Show HN: Distr 2.0 – A year of learning how to ship to customer environments

Source: Hacker News

Introduction

A year ago we launched Distr to help software vendors manage customer deployments remotely. We provided agents that pulled updates, a hub with a GUI, and many assumptions about on‑prem deployment needs.

It quickly became clear that things get messy when your software runs in environments you can’t simply SSH into.

Over the past year we also helped modernize a lot of home‑grown solutions:

• Bash scripts that emailed when updates failed
• Excel sheets nobody trusted to track customer versions
• Engineers driving to customer sites to fix issues in person
• Debug sessions over email (“can you take a screenshot of the logs and send it to me?”)
• Customers with access to internal AWS or GCP registries because there was no better option
• Deployments two major versions behind that nobody wanted to touch

Breaking change: Customer organizations

We waited a year before making our first breaking change, which resulted in a major SemVer bump. The change was necessary: we completely rewrote how we manage customer organizations.

• Vendors are the authors of software/AI applications that want to distribute them.
• Customers now belong to customer organizations that manage their internal users and RBAC.

Previously every customer was just a single user who owned a deployment. The new model required a migration of our API. Cloud customers migrated smoothly, but custom solutions built on top of our APIs needed updates.

Notable features since launch

• OCI container registry – built on an adapted version of google/go‑container-registry, embedded directly into our codebase and served via a separate port from a single Docker image. This lets vendors distribute Docker images and other OCI artifacts for self‑managed deployments.
• License Management – restricts which customers can access which applications or artifact versions. It codifies contractual agreements (e.g., time‑based access to specific software versions).
• Container logs and metrics – visible without SSH access. We debated using a time‑series database versus storing logs in Postgres; after extensive tuning of Postgres indexes, the solution now runs stably.
• Secret Management – ensures database passwords don’t appear in configuration steps or logs.

Adoption

Distr is now used by 200+ vendors, including Fortune 500 companies, across on‑prem, GovCloud, AWS, and GCP environments. Our users span health tech, fintech, security, and AI sectors. We’ve also begun work on our first air‑gapped environment.

Future plans (Distr 3.0)

We are developing native Terraform / OpenTofu and Zarf support to provision and update infrastructure in customers’ cloud accounts and physical environments. This will enable vendors to offer BYOC and air‑gapped use cases from a single platform.

Open source & documentation

• Repository:
• Docs:

We’re YC S24. Happy to answer questions about on‑prem deployments and would love to hear about your experience with complex customer deployments.