What “no servers” actually means

“No servers” is a lie, of course — a friendly one. Your app runs on a machine in a data centre in the EU, with power, disks and everything. The difference is who takes care of it. Here is what happens when you click start.

One pod per app

Every app gets its own pod: a group of containers that belongs only to it. The app itself, its database if it needs one, and for some apps a helper service — Immich’s image recognition, Twenty’s background jobs. The containers share a private network and see neither other pods nor the rest of the server.

The pod carries limits: as much CPU, memory and storage as you booked. The limits protect both ways — nobody can use up your resources, and an app that goes haywire cannot take the server down with it.

An address with a certificate

Every pod gets an address like yourapp.podless.app, and the proxy in front of it obtains the certificate. Plain HTTP does not exist. Enter your own domain and the same happens for it — you set one DNS record, Podless does the rest.

We keep search engines out: every pod address tells crawlers via robots.txt and a header that there is nothing to index here. Your document archive does not show up on Google.

Two kinds of storage

Databases and everything that needs fast small accesses live on the server’s disk. The bulk — photos, documents, archives — lives on mass storage in Frankfurt that looks like a normal file system to the app. That is how a pod can hold 500 GB of photos without filling the server disk, and storage costs what mass storage costs.

Updates somebody tried first

Open-source apps release often — and not every version runs smoothly. Before an update reaches you, Podless starts the new version on its own test instance and checks that it comes up and answers. Only then does it roll out to customers. If you like, Podless emails you before your app is updated.

What you still see

• The logs of every container, live in the dashboard.
• The usage of CPU, memory and storage — and the sliders to change them.
• A time-limited SFTP access when you want the files.
• The database credentials when you want the data.
• A field for your own S3 bucket, into which Podless backs up daily, encrypted.

What we do not do

We do not look into your pods. There is no analytics, no scanning, no evaluation of what you do in your app. Environment variables and credentials are stored encrypted and decrypted only to start your app. Delete an app and it is gone — data included. That is the deal: we run the servers, you keep control. More under Security & privacy.