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StackRocket: Build and share virtualized dev stacks, start coding in minutes

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Re: StackRocket: Build and share virtualized dev stacks, start coding in minutes

#31

Post by PabloOsinaga »

sayhello wrote: post #30
PabloOsinaga wrote: post #29

I wonder - has anyone ever tried the approach of the entire VM binary image being the repo and doing smart bindiffs as changes? The trick would be to identify what is "code/config/program code" vs random/temp files. In code tracking you do it manually by saying don't track. Here you'd need a bit more intelligence, but seems like doable. And you could create then like a git for machines. I may be too simplistic / not…

You are right, having a binary diffing mechanism would make it simpler to implement, but that diffing mechanism would be hard to implement! We've thought about going pure diff at the beginning and decided that to implement that method will give us less flexibility in the short term. I speculate that do so, we would need to implement our own virtual machine (we are using virtualbox) and/or disk image format.

mmm I take your point - what ideas are out there to do that thought? I agree it is hard ...

Good news is that for the "known/commont stuff" you can always have a central database of the random/temp stuff they generate.

E.g., mysql generetes tmp files here and there, and so and so - so you could profile all that common stuff in that way.

Then the uncommon stuff or your custom things, you declaratively say "do not track" as you do with code today.

Moreover you can do it in a way that is crowdsourced - ie: if its a cloud service when people declare such and such in mongodb is random/temp then you learn for all users.

At the end of the day there is a limited number of things people use and for the long tail it is OK for people to be declarative I guess.

But on the flip side I can see how that could end up being a nightmare.

But wouldn't it be nice to do something as simple as pull/commit/push for general purpose computers?

Re: StackRocket: Build and share virtualized dev stacks, start coding in minutes

#32

Post by sayhello »

sayhello wrote: post #30
PabloOsinaga wrote: post #29

I wonder - has anyone ever tried the approach of the entire VM binary image being the repo and doing smart bindiffs as changes? The trick would be to identify what is "code/config/program code" vs random/temp files. In code tracking you do it manually by saying don't track. Here you'd need a bit more intelligence, but seems like doable. And you could create then like a git for machines. I may be too simplistic / not…

You are right, having a binary diffing mechanism would make it simpler to implement, but that diffing mechanism would be hard to implement! We've thought about going pure diff at the beginning and decided that to implement that method will give us less flexibility in the short term. I speculate that do so, we would need to implement our own virtual machine (we are using virtualbox) and/or disk image format.

Thanks for your thoughts, PabloOsinaga.

I am just spitting out ideas without deep thought but a discussion might prove fruitful.

It could come down to certain types of data, some to be ignored, some to be careful of (like data or code), others to blindly overwrite (critical security updates).

The point would be treat the data as "dumb", but to keep in mind that some data are "dumber" than others.

Perhaps if we had our own disk image format, we could mark certain types of data to be ignored for instance.

Our VM would know what to mark as ignored for say POSIX systems and that aspect could be configurable.

Re: StackRocket: Build and share virtualized dev stacks, start coding in minutes

#34

Post by PabloOsinaga »

PabloOsinaga wrote: post #31
sayhello wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are right, having a binary diffing mechanism would make it simpler to implement, but that diffing mechanism would be hard to implement! We've thought about going pure diff at the beginning and decided that to implement that method will give us less flexibility in the short term. I speculate that do so, we would need to implement our own virtual machine (we are using virtualbox) and/or disk image format.

mmm I take your point - what ideas are out there to do that thought? I agree it is hard ... Good news is that for the "known/commont stuff" you can always have a central database of the random/temp stuff they generate. E.g., mysql generetes tmp files here and there, and so and so - so you could profile all that common stuff in that way. Then the uncommon stuff or your custom things, you declaratively say "do not trac…

that piece is the less difficult i think - you could always use existing VM infrastructure and do (1) restore (2) apply changes and (3) save back - I wouldn't mess with disk formats and so on - no need

Re: StackRocket: Build and share virtualized dev stacks, start coding in minutes

#35

Post by sayhello »

skeptical wrote: post #33

Looks practical, but I would like to see support for java, including building tools and such. The deployment is only part of the problem.

Java is definitely on the roadmap. We have been out of touch with the java universe for a few years, but we'd like to provide a great experience.

Re: StackRocket: Build and share virtualized dev stacks, start coding in minutes

#36

Post by shykes »

PabloOsinaga wrote: post #29

I wonder - has anyone ever tried the approach of the entire VM binary image being the repo and doing smart bindiffs as changes? The trick would be to identify what is "code/config/program code" vs random/temp files. In code tracking you do it manually by saying don't track. Here you'd need a bit more intelligence, but seems like doable. And you could create then like a git for machines. I may be too simplistic / not…

That's exactly what Cloudlets does. http://github.com/dotcloud/cloudlets

Re: StackRocket: Build and share virtualized dev stacks, start coding in minutes

#37

Post by danellis »

sayhello wrote: post #21
mtogo wrote: post #18

Current features: * Landing page * Sign up form

We do have a product and a couple of companies as users. That said, we're in private beta. If you're interested, sign up and shoot me an email. I'd like to learn more about what you're interested in.

No information about pricing, though?

Re: StackRocket: Build and share virtualized dev stacks, start coding in minutes

#38

Post by themgt »

sayhello wrote: post #28
themgt wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How will this work? It sounded like a user could just build a custom VM image and send it to you. There wouldn't be a way to deploy that to heroku, right? Are you doing sort of a blended app hosting/cloud offering?

With what we have today, code on our pre-configured RoR stack will work on heroku. What we have in the works is detecting if you have e.g. Redis and subscribing to that "addon" for you.

Have you seen the dotcloud "build files" for specifying services? I wonder if trying to encourage standardization among cloud/app hosts on a service specification file like this would be beneficial, similar to Gemfile/Procfile/etc.

service 'redis', '~> 2.2.2'

http://docs.dotcloud.com/guides/build-file/

Re: StackRocket: Build and share virtualized dev stacks, start coding in minutes

#39

Post by PabloOsinaga »

shykes wrote: post #36
PabloOsinaga wrote: post #29

I wonder - has anyone ever tried the approach of the entire VM binary image being the repo and doing smart bindiffs as changes? The trick would be to identify what is "code/config/program code" vs random/temp files. In code tracking you do it manually by saying don't track. Here you'd need a bit more intelligence, but seems like doable. And you could create then like a git for machines. I may be too simplistic / not…

That's exactly what Cloudlets does. http://github.com/dotcloud/cloudlets

That's nice. seems to be the infrastructure required for building such system. question is how do you come about building the manifests? Users need to do that???

Re: StackRocket: Build and share virtualized dev stacks, start coding in minutes

#40

Post by shykes »

themgt wrote: post #38
sayhello wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With what we have today, code on our pre-configured RoR stack will work on heroku. What we have in the works is detecting if you have e.g. Redis and subscribing to that "addon" for you.

Have you seen the dotcloud "build files" for specifying services? I wonder if trying to encourage standardization among cloud/app hosts on a service specification file like this would be beneficial, similar to Gemfile/Procfile/etc. service 'redis', '~> 2.2.2' http://docs.dotcloud.com/guides/build-file/

dotCloud team here. If there's interest, we'll happily contribute our specs and code to get things started.
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