This is great. We went through a lot of pain keeping our cloud and on-premise offering [0] in check. Eventually took our infrastructure back to the drawing board and settled on a docker based solution with some custom orchestration on top. Cloud is docker swarm and on-prem docker on a VM. A service like Gravitational would have saved us a lot of time.
Gravitational (YC S15): Software On-Prem or in Cloud from Single Code Base
11–20 of 27 posts
Re: Gravitational (YC S15): Software On-Prem or in Cloud from Single Code Base
#12I gave a talk on delivering Rails apps behind corporate firewalls at Railsconf'2015[0], but have since migrated Coveralls Enterprise[1] from our home-baked, pre-packaged VM to Replicated.com[2]
I'd recommend checking them out too since they're Docker based and have a significant roster: Travis, NPM, Code Climate, etc.
[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V6e_A9VzPy8
Re: Gravitational (YC S15): Software On-Prem or in Cloud from Single Code Base
#13I'm the CEO of Gravitational, AMA about transitioning from single-cloud SaaS model to launching an Enterprise on-prem version, or going multi-region/international.
How does Gravitational compare to Replicated (http://www.replicated.com)?
Re: Gravitational (YC S15): Software On-Prem or in Cloud from Single Code Base
#14I'm the CEO of Gravitational, AMA about transitioning from single-cloud SaaS model to launching an Enterprise on-prem version, or going multi-region/international.
How does Gravitational compare to Replicated ( http://www.replicated.com )?
The best part with Gravitational is that you don't need to "migrate" to our platform.
We port your application deployment to work with Google Kubernetes. As long as the app works on Kubernetes it works with us too on AWS, Google cloud compute and bare metal servers.
Re: Gravitational (YC S15): Software On-Prem or in Cloud from Single Code Base
#15Curious, was just thinking about this the other day. What does Gravitational offer in the way of special sauce that can't be achieved just be working with Docker/Kubernetes directly? What cost to the developer? How are you taking on customers at the moment?
Just asking because I was in the planning stages for something and this was the first step to what I wanted to achieve. I don't know if it's worth learning Docker/Kubernetes or signing up for something like this before I've coded anything.
Re: Gravitational (YC S15): Software On-Prem or in Cloud from Single Code Base
#16A few reasons why we started working on this for some additional context: 1) We think developers have had to take on too much responsibility for operating the software they build (DevOps). We hope to create more clearly defined roles for developers and operators through better tooling for operators. 2) A lot of the engineering challenges with SaaS comes from multi-tenancy, which is one of the reasons Dev and Ops have…
I find (2) curious, as our pains come from trying to build a single-tenant (as in 1 process per client, not 1 machine per client) hosted SaaS offering. Everywhere I look, there's plenty of tooling written for multi-tenant, distributed webapps, but barely anything if you want to automate the creation and management of isolated "instances" (subdomain + process + database).
We've built some manual deployment scripts for creating new instances, but having to build everything ourselves has been time-prohibitive. I really wish I could find some ready-made tools for our use case.
Re: Gravitational (YC S15): Software On-Prem or in Cloud from Single Code Base
#17A few reasons why we started working on this for some additional context: 1) We think developers have had to take on too much responsibility for operating the software they build (DevOps). We hope to create more clearly defined roles for developers and operators through better tooling for operators. 2) A lot of the engineering challenges with SaaS comes from multi-tenancy, which is one of the reasons Dev and Ops have…
How is this different from one of the more fully featured systems like OpenShift or Apprenda?
Re: Gravitational (YC S15): Software On-Prem or in Cloud from Single Code Base
#18Curious, was just thinking about this the other day. What does Gravitational offer in the way of special sauce that can't be achieved just be working with Docker/Kubernetes directly? What cost to the developer? How are you taking on customers at the moment? Just asking because I was in the planning stages for something and this was the first step to what I wanted to achieve. I don't know if it's worth learning Docker…
Sure,
Docker and Kubernetes are fine tools for deploying and orchestrating an application into an environment you have full control over (typical SaaS scenario). Our "distribution" of Kubernetes is optimized for running in "hostile" unknown environments with varied networks, storage, etc. It comes in HA-configuration with self-updating and self-monitoring turned on.
Secondly, once you have thousands of instances deployed across the globe, we give you unified and secure remote access to do ops in a scalable way. The true cost of going on-prem is not deployment (it's not that hard, you're right: Kubernetes does most of the heavy lifting).
The true cost of going multi-region/on-prem is operations. And, of course, the security complications that come with it. Our OpsCenter tackles this problem: it gives you access to thousands of absolutely identical instances of your app, while staying compliant with on-site security policies.
Give us a call, we'll have a solution engineer spend some time with your team and we'll do all of the integration work.
The end result: you have the same codebase which runs in your own 5 AWS regions, plus 5000 on-prem locations, and you don't need to:
a) fork your codebase
b) hire a ton of ops engineersRe: Gravitational (YC S15): Software On-Prem or in Cloud from Single Code Base
#19A few reasons why we started working on this for some additional context: 1) We think developers have had to take on too much responsibility for operating the software they build (DevOps). We hope to create more clearly defined roles for developers and operators through better tooling for operators. 2) A lot of the engineering challenges with SaaS comes from multi-tenancy, which is one of the reasons Dev and Ops have…
How is this different from one of the more fully featured systems like OpenShift or Apprenda?
They are orchestration systems for clusters, and Gravitational offers tooling to aggregate thousands of them (owned by 3rd parties) to simplify operations.
...except we decided against using these PaaSes and placed a bet on Kubernetes.
In fact, our belief is that developers should think less about orchestration and let other people do the work. Kubernetes offers a perfect set of abstractions to make this thinking practical.
Re: Gravitational (YC S15): Software On-Prem or in Cloud from Single Code Base
#20A few reasons why we started working on this for some additional context: 1) We think developers have had to take on too much responsibility for operating the software they build (DevOps). We hope to create more clearly defined roles for developers and operators through better tooling for operators. 2) A lot of the engineering challenges with SaaS comes from multi-tenancy, which is one of the reasons Dev and Ops have…
I find (2) curious, as our pains come from trying to build a single-tenant (as in 1 process per client, not 1 machine per client) hosted SaaS offering. Everywhere I look, there's plenty of tooling written for multi-tenant, distributed webapps, but barely anything if you want to automate the creation and management of isolated "instances" (subdomain + process + database). We've built some manual deployment scripts for…
Hmm... interesting. I wonder how you define a "tenant" and how tenant affinity is applied to a connection (routing). I doubt you're talking about process-per-web-request, in that case a good ole CGI would do.
Shoot me an email to ev@kontsevoy.com, will be glad to chat more about this.