About Tau
Tau is the open-source core of Taubyte, described as a fullstack workspace for humans and machines. It is a cloud platform written in Go that spans the development environment, building applications, and deploying and running them. Topics place it in serverless computing, WebAssembly, peer-to-peer distributed systems, CDN, and cloud-native platform-as-a-service. It is released under the BSD-3-Clause license.
The quickest way to try it is to start a local cloud with the dream tool. For real use, you deploy Taubyte to your own servers or VMs, either manually or with the automated Spore Drive tool, and the documentation at tau.how covers the platform, deployment, and getting started. A video series called the Hitchhiker's Guide to Taubyte provides guided demos.
The project welcomes contributions through a standard fork, branch, test, and pull request workflow, with good first issues labeled. Tau suits developers and platform teams that want to run their own cloud-like environment, avoid dependence on a single hyperscaler, and experiment with a WebAssembly-based serverless model.
Key features
- Self-hosted cloud platform written in Go
- Serverless functions with WebAssembly
- Local cloud with the dream tool
- Automated deployment with Spore Drive
- Peer-to-peer distributed architecture
- Guides and video walkthroughs
Good fit for
- →Running a private cloud on your own servers
- →Experimenting with WebAssembly serverless apps
- Built with
- Go
- Tags
- paas
- serverless
- webassembly
- cloud-native
- go
- distributed-systems
- self-hosted
- p2p
Tau: questions and answers
- What is Tau used for?
- Tau is Taubyte's open-source cloud platform that combines development environment, build, and deployment so you can run a serverless, WebAssembly-based cloud on your own servers. It is a good fit for running a private cloud on your own servers and experimenting with WebAssembly serverless apps.
- Is Tau open source?
- Yes. Tau is open source under the BSD-3-Clause licence. Its source code is on GitHub at taubyte/tau and is written mainly in Go.
- Is Tau free?
- Yes. Tau is open source, so the software itself is free to use.
- Can I self-host Tau?
- Yes. Tau can be self-hosted on your own server or infrastructure.
- What is Tau an alternative to?
- Tau is an open-source alternative to Vercel, Netlify, Cloudflare Workers and Azure Functions. Other open-source alternatives to Vercel include Coolify, Dokploy and Openship.
- Is Tau actively maintained?
- Yes. The most recent commit to Tau was on 16 August 2026, and the latest release is v1.1.10, published on 22 April 2026. The project has 5.2k stars on GitHub.
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