A year after launching Distr to help software vendors manage customer deployments remotely, the team has released version 2.0 with significant architectural changes. The platform now supports customer organizations with built-in RBAC, moving beyond the previous single-user model. This update addresses the messy reality of managing software across environments where SSH access isn't possible.
Distr has evolved from helping modernize home-baked solutions like email-based update notifications and in-person debugging sessions to serving 200+ vendors, including Fortune 500 companies across health tech, fintech, security, and AI sectors. The platform now includes an embedded OCI container registry, license management for codifying vendor-customer agreements, and improved logging that doesn't require SSH access. The team chose PostgreSQL over time-series databases after extensive tinkering with indexes.
The open-source platform continues expanding its capabilities with native Terraform/OpenTofu and Zarf support planned for version 3.0, enabling BYOC and air-gapped deployments. With deployments spanning on-prem, GovCloud, AWS, and GCP, Distr positions itself as a comprehensive control plane for software distribution. The company, part of YC S24, maintains its commitment to being fully open source and self-hostable.
Source: Hacker News: Front Page · Summarized by HeadlinesBriefing