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Self Managed Software

Understanding the Self-Managed software deployment model

What is Self-Managed?

Self-Managed Software Definition

Self-managed deployment is a model where organizations are responsible for fully hosting, operating, and maintaining software within their own infrastructure, either on-premises or in a private or public cloud environments. This approach gives customers complete control over their environment, including data security, compliance, and access management, which is often crucial for highly regulated industries. Unlike SaaS or BYOC, self-managed solutions require organizations to handle software setup, updates, scaling, and ongoing maintenance.

How Does Self-Managed Software Work?

In a self-managed deployment scenario, software customers typically purchase a license, download and install the software package onto their own servers or cloud environment. They handle all infrastructure-related tasks, including server setup, storage allocation, network configuration, and security protocols. Updates and patches are also tasked to the organization’s IT or DevOps team, who also monitor the system’s health, manage backups, and troubleshoot any issues. This deployment model demands a higher level of technical expertise and always incurs more significant ongoing IT costs, but it offers unmatched customization and control.

Why Choose Self-Managed Software?

Self-managed deployment is often chosen by organizations that require complete control over their environment, particularly in industries with stringent data sovereignty, security, and compliance requirements, such as finance, government, and healthcare. This model is also preferred by companies with unique operational needs or specialized infrastructure requirements, as it allows for full customization and integration with existing systems.

While it involves a larger internal resource commitment, self-managed deployment is ideal for businesses and government agencies with the expertise and resources to manage their own infrastructure and for those needing a high degree of autonomy and data control. This model prioritizes control and flexibility at the expense of convenience and ease of scaling.

Turn self-hosted into a repeatable sales motion

From your first on-prem POC to dozens of enterprise customers, the Distr platform gives you the tooling to deploy, update and manage self-managed customers, backed by a team that supports you hands-on with the deployment knowledge and implementation help.

Proof from teams shipping self-hosted software

GovCloud deployments without extra overhead

"Distr gives us a clean way to deploy and update our software in GovCloud without breaking security or adding operational overhead."

Corbin Klett

Corbin Klett

Co-Founder, Artifact

Manual operations become one-click workflows

"Our main goal is to simplify the daily operations. No more manual installations, updates, or rollbacks — everything can now be handled with a single click with Distr."

Jefferson Rodrigues

Jefferson Rodrigues

Co-Founder & CTO, Lerian

Read case study

Self-hosted without the engineering tax

"Weave has a fully self-hosted offering. It's a huge unlock for us, but we almost didn't build it. Distr made such a huge difference in getting us there."

Andrew Churchill

Andrew Churchill

Co-Founder & CTO, Weave

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One place for every self-hosted customer

"Having a dedicated space for all our self-hosted customers that can manage authenticated registry access is great."

Derek Reynolds

Derek Reynolds

Product Engineer, Basedash

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Updates that took days now take minutes

"Distr eliminated nearly all deployment headaches. Updates that used to take days now take minutes."

Ansh Gupta

Ansh Gupta

CTO, Sophris.ai

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