Well actually, the Metabase Team already wrote “How to run Metabase in production” where they covered the first 2 official ways.
However, there is a 3rd way and that’s what I’m about to share here.
It’s also self-hosting Metabase but on steroids as it solves lots of pain points in maintaining an open source project.
Based from my experience as a Data Engineer, it’s never fun to upgrade an open-source project.
Instead of me working on my core responsibility to discover insights for the business, I ended up working mostly on fixing the open-source tool.
Enough of the chit-chat! Let’s dive in!
3 steps to setup an automated self-hosted Metabase
- Choose your cloud service provider. This is where Plural in step 2 will be deployed. Currently these are the supported providers: AWS, GCP & Azure. Follow this guide to make sure it’s set up correctly.
- Install Plural.sh. Plural is an open-source management platform. Once installed, it automatically handles the deployment, maintenance & scaling of the open-source apps installed on this platform which in our case it’s Metabase. Please follow this quick start guide to get it done correctly.
- Install Metabase via Plural.sh. Once you have Plural setup, it’s now easy to install open-source apps that are available in their marketplace. Just search for Metabase and install it from there. The installation of support open-source applications in Plural can also be found in the quick start guide.
That’s pretty much it! So easy right?
Benefits of this approach
- Cost savings. Since this is self-hosted, it means that you can save cost but at the same time enjoying the full benefits of Metabase Cloud Starter. See pricing.
- Cost savings. In this approach, I bet the Data Engineer can do the setup so no need to hire an FTE which is another way to save cost.
- Get business insights fast. Since we installed Metabase in Plural, Plural will automatically handle the maintenance upgrades and auto-scaling which means the Data Engineer can focus on discovering and delivering the business insights instead of doing the maintenance.
If you don’t have a Data Engineer but you badly need business insights for your business, please feel free to email me at joey@taleno.digital and you’ll get more cost savings. 🫰