Self hosting doesn’t have to be hard

When I started working on self-hosted for 3B, I had one main ambition: make installing it as easy as installing anything with Homebrew. Every engineer knows that feeling: one line, and the tool's just there. That’s what I wanted for 3B.

With this goal in mind, and some applied creativity, we were able to make installation a single command: helm install if you're already running on Kubernetes, or our bundled installer if you're not. The only prerequisite is a Linux VM or a Kubernetes cluster with access to our images. Everything past that is one line, and three to five minutes later you've got a real, running, self-hosted installation of Tines 3B with workflows, storage, everything.

The unexpectedly hard part was that we couldn't assume who, or what, would be running that command. That became obvious when a prospect pointed an AI Agent at a VM over AWS SSM, handed it our docs, and told it to install Tines 3B. The agent checked in to confirm a handful of steps along the way, but installed almost everything itself. So the installer had to work two ways: a guided, interactive walkthrough for someone SSHing in by hand, and a fully scriptable, non-interactive path for a pipeline, an agent, or a cloud CLI to run unattended.

I think software should just work, no matter who or what is asking it to. One command, five minutes, and it's yours, running on infrastructure you control.