Tela and Awan Saya
Over the years, I had cobbled together a mostly functioning personal cloud. Thanks to Singapore's fantastic infrastructure, I have 10gbps symmetrical fibre to my home, so I took advantage of tools like Tailscale, Cloudflare, and Docker to stop paying the Azure/AWS/GCP tax. However, I knew I could do better, so I wrote my own cloud service.
The idea started when I saw this post on LinkedIn by Jakob Neild:
You may have noticed my reply there: “Unless you host your own cloud 😎”.
That was a little bit snarky, but also a little bit smug. I thought I was doing pretty well with my personal cloud, but since I was sitting in Ninoy Aquino International Airport waiting for my flight to start boarding, I had a little time to think. I had a workstation and a few Docker containers on Tailscale, and I was serving some web sites with Cloudflared, but I still didn't really control the infrastructure. I couldn't access Tailscale from my locked-down company laptop, for example, since I wasn't allowed to install Tailscale on it (or, indeed, do much of anything on it).
Like any modern software developer, I opened up an chat with an LLM and started brainstorming. By the time my flight started boarding, I had the basic idea sketched out: A zero-install client that could let me connect to any of the services I exposed from my machines at home, whether real or virtual or containerised. By the time the plane landed, I had the design sketched out, not only of a federated cloud service called Tela, but also of a service on top of that called Awan Saya (Malay for “My Cloud”).