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Migrating from Heroku to AWS using Docker

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Re: Migrating from Heroku to AWS using Docker

#2

Post by seanwilson »

> With Heroku, you lose fine-grained control and visibility over your servers. Installing custom software in your server stack is far from straightforward, and it’s not possible to SSH into a server to debug a CPU or memory issue.

I found this annoying at first along with not being able to save files to the server. However, Heroku is forcing you to automate server setup so servers can be restarted, destroyed and created without losing data or functionality. If you allow SSHing in to install software and storing files on the server, you're probably going to get some nasty surprises when you need to recreate the server or add more servers for example.

You mention it was a couple of months of work to transition to your EC2+Docker setup. How much time do you find is required to maintain this compared to your Heroku setup? Heroku does seem expensive but I find it can have lower setup and maintenance costs than a custom solution.

Being able to run and test your Docker setup locally is a nice benefit though. I haven't found a satisfying solution to this for Heroku yet.

Re: Migrating from Heroku to AWS using Docker

#4

Post by reustle »

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Re: Migrating from Heroku to AWS using Docker

#5

Post by istvan__ »

Would you mind sharing more details about the Docker setup on AWS?

"Our code deployment flow was straightforward, and mostly consisted of building a Docker image off our latest codebase and distributing it to our server instances, with the help of a Docker image server. We only needed to write a few short Chef scripts to download the latest Docker image build and start up a new Docker container."

I was wondering what did you mean downloading the latest Dockerfile and build the image, or what sort of building are you performing with an image if it was not an accident? The diagram suggest a slightly different setup.

I my mind, you build your docker images on the CI/CB system and push them to a repository, than you can deploy them with docker pull. I was wondering if you used the docker-registry service or went for Docker Hub? I finished migrating some of our stuff to AWS/Docker last week but we skipped Opsworks part. I am familiar with Chef though, I just think it is overly complicated and it is hard to debug if something goes sideways.

Anyways, thanks for sharing.

Re: Migrating from Heroku to AWS using Docker

#6

Post by toomuchtodo »

istvan__ wrote: post #5

Would you mind sharing more details about the Docker setup on AWS? "Our code deployment flow was straightforward, and mostly consisted of building a Docker image off our latest codebase and distributing it to our server instances, with the help of a Docker image server. We only needed to write a few short Chef scripts to download the latest Docker image build and start up a new Docker container." I was wondering what…

Store your Dockerfile in version control, either in its own repo with other Docker files or in the same repo as the app.

Use Jenkins (or preferred build system) to fetch the Dockerfile, your app, build the Docker container, and then docker push to your own private docker registry.

Bake your AMIs with your Docker image (tags are your friend). You don't want to have to scale and find out you're having problems fetching Docker images from your private registry. You'll still be using config management for the underlying Docker host.

Hope this helps!

Re: Migrating from Heroku to AWS using Docker

#7

Post by skwirl »

seanwilson wrote: post #2

> With Heroku, you lose fine-grained control and visibility over your servers. Installing custom software in your server stack is far from straightforward, and it’s not possible to SSH into a server to debug a CPU or memory issue. I found this annoying at first along with not being able to save files to the server. However, Heroku is forcing you to automate server setup so servers can be restarted, destroyed and crea…

>I found this annoying at first along with not being able to save files to the server. However, Heroku is forcing you to automate server setup so servers can be restarted, destroyed and created without losing data or functionality. If you allow SSHing in to install software and storing files on the server, you're probably going to get some nasty surprises when you need to recreate the server or add more servers for example.

The point the author was making was that automating the installation of custom software on Heroku sucks and that you can't SSH in to debug issues that only occur in the Heroku environment and can't be reproduced locally. Nowhere did the author say they were SSHing in with the intention of installing custom software.

The author is using Docker to create images that contain the OS, the custom software, and the app itself. These images are then loaded onto EC2 instances by Chef and the application is run. There's no manual installation.

Even if the author didn't use Docker, there are a lot of ways to automate server setup with AWS. Anyone seriously using AWS for production software is automating server setup. This isn't some kind of Heroku specific concept.

Re: Migrating from Heroku to AWS using Docker

#9

Post by madeofpalk »

If you're looking at doing this, especially if you're moving from Heroku and/or using Docker, seriously consider AWS ElasticBeanstalk. http://aws.amazon.com/elasticbeanstalk/

In case you don't know, ElasticBeanstalk is the AWS Heroku but _a lot_ more flexible. It's basically a layer on top of EC2 and ELB. It takes care of creating auto-scaled EC2 instances to your specification and deploying your application to it (with rolling updates!)

Out of the box, it supports PHP, Java, Python, Ruby, Node.js, .NET, Go, and Docker (so, everything else), and it's fairly trivial to set up a heroku-like git-based deploy with something like circle ci.

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