Miren Developer Preview Now Available

I’m so excited to announce that, after working on it for most of 2025, the deployment platform we’ve been working on is now publicly available as a Developer Preview.

I started Miren because I’ve been frustrated by the state-of-the-art for how people build and manage software. Tools are either built for a solo developer or built for an enterprise, which leaves out the vast majority of developers who work on small teams. This gap in products is going to become even more unacceptable as the age of coding AIs dawns, allowing small teams to do more and more.

Given my background broadly in cloud infrastructure and specifically in application deployment, it felt natural that the place to begin the Miren story was to apply our taste to software deployment. The Developer Preview focuses on running services exposed via HTTP and their supporting services like background workers and databases. That’s a huge swath of where people work today and felt like the right place to begin.

When we set out to build products for small teams, we knew that we needed to focus on workflows (and not technology) first and foremost. Workflows help focus how users actually interact with what they’re building, because they ask “how do I make my code available?” and not “which load balancer configuration version is required?” That focus on workflows means we work to get our technology out of the way and meet developers where they already are. You work in apps and versions, not proxies and containers.

Self-Hosted

While the workflows are the product surface area, the technical details are important because they are a governing factor in what the product can deliver to users. From day one, we knew that the first version of the product was going to be self-hosted, a platform that you can run on any Linux machine that makes sense for you and your team. Whether that’s a laptop for development, a Raspberry Pi for internal apps, or your favorite cloud provider’s Linux instances, you’ll get the same features in the same experience.

Cloud Console

One of the big issues with self-hosted? Managing how to connect to the servers and who can connect. We knew that if we were going to have our own story for self-hosted, we had to have a story about how you access the your servers. Our answer to this is Miren Cloud. Self-hosted servers register themselves with Miren Cloud, so you can discover and connect to your clusters without any configuration. And of course you’ll want access control too—so we made sure that was part of the launch story.

In addition to network access details for servers, Miren Cloud also provides authentication and authorization of users to the self-hosted clusters. After you run miren login and adds a cluster, the miren CLI passes a token to your self-hosted server, which contains the information about which organizations the user is in. This allows the server to perform an authentication check, only allowing users that are in the same organization.

Admin users can use the Miren Cloud access control to further restrict which users can perform actions on the cluster. At launch time, we’ve only got cluster access and deploy as checked actions, but this sets the stage for us to flesh out a wide array of actions that admins can control.

These sorts of options are what separates Miren from similar tools in the space. It’s designed from the very beginning to be used by a small team, while at the same time giving sensible defaults and deep tools to customize the experience.

Using Miren Cloud is available in the Developer Preview today.

Fully Isolated

If the idea of hooking your self-hosted server up to an external service isn’t something you want to do, no problem. The Miren server can run completely isolated; in fact, we run a number of clusters in exactly this way today, because it’s such an important way to operate certain applications.

Availability

When your server is registered with Miren Cloud, it is NOT coupled to the availability of Miren Cloud. In other words, if your server is unable to connect to Miren Cloud, authentication and authorization will continue to work just fine. The server will simply not be able to refresh its rules until the network connection is restored.

Safe Data

Safely managing data is another huge question when self-hosting. Do you leave backups and restoration as an exercise left to the user? Do you saddle users with a complex management service that they have to operate to safely store data? Neither of these options were acceptable to us.

What you want is a solution that automatically backs up data and can restore automatically when the data is missing. How to deliver that seamless experience is usually what drives you to the big cloud platforms for, especially by looking for managed databases. Rather than punt the problem to a managed database that we run in the cloud, we wanted you to be able to self-host their databases and get the same features.

The breakthrough came in the form of a technology called Log Structured Virtual Disk. It’s a research technology that designed a way to create a virtual disk, one that can store its data in the cloud on demand by operating at the raw block level. The technical details are fascinating but you don’t need to understand them to know the benefits. The LSVD technology that Miren incorporates lets self-hosted servers instantly back up any data to Miren Cloud, which means that any database, any version is supported because the data is managed at the lowest possible level. If you’re familiar with AWS, you can think of it like Elastic Block Storage, but available on any server, anywhere.

We think that giving you the peace of mind that your data is being stored safely is a critical piece of the story for making self-hosted a viable option today.

Miren Disks based on LSVD technology are available today in the Developer Preview. We invite you to try it out and give us your thoughts of all types.

Cloud Economics

We’ve talked around it, but I think this is a good time to hit on the dynamics of cloud economics today. The last 10 years have seen all aspects of computing continue to drop in price: CPUs, memory, disks, network, etc. Today, more than any time in the past, a single computer running anywhere on the internet can fulfill the needs of a huge swath of use cases. What holds users back from doing that is things like access control, like how to manage data safely. Sound familiar? All elements that Miren is setting out to solve for our users.

Only The Beginning

This seems like a lot, but it’s really only the very beginning of what we want to build and provide to you. Please check out our public roadmap and give us feedback. If we’re missing something, let us know! The philosophy behind Miren is to build in public: to let you know what we’re doing, why we’re doing it, and when you’ll be able to use it.

Please head over to https://miren.dev/developer-preview for all the information!