DigitalOcean App Platform • Hacker News Board

Re: DigitalOcean App Platform

#21

Post by lizhang » Tue, Oct 06, 2020, 3:44 PM UTC

I would love a non-trivial demo app or webcast that uses some of the components (eg. service + DB + static site + multiple workers) to check out the configuration required to make everything work together.

Maybe examples of how server/workers communicate, support for RPC, event queue. I'm in the process of figuring out all this stuff and App Platform sounds perfect, but without a starting point it may become more straightforward to take the platform-agnostic approach and spin up droplets where I control all of this.

Re: DigitalOcean App Platform

#22

Post by onion2k » Tue, Oct 06, 2020, 3:50 PM UTC

phildougherty wrote: post #19

onion2k wrote: post #16

Like all DigitalOcean products, the App Platform provides predictable, easy-to-understand pricing that allows you to control costs to prevent surprise bills. I can't see any features listed that enable me to control costs to prevent surprise bills. If a site got submitted to HN and hugged to not-to-death-because-it-autoscales then I'd wake up to a bunch of alerts and massive outbound bandwidth bill. I don't want that…

Thanks for the feedback! Autoscaling is not yet supported on the platform (but is coming soon). Before autoscaling lands as a feature, insights based alerting will also land. You'll be able to setup alerts for scaling events, bandwidth, cpu, memory, and more that can be sent via email or slack.

My point is that alerts aren't really enough. If I'm asleep or on a plane or something then it could be many hours before I even see an alert, by which time it's probably too late. I'd prefer to be able to set up rules beforehand that prevent an unforeseen bill.

If the App Platform doesn't have that feature, and it isn't planned, that's OK but I'd argue that isn't really preventing a surprise bill as the marketing site claims. A warning isn't quite the same as prevention.

Re: DigitalOcean App Platform

#23

Post by dubcanada » Tue, Oct 06, 2020, 3:50 PM UTC

bizzleDawg wrote: post #5

I'd be interested to know if this is integrated and rebranded nanobox [0]? Or something completely from scratch? [0]: https://nanobox.io/

It's completely from scratch, and based on playing around with it, it's a weird kubernates system. Which is why the pricing seems super weird compared to existing DO products (100GB's base and then you pay per a GB).

Nanobox was a tool that allows you to build and manage a container with setups for heroku build packs. It handled deployment, load balancing, etc. Similar to heroku for example. But it also worked with Vultr, Amazon, etc.

Re: DigitalOcean App Platform

#24

Post by p410n3 » Tue, Oct 06, 2020, 3:50 PM UTC

phildougherty wrote: post #19

onion2k wrote: post #16

Like all DigitalOcean products, the App Platform provides predictable, easy-to-understand pricing that allows you to control costs to prevent surprise bills. I can't see any features listed that enable me to control costs to prevent surprise bills. If a site got submitted to HN and hugged to not-to-death-because-it-autoscales then I'd wake up to a bunch of alerts and massive outbound bandwidth bill. I don't want that…

Thanks for the feedback! Autoscaling is not yet supported on the platform (but is coming soon). Before autoscaling lands as a feature, insights based alerting will also land. You'll be able to setup alerts for scaling events, bandwidth, cpu, memory, and more that can be sent via email or slack.

What good are alerts when I sleep? I usually don't even check my personal mail until I'm done at work. There's a lot that can happen in 16h

Re: DigitalOcean App Platform

#25

Post by sciurus » Tue, Oct 06, 2020, 3:50 PM UTC

phildougherty wrote: post #7

bizzleDawg wrote: post #5

I'd be interested to know if this is integrated and rebranded nanobox [0]? Or something completely from scratch? [0]: https://nanobox.io/

We certainly took a lot of inspiration and leaned on the awesome experience of the nanobox team, but this is largely a completely different architecture.

Can you tell us anything about the architecture?

Re: DigitalOcean App Platform

#26

Post by phildougherty » Tue, Oct 06, 2020, 3:53 PM UTC

mitch-snipline wrote: post #20

I got quite excited at being able to stick my static sites on DO for free, but notice on this page[1] that only the first three are free, then it's $3/m/site. Perhaps I've been spoiled by services like Netlify. I'd be interested to know what the benefits are of using DO's service over free alternatives. [1] https://cloud.digitalocean.com/apps?i=6bf7f8

Thanks, that is valuable feedback. We definitely recognize that there are other options out there that offer unlimited static sites. We feel that the additional features and capabilities offered by the platform including running scaled our dynamic workloads, workers, jobs, and databases - at a price point that is very competitive will provide you with value to make up for it - having these features just results in a different economic model for us.

Re: DigitalOcean App Platform

#27

Post by nightowl_games » Tue, Oct 06, 2020, 3:53 PM UTC

This sounds good. I like DO.

This sentence is a bit worrying though:

"We automatically analyze your code, create containers, and run them on Kubernetes clusters."

I still want to be able to make _some_ decisions as a developer.

Re: DigitalOcean App Platform

#28

Post by fennecfoxen » Tue, Oct 06, 2020, 3:54 PM UTC

leadetes wrote: post #6

Digital Ocean has really changed. Just get the feeling leadership or something changed internally to pivot away from being customer/developer focused. I'll stick with gcp.

What are you talking about? They sponsor Hacktoberfest, which gives people free T-shirts for spamming meaningless pull requests on open source projects on Github. How much more developer focus do you want?!?

Re: DigitalOcean App Platform

#29

Post by garettmd » Tue, Oct 06, 2020, 3:54 PM UTC

onion2k wrote: post #22

phildougherty wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the feedback! Autoscaling is not yet supported on the platform (but is coming soon). Before autoscaling lands as a feature, insights based alerting will also land. You'll be able to setup alerts for scaling events, bandwidth, cpu, memory, and more that can be sent via email or slack.

My point is that alerts aren't really enough. If I'm asleep or on a plane or something then it could be many hours before I even see an alert, by which time it's probably too late. I'd prefer to be able to set up rules beforehand that prevent an unforeseen bill. If the App Platform doesn't have that feature, and it isn't planned, that's OK but I'd argue that isn't really preventing a surprise bill as the marketing si…

Most autoscaling platforms let you define min and max types of restrictions. I assume DO would have the same functionality in their autoscaling.

Re: DigitalOcean App Platform

#30

Post by dubcanada » Tue, Oct 06, 2020, 3:55 PM UTC

nightowl_games wrote: post #27

This sounds good. I like DO. This sentence is a bit worrying though: "We automatically analyze your code, create containers, and run them on Kubernetes clusters." I still want to be able to make _some_ decisions as a developer.

They analyse your code for things like composer.json or package.json to determine what base buildpack to use.

You do have complete control over the configuration, see https://www.digitalocean.com/docs/app-platform/references/ap...