Software installation, even for simple trials reminds me of this Stephen Hawking quote:
"Someone told me that each equation I included in the book would halve the sales. I therefore resolved not to have any equations at all. In the end, however, I did put in one equation, Einstein's famous equation, E = mc squared. I hope that this will not scare off half of my potential readers."
It just feels like that law can be adapted to: for every step and pre-requisite in your setup, you lose half your potential customers.
Of course, it's not precisely that, but it feels the same.
I, for one, am not afraid of manually building a stack to self-host an application. I'd prefer it over Docker in fact, because it makes everything exposed, and as an admin, I love to know what I'm tinkering with.
However, the docs should be good. No hidden layers, no skimped over steps, no "insert some magic here". It's your app, you know it by heart, but I'm just getting to know it.
If you do this as an established application or a developer which also sell your product as a SaaS, I assume that you're doing it in bad faith, and move on.
Building an app that scales to enterprise size is hard. Building an app that does so while also scaling down to single-team size is hard. Every feature you build two backends for is one more thing to go wrong. Writing a sqlite backend for your redis usage, your search, etc... it's not insane, and it's a sign of good Faith, but it's not something that should be expected, either.
"Someone told me that each equation I included in the book would halve the sales. I therefore resolved not to have any equations at all. In the end, however, I did put in one equation, Einstein's famous equation, E = mc squared. I hope that this will not scare off half of my potential readers."
It just feels like that law can be adapted to: for every step and pre-requisite in your setup, you lose half your potential customers.
Of course, it's not precisely that, but it feels the same.