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Convox – Launch a Private Cloud in Minutes

convox.com

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Re: Convox – Launch a Private Cloud in Minutes

#21

Post by ddollar »

ekidd wrote: post #10
ddollar wrote: post #3

Hello! I'm part of the Convox core team and happy to answer any questions. Convox is an app deployment platform that you can install into your own AWS account. It uses ECS, ELB, Kinesis, and many other great AWS services under the hood but automates it all away to give you a deployment experience even easier than Heroku. Convox uses Docker under the hood so if you want to customize anything (distro, dependencies, etc…

Looks interesting! How is ECS working out so far for you? And what's your minimum per-application cost for single-container Docker web app with SSL?

ECS is working out great for us. We host all of our own internal infrastructure on Convox and have been very happy.

The minimum per-application cost would be for an ELB. Counting the slice of runtime cluster needed to run it I'd estimate around $20-25 per app as a minimum.

Re: Convox – Launch a Private Cloud in Minutes

#22

Post by ddollar »

mappu wrote: post #12

You have a "Convox, Inc" copyright on the website - is there a business / monetisation-plan behind this, or is it just the open source project?

Yes, there is a business behind Convox. The founders are all ex-Heroku engineers and have we all have a great deal of experience building this type of tooling and automation.

For now we are focused on building a great open-source platform.

Re: Convox – Launch a Private Cloud in Minutes

#23

Post by sjtgraham »

ddollar wrote: post #15
sjtgraham wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can Convox do non-internet-facing services? i.e. private internal services not routable from outside the VPC?

Absolutely! You can decide not to use a front-end load balancer. We have one user using Convox to spin up large worker pools on AWS. We also have plans on our roadmap to integrate with internal (inside the VPC only) ELBs for internal APIs and things of that nature.

> We also have plans on our roadmap to integrate with internal (inside the VPC only) ELBs for internal APIs and things of that nature.

This is what I'm getting at. Also just saw the issue pertaining to HIPAA, which probably requires the same thing.

Apps deployed on Empire apparently are only available inside the VPC unless a domain name is added, it doesn't actually work like that (when I deployed the Empire stack all boxes had public IPs and a security group allowing ingress from the internet 😓), but the idea is a good one I think.

Oh, and thanks. Knowing you're behind it I'm sure Convox will be great. I'm looking forward to watching it develop and using it myself.

Re: Convox – Launch a Private Cloud in Minutes

#24

Post by ddollar »

benley wrote: post #16
ddollar wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is similar to Deis in goals but it differs substantially in implementation. Because Convox runs on AWS we can rely on stable and scalable services only available on that platform such as ELB and DynamoDB. Deis uses its own internal Postgres and implements a custom load balancer, scheduler, etc. We believe using the hosted services will help you keep your operational costs down over time.

How does Convox compare to Empire? I see a bunch of similarities (good use of AWS features in particular), and they both look pretty great. (Empire: https://github.com/remind101/empire , http://engineering.remind.com/introducing-empire/ )

Empire is awesome, we think it's a great project. We have been swapping notes with the folks working on it.

The primary difference is that Convox is backed by a company for which this is our product and has a full-time team dedicated to it.

Re: Convox – Launch a Private Cloud in Minutes

#25

Post by icpmacdo »

ddollar wrote: post #18
icpmacdo wrote: post #8

How is this different than Dokku?

Unless it has changed since I last look Dokku only runs on a single server. The other major difference is that software like Dokku is trying to run anywhere. Because we are only trying to run on AWS we do not need to build custom schedulers, load balancers, routers, etc. We believe this will reduce your operational costs over time.

Thanks for the reply, Im starting a project with dokku right now but its giving me trouble so I might switch over

Re: Convox – Launch a Private Cloud in Minutes

#26

Post by ddollar »

bvanvugt wrote: post #14

Is anyone using this in production? If so, at what scale?

Yes, we have people using this in production, including ourselves! Most of the scale right now is on the small-to-moderate end but once your application is up and running you're really only limited by how much AWS you want to pay for :)

Re: Convox – Launch a Private Cloud in Minutes

#27

Post by ddollar »

rjurney wrote: post #20

So what does Convox, Inc. offer?

Currently we only offer Convox the open-source platform :) In the future we are considering paid support and other monetization strategies but the base platform itself will always be open-source and available for you to do with as you please.

Re: Convox – Launch a Private Cloud in Minutes

#30

Post by benley »

ddollar wrote: post #24
benley wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does Convox compare to Empire? I see a bunch of similarities (good use of AWS features in particular), and they both look pretty great. (Empire: https://github.com/remind101/empire , http://engineering.remind.com/introducing-empire/ )

Empire is awesome, we think it's a great project. We have been swapping notes with the folks working on it. The primary difference is that Convox is backed by a company for which this is our product and has a full-time team dedicated to it.

Fair enough :-)
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