Ask HN: Do you know of any deployment mangement frontends?
At my job we build and host a fair amount of web apps (80+). A large amount of which are dockerized Django-based apps but also things like Next.js apps deployed to Lambdas. Currently we store our deployment config in a git repo and have a deployment CI pipeline that is responsible deploying the app to AWS either via programmatically created AWS CloudFormation file or [SST](https://sst.dev/).
This is both fiddly to maintain and not a great DX to use so I'd love to move us to something with a proper frontend for deployment management. Ideally something like the Vercel frontend where you can create projects, modify a project's env vars + other deployment related config, and view the history of deployments for a project + see a deployments logs. We've found a few products that seem close to what we're looking for but unfortunately we have a number of requirements that mean nothing I've found so far quite fits them:
- For one we have a very tight budget as we're a non-profit (we builds apps to assist other non-profit orgs like case management software for homelessness service providers).
- We're also a big enough organisation that we need a more centralised approach to deployment for things to be manageable but we're small enough that we don't have people dedicated to managing our deployment system.
- We're fairly heavily invested in the AWS platform so it has to work with that.
- We want infrastructure abstraction with the option to customise specific AWS infra per app as required. That's because most of our apps have fairly similar intra needs. They're largely Dockarized and run on AWS Fargate and it would be unmaintainable if every app had to include the low-level configuration needed for things like setting up an ALB and assigning a domain to it, etc. But at the same time enough of our apps have their own particular quirks requiring specific AWS services that we need a system which allows us to include that lower-level infra provisioning config for the apps as needed.
Because of all that it seems like none of the off-the-shelf options I've come across so far quite cover our needs. While it doesn't provide the frontend aspect we're looking for we have found that [SST](https://sst.dev/) has been working pretty well for us for doing the actual infrastructure definition and deployment part. We maintain a library of custom components/CDK constructs that are shared between our apps which allow us to abstract away the specific hosting infrastructure of an app when we can without loosing the ability to fully customise any AWS service on a per app basis.
Really all that it feels like we're missing is a frontend to manage config such as env vars, secrets, etc and to run a deployment by triggering SST to run. So I've been thinking what would be great if there was a self-hostable (and ideally open-source) web app that provides a similar interface to Vercel/Coolify/etc for managing the deployment config and history of an app HOWEVER unlike those existing services it didn't actually do the deployment itself but handed that part off to some other system via some standardised api (like a standardised rest api you would point it at and it would call as needed or even just some scripts it would call in a pre-defined manner). Then for us we'd be able to hook it up with SST but other organisations with differing deployment infra needs could set it up to work with some other deployment system.
Have you found anything that would fit that description? I'd love to hear about it :)