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CapRover: Build your own PaaS

caprover.com

121–130 of 183 posts

Re: CapRover: Build your own PaaS

#121
I can see exactly why this exists. It won't suit hard core roll your own developers - any more than WordPress theme generators suit DIY web developers - but for those who may be light on skills and time, this could be a superb way to get an MVP going really quickly and easily. Very nice tool to fill a gap.

Re: CapRover: Build your own PaaS

#122
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> should not survive a cost-benefit analysis I completely disagree, the difference of price between dedicated servers and even EC2 instances is completely amazing. This is what you get for less than $200/month with a dedicated server: 1× AMD EPYC 7281 CPU - 16C/32T - 2.1 GHz, 2 × 1 To NVMe, 96 Go DDR4 ECC, unmetered 750 Mbps In one of my companies the AWS bill is just completely insane, we have like half that hardwar…

Yes, hardware as a service will always be much more expensive than hardware you own. But it may be less expensive than the team you will require to run that hardware at an acceptable service level. It very likely will be less expensive than the opportunity cost of running your own hardware. As an example of the latter bit, if you are running your own hardware and need to add another host and you do not have a spare l…

I love how there's this myth that servers and services just blow up every 10 minutes 24/7 and unless you have a legion of ops personnel you're going to get hours of downtime each year.

Servers, for the most part, just work. In DC climate-controlled environments, hardware failures is exceedingly rare. Apart from harddrives, most hardware will happily tick along for a decade, if not longer.

Sane production-grade OSes (read: not Ubuntu) will also happily run for literal years with zero human intervention. For obvious reasons, it's a bad idea to not patch your systems, but things will continue to "just work" pretty much forever unless you're running really shitty code.

For renting vs buying servers, there's upsides and downsides. Buying gear is far far cheaper if you plan to be around for more than a year, but renting dedicated servers gives you a lot more flexibility -- to provision a new server, you hit a button in their online panel, wait 15 minutes, then let your deployment strategy take care of the rest.

I find it almost mind-boggling that AWS and friends have convinced people that it's normal to spend ridiculous amounts of money for fairly "meh" service specs in what's essentially VMs.

Re: CapRover: Build your own PaaS

#125

I have been using CapRover for about half a year now on my personal server running multiple projects. It does what you'd expect and the configuration format is pretty easy to use, using any docker image directly works without any extra steps, just enter the image name and it'll do the rest. I'm pretty happy with it and will probably stay with it for the time being. It's not the best for hosting many static pages, as…

If you have a vpn, you can edit the nginx config for the admin panel and make it only accept connections from your vpn ip address.

Re: CapRover: Build your own PaaS

#126
post #5

For those who have even simpler needs (like side projects, or 1 dev projects), I found using simply docker and git to be plenty enough. Basically, you can create a bare git repository on your server (`git init --bare`), and put a `hooks/post-receive` script within it that will clone sources in a temporary directory, build the docker image and rotate containers. That way, you can `git push` to build and deploy, and it…

Caprover doesn't do zero-downtime deployment currently fyi

Re: CapRover: Build your own PaaS

#127
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, hardware as a service will always be much more expensive than hardware you own. But it may be less expensive than the team you will require to run that hardware at an acceptable service level. It very likely will be less expensive than the opportunity cost of running your own hardware. As an example of the latter bit, if you are running your own hardware and need to add another host and you do not have a spare l…

I love how there's this myth that servers and services just blow up every 10 minutes 24/7 and unless you have a legion of ops personnel you're going to get hours of downtime each year. Servers, for the most part, just work. In DC climate-controlled environments, hardware failures is exceedingly rare. Apart from harddrives, most hardware will happily tick along for a decade, if not longer. Sane production-grade OSes (…

The points you make are fine but I think the experience becomes more painful linearly with the number of servers you manage, since you're N times more likely to see something happen that takes down a server. It just happens more frequently. At some point that becomes often enough that you don't want to deal with it anymore.

Re: CapRover: Build your own PaaS

#128
post #2

Curious as to how this compares to Dokku ( http://dokku.viewdocs.io/dokku/ )?

CapRover has support for multi-server deployments using Docker Swarm. It also has a nice dashboard with built-in monitoring and such. There is a marketplace of sorts with single-click deployment for certain applications. Dokku on the other hand has support for buildpack deployment as well as Procfile support for running multiple processes. I prefer Dokku. The main reason is that I only need a single server for my app…

Fantastic write-up, thanks!!

Re: CapRover: Build your own PaaS

#129

I have been using CapRover for about half a year now on my personal server running multiple projects. It does what you'd expect and the configuration format is pretty easy to use, using any docker image directly works without any extra steps, just enter the image name and it'll do the rest. I'm pretty happy with it and will probably stay with it for the time being. It's not the best for hosting many static pages, as…

> you'll need a HTTP server for each site isn't that what virtualhosts are for?

he's still in the early 90s

Re: CapRover: Build your own PaaS

#130
I have been using CapRover and love it. I donate to their OpenCollective[1].

For those noting "why don't you just use Linux / k8s / ...", that feels close to the original complaints re: Dropbox on Hacker News[2]. I've run clusters hundreds of nodes in size myself but CapRover gives me the pleasure of not having to sweat the small details. You can get this from other platforms but usually there's a dollar cost tied to each option. When I'm experimenting I don't want to have a dollar cost attached.

Deploys are trivial. The default nginx setup is most of what I'd want to do. LetsEncrypt is a single button click. Monitoring is included by default. If I need to scale up, everything I'm pushing is Docker containers. If I want to experiment, there's great fun in looking at the included "One click apps / databases" and just playing around.

CapRover is just a lovely freeing experience that will do what you need :)

[1]: https://opencollective.com/caprover

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863

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