Kamal Proxy – A minimal HTTP proxy for zero-downtime deployments
1–10 of 133 posts
Re: Kamal Proxy – A minimal HTTP proxy for zero-downtime deployments
#2DHH mentioned they built it to move from the cloud to bare metal. He glorifies the simplicity but I can't help thinking they are a special use case of predictable, non-huge load.
Uber, for example, moved to the cloud. I feel like in the span between them there are far more companies for which Kamal is not enough.
I hope I'm wrong, though. It'll be nice for many companies to be have the choice of exiting the cloud.
Re: Kamal Proxy – A minimal HTTP proxy for zero-downtime deployments
#3Strange choice of language for the actions:
>To route traffic through the proxy to a web application, you *deploy* instances of the application to the proxy. *Deploying* an instance makes it available to the proxy, and replaces the instance it was using before (if any).
>e.g. `kamal-proxy deploy service1 --target web-1:3000`
'Deploy' is a fairly overloaded term already. Fun conversations ahead. Is the app deployed? Yes? No I mean is it deployed to the proxy? Hmm our Kamal proxy script is gonna need some changes and a redeployment so that it deploys the deployed apps to the proxy correctly.
Unsure why they couldn't have picked something like 'bind', or 'intercept', or even just 'proxy'... why 'deploy'..
Re: Kamal Proxy – A minimal HTTP proxy for zero-downtime deployments
#4DHH mentioned they built it to move from the cloud to bare metal. He glorifies the simplicity but I can't help thinking they are a special use case of predictable, non-huge load. Uber, for example, moved to the cloud. I feel like in the span between them there are far more companies for which Kamal is not enough. I hope I'm wrong, though. It'll be nice for many companies to be have the choice of exiting the cloud.
I mean most B2B company have a pretty predictable load when providing services to employees..
I can get weeks advance notice before we have a load increase through new users
Re: Kamal Proxy – A minimal HTTP proxy for zero-downtime deployments
#5DHH mentioned they built it to move from the cloud to bare metal. He glorifies the simplicity but I can't help thinking they are a special use case of predictable, non-huge load. Uber, for example, moved to the cloud. I feel like in the span between them there are far more companies for which Kamal is not enough. I hope I'm wrong, though. It'll be nice for many companies to be have the choice of exiting the cloud.
You can’t talk about typical cases and then bring up Uber.
Re: Kamal Proxy – A minimal HTTP proxy for zero-downtime deployments
#6DHH mentioned they built it to move from the cloud to bare metal. He glorifies the simplicity but I can't help thinking they are a special use case of predictable, non-huge load. Uber, for example, moved to the cloud. I feel like in the span between them there are far more companies for which Kamal is not enough. I hope I'm wrong, though. It'll be nice for many companies to be have the choice of exiting the cloud.
> I feel like in the span between them there are far more companies for which Kamal is not enough.
I feel like this is a bias in the HN bubble: In the real world, 99% of companies with any sort of web servers (cloud or otherwise) are running very boring, constant, non-Uber workloads.
Re: Kamal Proxy – A minimal HTTP proxy for zero-downtime deployments
#7Strange choice of language for the actions: >To route traffic through the proxy to a web application, you *deploy* instances of the application to the proxy. *Deploying* an instance makes it available to the proxy, and replaces the instance it was using before (if any). >e.g. `kamal-proxy deploy service1 --target web-1:3000` 'Deploy' is a fairly overloaded term already. Fun conversations ahead. Is the app deployed? Y…
Deployed = running and registered to the proxy.
Re: Kamal Proxy – A minimal HTTP proxy for zero-downtime deployments
#8Also exciting that Kamal 2 (currently RC https://github.com/basecamp/kamal/releases) will support auto-SSL and make it easy to run multiple apps on one server with Kamal.
Re: Kamal Proxy – A minimal HTTP proxy for zero-downtime deployments
#9DHH mentioned they built it to move from the cloud to bare metal. He glorifies the simplicity but I can't help thinking they are a special use case of predictable, non-huge load. Uber, for example, moved to the cloud. I feel like in the span between them there are far more companies for which Kamal is not enough. I hope I'm wrong, though. It'll be nice for many companies to be have the choice of exiting the cloud.
I don't think that's the real point. The real point is that 'big 3' cloud providers are so overpriced that you could run hugely over provisioned infra 24/7 for your load (to cope with any spikes) and still save a fortune.
The other thing is that cloud hardware is generally very very slow and many engineers don't seem to appreciate how bad it is. Slow single thread performance because of using the most parallel CPUs possible (which are the cheapest per W for the hyperscalers), very poor IO speeds, etc.
So often a lot of this devops/infra work is solved by just using much faster hardware. If you have a fairly IO heavy workload then switching from slow storage to PCIe4 7gbyte/sec NVMe drives is going to solve so many problems. If your app can't do much work in parallel then CPUs with much faster single threading performance can have huge gains.
Re: Kamal Proxy – A minimal HTTP proxy for zero-downtime deployments
#10I don't understand how to use this, maybe I am missing something.
Following the example, it starts 4 replicas of a 'web' service. You can create a service by running a deploy to one of the replicas, let's say example-web-1. What does the other 3 replicas do?
Now, let's say I update 'web'. Let's assume I want to do a zero-downtime deployment. That means I should be able to run a build command on the 'web' service, start this service somehow (maybe by adding an extra replica), and then run a deploy against the new target?
If I run a `docker compose up --build --force-recreate web` this will bring down the old replica, turning everything moot.
Instructions unclear, can anyone chime in and help me understand?