Show HN: SetOps – Run containers, databases and more in your own AWS account
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Re: Show HN: SetOps – Run containers, databases and more in your own AWS account
#2Hey HN! I’m Tobi, Co-Founder of SetOps.
Heroku is awesome; I started my dev career with it as well. But for us, a digital agency, it didn’t scale very well, mainly price-wise. AWS solved the pricing issue but made our dev teams slow since they did not know the in-and-outs of AWS and therefore relied on the DevOps team, which became a bottleneck for new projects.
During this time, the idea of SetOps was born. We imagined a tool that empowers developers to run their applications in the cloud to ship apps faster. But it needed to be flexible enough to fulfill all our customer’s requirements. So our key target group is Devs & DevOps alike. By providing a web interface, CLI and API, it can be used by devs and automated CI/CD systems.
Unlike other players like Heroku with SetOps users deploy to your own AWS account – keeping ownership and control of their infrastructure, allowing them to leave SetOps as they please and profit from AWS saving plans which might save a lot of money.
Two important topics to us are reliability and cost-efficiency. By using AWS ECS, managed load balancers, autoscaled EC2 instances, and redundancy across data centers, the infrastructure and, therefore, the deployed applications are highly available and self-healing. By sharing resources as much as possible – like one load balancer for multiple apps and shared database instances – SetOps can save some additional bucks.
If there is a use-case that SetOps does not support, it can be extended by additional AWS resources and external cloud services like MongoDB Atlas via VPC peering. Also, a reason to deploy to one’s own cloud account.
Although user-facing SetOps is currently an imperative infrastructure tooling, under the hood, we use a JSON definition of a so-called stage (a collection of apps and services) which we pass to Terraform to ensure that the state in the cloud account always matches the desired state. This allows for fixing broken AWS configurations as well.
Long story short: if SetOps sounds interesting, check out setops.co. We are looking forward to your feedback and use-cases.
Re: Show HN: SetOps – Run containers, databases and more in your own AWS account
#3> Isn't it just Kubernetes under the hood? That's not the right question...Kubernetes is just one of the building blocks for easy and secure app deployment. It is not a one-shot answer for day two operations such as reliable databases, load balancing, backups, certificates, and data security...With SetOps, you don't need to care how we run containers – you'll profit from the sensible choices and long hours our infrastructure experts spent to make sure it runs well.
I have really mixed feelings about this response.
On the one hand, I 100% agree - vanilla k8s is not prod-ready, and you need to do a _lot_ of work to figure out some things, especially around persistent storage (but load balancing and certs are a pretty solved problem).
But the line "you don't need to care how we run containers" bugs me. Maybe your two-person start up doesn't need to know, but eventually you will grow to the point that you _do_ need to care how things are running, and need control over it. This is why so many companies end up outgrowing Heroku and have to go through an expensive migration.
What I'd love to see is a "batteries-included Kubernetes", which allows me to slowly take control over more and more of the stack, until I'm a 1000 person company and ready to run my own clusters.
Re: Show HN: SetOps – Run containers, databases and more in your own AWS account
#4> Isn't it just Kubernetes under the hood? That's not the right question...Kubernetes is just one of the building blocks for easy and secure app deployment. It is not a one-shot answer for day two operations such as reliable databases, load balancing, backups, certificates, and data security...With SetOps, you don't need to care how we run containers – you'll profit from the sensible choices and long hours our infras…
This also makes sense as somebody who has never deployed to or operated k8s - I want the most prod-ready and batteries-included cluster config, which I deploy myself on my own infra, and can then customise as and when I need to, and learn as I go.
Re: Show HN: SetOps – Run containers, databases and more in your own AWS account
#5> Isn't it just Kubernetes under the hood? That's not the right question...Kubernetes is just one of the building blocks for easy and secure app deployment. It is not a one-shot answer for day two operations such as reliable databases, load balancing, backups, certificates, and data security...With SetOps, you don't need to care how we run containers – you'll profit from the sensible choices and long hours our infras…
Have you seen https://github.com/cloudfoundry/cf-for-k8s?
Re: Show HN: SetOps – Run containers, databases and more in your own AWS account
#6> Isn't it just Kubernetes under the hood? That's not the right question...Kubernetes is just one of the building blocks for easy and secure app deployment. It is not a one-shot answer for day two operations such as reliable databases, load balancing, backups, certificates, and data security...With SetOps, you don't need to care how we run containers – you'll profit from the sensible choices and long hours our infras…
Interesting thought. I can see your case for some growing companies. However I'm not sure if you would always need Kubernetes for this. What would you like adjust when we grow into a 1000 person company? I think you have still similar requirements like autoscaling, resource allocation, zero-downtime deployments etc. This is also possible without direct access to the container management.
And there are a lot of companies which do not become the next Unicorn and need an easy way to manage their container workloads.
SetOps currently uses ECS since it comes with no additional overhead costs for the management plane/API and does the container management job well enough. However this is not a definite decision and ECS could be replaced in the future. The main point is that there is a simple abstraction for users managing the workloads and that the "backend" is interchangeable.
Re: Show HN: SetOps – Run containers, databases and more in your own AWS account
#7> Isn't it just Kubernetes under the hood? That's not the right question...Kubernetes is just one of the building blocks for easy and secure app deployment. It is not a one-shot answer for day two operations such as reliable databases, load balancing, backups, certificates, and data security...With SetOps, you don't need to care how we run containers – you'll profit from the sensible choices and long hours our infras…
Have you seen https://github.com/cloudfoundry/cf-for-k8s ?
My experience with tools like these on Kubernetes, even with something stable and widely used as e.g. certmanager, is that in the end something still breaks and you still need to get familiar with all the building blocks. In comparison if you use managed services like the AWS Certificates service you have less friction and less risk for something to break.
Re: Show HN: SetOps – Run containers, databases and more in your own AWS account
#8> Isn't it just Kubernetes under the hood? That's not the right question...Kubernetes is just one of the building blocks for easy and secure app deployment. It is not a one-shot answer for day two operations such as reliable databases, load balancing, backups, certificates, and data security...With SetOps, you don't need to care how we run containers – you'll profit from the sensible choices and long hours our infras…
Interesting thought. I can see your case for some growing companies. However I'm not sure if you would always need Kubernetes for this. What would you like adjust when we grow into a 1000 person company? I think you have still similar requirements like autoscaling, resource allocation, zero-downtime deployments etc. This is also possible without direct access to the container management. And there are a lot of compan…
Here's a few examples of policies/needs that I've seen companies run up against at scale. K8s does a great job solving them.
* Understanding which workloads share a node's memory/CPU, and isolating certain workloads for security reasons
* Running specific workloads on specific instance types (e.g. with GPU or extra CPU)
* Configuring network policy between workloads
* Airgapping certain workloads
* Setting priority levels for different workloads, so some scale more rapidly while others have to wait for a new node to be provisioned
* Customized scaling behavior (e.g. based on the depth of a queue or latency metrics)
* Multi-region support for DR
I could probably go on :)
Re: Show HN: SetOps – Run containers, databases and more in your own AWS account
#9Crowded space! Flightcontroller, qovery, Architect. Competition is stiff, I am interested to see where your product is heading.
Re: Show HN: SetOps – Run containers, databases and more in your own AWS account
#10I donno. I am looking for a simpler solution on top of AWS that abstracts away setting up the services with configuration but doesn't necessarily use containers for everything and def. not Kubernetes.
Is this not desirable for others ? All the solutions that I see are focussed on containerizing (I get that to an extent). But I would personally want a service on top of AWS that abstracts away setting up EC2, load balancers, auto scaling, RDS etc etc. Does it have to be kubernetes ?