Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Convox – Launch a Private Cloud in Minutes

convox.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 118 posts

Re: Convox – Launch a Private Cloud in Minutes

#81

Post by nzoschke »

pscanf wrote: post #57
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 awesome! It might be just what we need for a project we're working on at my company. :-) Do you perhaps have a writeup or something about the convox architecture? (Which AWS services it uses, how etc)

@oreng put together a nice high-level diagram: http://oren.github.io/blog/convox.html

We're using CloudFormation and Lambda to create and update everything.

The "convox" stack the installer creates makes a VPC, ASG, ECS cluster and ELB, and registers an ECS task and service for the API and private registry.

It also creates DynamoDB table for recording every build and release. And creates a KMS key for encrypting all the environment variables before we save them to S3.

An app stack the "convox deploy" command creates makes ECS tasks and services and an ELB for all the containers in `docker-compose.yml`, and creates a Kinesis stream for app logs.

Take a look at the CloudFormation tools as a starting point:

https://github.com/convox/kernel/blob/master/dist/kernel.jso... https://github.com/convox/app/blob/master/template/staging.t...

Re: Convox – Launch a Private Cloud in Minutes

#82

Post by nzoschke »

kevinSuttle wrote: post #55

"The simplicity of Heroku. The power of AWS." The privacy of "?". Was waiting for this part since it was included in the title.

How about something like:

"The privacy of your own data center."

To me, AWS VPC is a game-changer for privacy. The isolation and network configuration options satisfy every need of a "private cloud" or "behind the firewall install".

Re: Convox – Launch a Private Cloud in Minutes

#83

Post by nzoschke »

badri wrote: post #78

sounds very similar to tsuru: https://tsuru.io/

There is a tremendous amount of awesome work happening in this space. Tsuru is one such great project, thanks for adding it to the thread.

One big difference is that Convox uses managed services over writing and running our own components. For example, we use DynamoDB for saving build and release records. And we use ELBs for load balancing and routing.

This approach ties us closely to AWS, but results in a stack of infrastructure that has minimal operational overhead (e.g. Amazon is keeping DynamoDB Available, you don't have to manage an etcd cluster), and great scaling potential (vs tuning and scaling individual HAProxy nodes).

Re: Convox – Launch a Private Cloud in Minutes

#84

Post by bradgessler »

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…

This project looks great!

Is anybody working full-time on the project? Are there plans to commercialize any aspects of this? How confident are you that the project will get to "1.0".

Re: Convox – Launch a Private Cloud in Minutes

#86

Post by bliti »

dxhdr wrote: post #54

Cool product! This is fairly unrelated but since you've open-sourced your code (thanks!) I was just browsing around the 'cli' project and saw heaps of the following: if err != nil { stdcli.Error(err) return } Is this idiomatic Go? It's just sprinkled everywhere and makes it hard to follow logic at a glance.

I work with Go at my day job and that's idiomatic. It's not the most beautiful or readable language for sure. This does force devs to think about error handling. Although it's not that different from code littered with exceptions (like some Java codebases).
Post reply on HN