Dreamer
Self-hosted PaaS with scale-to-zero and sub-30s cold starts, deploys any GitHub repo in under a minute.
- <30s
- Cold start
- <1min
- Push to live
- 0
- State races under retry
→ built because I had an old PC which was underutilized, and wanted to know exactly what happens between git push and a live URL.
# problem
Replicating a correct Vercel-style deploy pipeline meant solving a thundering-herd race on container wake-up, and enforcing a deployment state machine under concurrent BullMQ workers without corrupting state.
# solution
Hosted on my old PC, A Redis SET NX distributed mutex coordinates container wake-up so exactly one job fires regardless of concurrent requests, and a Postgres trigger enforces valid state transitions at the database layer instead of trusting application code to get the race condition right.
# result
Dual execution engine (AWS ECS Fargate for cloud, local Docker for bare-metal) behind one interface, sub-30s cold starts, and zero state-machine races under concurrent retry attempts.
# architecture
Try it: the race this mutex solves
5 concurrent wake-up requests hit a sleeping container. Watch what happens with and without the lock.
incoming requests
container state
event log
press "fire 5 concurrent requests" above.
More deep dives on infrastructure and systems on the blog.