True, but it doesn't have a program wrapper and isn't part of the AWS Free tier.

For a lot of teams, it's a better choice than Embrasure, but Embrasure serves its use case well and all of its components can be deployed with AWS's free plan.

That's a fair point. Thanks for the feedback!

I would disagree. Sure, you don't own the hardware, but you have total control over Embrasure's functionality within your self-contained instance.

Wikipedia: "Self-hosting is the practice of running and maintaining a website or service using a private web server, instead of using a service outside of someone's own control."

Yes, correct, AWS Secrets Manager is out of your own control. You don't control it. AWS does. They can change it or even end it as a product any day they like.

and they can also end all their other services on a whim. Are they gonna do it? dont think so, but they could

The point remains though that AWS is not self-hosting.

exactly my point aswell, or atleast that it cannot be limited to AWS

I agree this is generally a good idea, but sometimes you can't avoid using secrets. Right?

SSM is a great alternative, but it's a managed solution. Embrasure is self-hosted.

It’s self managed, AWS is hosting it.

This may seem like nit picking, but I can assure you confusing your audience will hamper the success of your project if you are aiming for growth.

I do wonder why OP is so set on calling it self hosted, when it seems quite obvious that more or less nobody has the same definition of self hosted

Thanks for your reply, but as far as I read the documentation, your solution relies on AWS. If so, manged vs self-hosted is not really an issue since you are already locked into AWS. If it works without AWS, then it makes sense.

> expected "self-hosted" to mean I can host anywhere

You're referring to a cloud-agnostic solution.

Embrasure is self-hosted since each instance is deployed within an organization's infrastructure, but as you mentioned, it's AWS-dependent.

> You're referring to a cloud-agnostic solution.

I actually mean that the service need not care if it's in the cloud or on-premise as opposed to whose cloud. Many of my services don't need to do anything in the cloud.

If you look at things like awesome-selfhosted[0] you'll see that this is the prevailing expectation of things describing themselves as "self-hosted".

[0] https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted

Based on a strict definition, I agree that Embrasure may not be considered self-hosted, but I don't think that's the "prevailing expectation."

For example, look at Infisical's documentation[0], and you'll see they offer self-hosting solutions on AWS, GCP, Azure, and more.

[0]https://infisical.com/docs/self-hosting/overview

I don’t think we should go down that rabbit hole of redefining self hosting ad anything other than host it in your own infra. So if AWS disappeared today, would your product still be self hosted? If being self hosted does not actually depend on your product but on the availability of another provider, there I don’t think we should call it self hosted.

> Based on a strict definition, I agree that Embrasure may not be considered self-hosted, but I don't think that's the "prevailing expectation."

I wont 100% discount that I live in a bubble, but try ask 100 random people what "self hosted" means, I would strongly guess that very very few says "I can (only) spin up some resources on AWS and deploy it there"

> ask 100 random people

I don't think it should be left to the opinion of 100 "random" people.

I'll quote Wikipedia[0] again: "Self-hosting is the practice of running and maintaining a website or service using a private web server..."

Embrasure is built on a Virtual Private Cloud instance.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-hosting_(web_services)

> I don't think it should be left to the opinion of 100 "random" people.

well judging by the other comments here, you will be getting even less who agree with your definition

Self-hosting does not mean you can't run it on AWS, but people expect more. Just look at Postgresql as an example of a self hosted software. You can run it in the cloud or your own basement.

Postgresql is a great example.

No, this is not what self hosted means.

This is a self managed AWS solution; nothing wrong with that.

Thanks! We used Adobe and svgrepo.com for vectors.