure that media files cannot be deleted, even by someone with admin access to Atlos.
• Provide only the minimum permissions necessary to the AWS keys that Atlos is configured to use. Currently, Atlos only needs permission to send emails via SES and read/write the S3 bucket where media is stored. We recommend that you create a new IAM user with these permissions and use those credentials in your Atlos configuration.
• Enable point-in-time-restore and replication on your PostgreSQL database to ensure that you can recover from data loss or corruption.

Support for self-hosting orgs

We are also able to provide official and priority support channels to self-hosting organizations that contribute financially to the project. For all organizations, we are happy to answer questions and provide guidance on our Discord server to the extent that we are able.

If you have any questions about self-hosting, please feel free to reach out to us on Discord or via email.