Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

A simple DIY Heroku replacement to keep your hosting costs down

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 76 posts

Re: A simple DIY Heroku replacement to keep your hosting costs down

#11

Post by jacques_chester »

StavrosK wrote: post #8
gitgud wrote: post #5

Well, Dokku [1] is already a good solution to the heroku cost problem. All the power and convenience of heroku commands with the freedom and low cost of docker deployment. It has lets-encrypt ssl support too! [1] https://github.com/dokku/dokku

I'm using Dokku to serve a bunch of sites and love it, it has made deployments a breeze. I did run into some Docker problems (used too much CPU and couldn't connect to its socket, etc), but I don't think it was Dokku's fault, but Docker's. I want to see if I can use Kubernetes as a Dokku replacement (hopefully a more stable one), but I don't think Kubernetes has all the niceties Dokku has (automatic reverse proxying,…

You might look at Red Hat's OpenShift, which builds on top of Kubernetes. Or Deis, which has adopted buildpacks.

Cloud Foundry has buildpacks too, but it's usually seen as a heavyweight solution -- the light footprint variant is 6 VMs, the standard variant is 20-something.

Disclosure: I work for Pivotal, we contribute a lot to Cloud Foundry. Red Hat is a competitor.

Re: A simple DIY Heroku replacement to keep your hosting costs down

#12

Post by cies »

This but based on Kubernetes/Deis would be a huge thing. This project feels like may be fun, but not industrial strength. A bit like Dokku and Dokku-alt some times back.

There something called Minikube also right? Maybe that would also be great to integrate.

Maybe OpenStack's interface could even be used as a starting point.

Oh, and I frown at the use of JS where it is not mandated. Looking at the K8s/Deis community it seems Go is the favorite, and I find it a much more defendable choice for serious infra projects. (sorry will stop about JS now)

Reading back I gave some comments (and even a JS nag), but I mostly want to say that I love the project from what I see on the README. Very well done REAMDE. And I love this LetsEncrypt feature (Deis has is identified as cool feature as well -- https://github.com/deis/workflow/issues/708 )

Re: A simple DIY Heroku replacement to keep your hosting costs down

#13

Post by StavrosK »

jacques_chester wrote: post #11
StavrosK wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm using Dokku to serve a bunch of sites and love it, it has made deployments a breeze. I did run into some Docker problems (used too much CPU and couldn't connect to its socket, etc), but I don't think it was Dokku's fault, but Docker's. I want to see if I can use Kubernetes as a Dokku replacement (hopefully a more stable one), but I don't think Kubernetes has all the niceties Dokku has (automatic reverse proxying,…

You might look at Red Hat's OpenShift, which builds on top of Kubernetes. Or Deis, which has adopted buildpacks. Cloud Foundry has buildpacks too, but it's usually seen as a heavyweight solution -- the light footprint variant is 6 VMs, the standard variant is 20-something. Disclosure: I work for Pivotal, we contribute a lot to Cloud Foundry. Red Hat is a competitor.

Ah, I've heard about Deis, I'll check that one out, thanks. My main concern is the fact that Kubernetes recommends running more than one server, which is a luxury my personal projects cannot afford. Does anyone know how well it runs on a single server?

Re: A simple DIY Heroku replacement to keep your hosting costs down

#14

Post by StavrosK »

Sevrene wrote: post #9
StavrosK wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm using Dokku to serve a bunch of sites and love it, it has made deployments a breeze. I did run into some Docker problems (used too much CPU and couldn't connect to its socket, etc), but I don't think it was Dokku's fault, but Docker's. I want to see if I can use Kubernetes as a Dokku replacement (hopefully a more stable one), but I don't think Kubernetes has all the niceties Dokku has (automatic reverse proxying,…

Kubernetes can have automatic reverse proxying and let's encrypt via an Ingress controller. I don't doubt Dokku has some nice plugins that Kubernetes doesn't though, especially for developers.

Ah, thanks, I'll try that. Dokku does have nice plugins, but they tend to be things I can write Dockerfiles for. The other big thing Dokku does is that it builds the image on the server, so it doesn't need a Docker registry, you just push the code directly to Dokku and the image gets built and deployed.

Re: A simple DIY Heroku replacement to keep your hosting costs down

#15

Post by jacques_chester »

StavrosK wrote: post #13
jacques_chester wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You might look at Red Hat's OpenShift, which builds on top of Kubernetes. Or Deis, which has adopted buildpacks. Cloud Foundry has buildpacks too, but it's usually seen as a heavyweight solution -- the light footprint variant is 6 VMs, the standard variant is 20-something. Disclosure: I work for Pivotal, we contribute a lot to Cloud Foundry. Red Hat is a competitor.

Ah, I've heard about Deis, I'll check that one out, thanks. My main concern is the fact that Kubernetes recommends running more than one server, which is a luxury my personal projects cannot afford. Does anyone know how well it runs on a single server?

There's minikube, but so far as I'm aware, it's not really meant for production use; it exists mostly for local development.

My own company has Pivotal Web Services[0], which gives a Heroku-like experience using Cloud Foundry. Pricing is per-megabyte[1], plus services. I expect we'll introduce a container service before long, because we like to dogfood our stuff with real production workloads.

[0] http://run.pivotal.io/

[1] http://run.pivotal.io/pricing/

Re: A simple DIY Heroku replacement to keep your hosting costs down

#16

Post by StavrosK »

jacques_chester wrote: post #15
StavrosK wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah, I've heard about Deis, I'll check that one out, thanks. My main concern is the fact that Kubernetes recommends running more than one server, which is a luxury my personal projects cannot afford. Does anyone know how well it runs on a single server?

There's minikube, but so far as I'm aware, it's not really meant for production use; it exists mostly for local development. My own company has Pivotal Web Services[0], which gives a Heroku-like experience using Cloud Foundry. Pricing is per-megabyte[1], plus services. I expect we'll introduce a container service before long, because we like to dogfood our stuff with real production workloads. [0] http://run.pivotal.…

Yeah, minikube is just for trying K8s out. PWS looks interesting, but, as with other managed/cloud offerings, it's much more expensive than a dedicated server (50ish EUR/mo for a 64 GB RAM i7).

For my side-projects, where I am cost-sensitive, I think the best solution would be a dedicated server with something like Dokku. It would just be nice if the "something" could be an industry standard.

Re: A simple DIY Heroku replacement to keep your hosting costs down

#17

Post by mikewhy »

pbreit wrote: post #7

Shouldn't something like this be deliverable with a set of Fabric or similar scripts?

I wrote a thing that uses fabric to do docker-compose based deployments. It also handles static sites.

I've used it internally at a couple of companies and it works well for us.

https://github.com/mikew/b3cmd https://github.com/mikew/b3cmd-server

Re: A simple DIY Heroku replacement to keep your hosting costs down

#19

Post by vfulco »

gitgud wrote: post #5

Well, Dokku [1] is already a good solution to the heroku cost problem. All the power and convenience of heroku commands with the freedom and low cost of docker deployment. It has lets-encrypt ssl support too! [1] https://github.com/dokku/dokku

It's awesome. Even lets liberal arts majors set up servers and R, Python, etc. apps with easy ;-)

Re: A simple DIY Heroku replacement to keep your hosting costs down

#20

Post by michaelbuckbee »

This, Dokku, Flynn, that 1000+ line bash/chef/ansible script that the guy who used to do your job before he left are all legitimate solutions for deploying apps (and all better than FTP'ing up whatever the developer happens to have on their laptop).

But, I feel like the comparison to Heroku isn't great.

Heroku saves you from having to do and worry about significant amounts of (I would argue) extremely important admin and security work.

How are datastore backups handled in this scenario? How do you handle updating redundancy? Can you in a couple clicks add a secure Postgres, MongoDB, Memcached or Redis server to your app? Setup CI?

Or even just secure these things properly. This stuff gets complex and it's extremely easy to accidently set up something that's much more open to the world than you would want.

To sum up:

Heroku -> A way for developers to put up much more robust sites than they could otherwise.

Scripted Setups -> a (very positive and cool thing) for those with devops/sysadmin skills to more rapidly setup a site.

Full disclosure: I do a lot of work in the Heroku ecosystem and could well be defending the platform out of greed. But, I've also seen first hand some of the wild misconceptions and mistakes that were caught by the built in systems and limits to the platform.

Post reply on HN