Self-hosting

Swirls can be self-hosted when you need full control over your infrastructure. Before going this route, consider Swirls Cloud. It handles all operational complexity so you can focus on building workflows.

When self-hosting makes sense

Self-hosting is the right choice when you have:

• Strict data residency requirements — Data must stay within a specific region or jurisdiction.
• Air-gapped environments — No outbound internet access to external services.
• Regulatory compliance — On-premise infrastructure required by your industry or organization.

If none of these apply to your situation, Swirls Cloud is the faster path to production.

What you take on

Self-hosting transfers the operational burden to your team. You are responsible for:

• Infrastructure provisioning and management
• Database setup and maintenance
• Monitoring and alerting
• Security updates and patches
• Scaling and performance tuning
• Stream storage management
• Secret management
• Cron scheduling reliability

These are non-trivial responsibilities. Each one requires ongoing attention.

Architecture overview

A self-hosted Swirls deployment consists of four main components:

• API server — Handles incoming requests, manages resources, and coordinates execution.
• Execution engine — Runs graphs, executes nodes in topological order, and records results.
• Database — Stores projects, graphs, forms, triggers, schemas, and execution records.
• Stream storage — Persists graph output data for downstream querying and analysis.

Good to know: If you are evaluating self-hosting, start with Swirls Cloud to validate your workflows first. Migrating to self-hosted later is straightforward if your requirements demand it.

Next steps

• Swirls Cloud — The managed alternative with no operational overhead.
• Local Development — Develop and test workflows locally before deploying anywhere.