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Introducing Empire: A Self-Hosted PaaS Built on Docker and Amazon ECS

engineering.remind.com

41–50 of 80 posts

Re: Introducing Empire: A Self-Hosted PaaS Built on Docker and Amazon ECS

#41

aws is silly expensive. Why didnt you build this on top of digitalocean? Digitalocean is so awesome right now. They dont even charge for bandwidth overages.

DO's "most popular plan" is $10/mo [1] AWS's t2.micro in us-east is ~$10.30/mo with a standard 8GB disk [2]

Both VMs are single core, 1GB RAM. DO gives you 30GB SSD, but AWS has a freely adjustable disk size. Upscaling from 8 to 30GB is another $2 - but how many single-core low ram instances use double-digit GB?

In the middle, DO has 8 core, 16GB for $160/mo, AWS has 4 core 16GB for 185/mo + storage.

At the top end of the DO offerings, DO's 20-core 64GB machine in $640/mo, and AWS's 16-core 64GB machine is $725mo + storage (not much). The difference in pricing is not that crazy, and you get a crapload of extra free features on AWS.

Those AWS prices are with the "On-Demand pricing". If you're willing to lock-in for a year, reduce by 1/3. The argument that DO is "OMG cheaper" than AWS is no longer valid.

[1] https://www.digitalocean.com/pricing/ [2] http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/

Re: Introducing Empire: A Self-Hosted PaaS Built on Docker and Amazon ECS

#42

aws is silly expensive. Why didnt you build this on top of digitalocean? Digitalocean is so awesome right now. They dont even charge for bandwidth overages.

"But they'd be wrong! Truth is, I thought it mattered. I thought that [the marginal hosting costs between cloud service providers] mattered. But does it bollocks. Not compared to how [developer productivity and costs] matter."[0]

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W3tFZxhVaXo

Re: Introducing Empire: A Self-Hosted PaaS Built on Docker and Amazon ECS

#43
post #41

aws is silly expensive. Why didnt you build this on top of digitalocean? Digitalocean is so awesome right now. They dont even charge for bandwidth overages.

DO's "most popular plan" is $10/mo [1] AWS's t2.micro in us-east is ~$10.30/mo with a standard 8GB disk [2] Both VMs are single core, 1GB RAM. DO gives you 30GB SSD, but AWS has a freely adjustable disk size. Upscaling from 8 to 30GB is another $2 - but how many single-core low ram instances use double-digit GB? In the middle, DO has 8 core, 16GB for $160/mo, AWS has 4 core 16GB for 185/mo + storage. At the top end o…

You seem to make the implicit assumption that a DO $10 VPS is equal in performance to a AWS t2.micro instance, which is not the case. For an example, check out:

http://serverbear.com/compare?Sort=Host&Order=asc&Server+Typ...

DO 1GB instance at $10/month has a UnixBench of 1041 [1], to beat that with AWS you have to spend $374/month.

Also, with the t2.micro you get an EBS disk, whose I/O you have to pay in addition to the instance cost. You also have to pay for the bandwidth out of the chosen AWS region. This is not the case on DO.

AWS complicated pricing makes comparison like yours very difficult and error-prone: I would suggest to go with AWS only if you need the particular features (like ELB, SQS, VPC, etc.) that DO doesn't offer.

[1] http://serverbear.com/1989-1gb-ssd--1-cpu-digitalocean [2] http://serverbear.com/240-extra-large-amazon-web-services

Re: Introducing Empire: A Self-Hosted PaaS Built on Docker and Amazon ECS

#44

How do you handle running one-off tasks (consoles, migrations etc) on this setup? This is something most of these systems seem to ignore...

We actually have a relay ( https://github.com/remind101/empire/tree/master/relay ) service that can be run alongside Empire that acts as a proxy to interactive Docker sessions. It's a bit of an experiment right now and something we'd like to solve better in the future, but it allows you to run containers with `emp run -a `.

Interesting... except for being limited to Node.js initially (now JVM too), I would think AWS Lambda would be almost ideal for this.

Re: Introducing Empire: A Self-Hosted PaaS Built on Docker and Amazon ECS

#45

aws is silly expensive. Why didnt you build this on top of digitalocean? Digitalocean is so awesome right now. They dont even charge for bandwidth overages.

DO is great for a lot of things, but it's not AWS. You can't allocate extra disk to a droplet, for example. AWS is a _much_ more complete offering than DO.

Agreed... AWS and Azure both offer a lot of services beyond just VPS hosting. Hosted database services, and extended blob/s3 storage are pretty valuable in and of themselves.

DO/Linode don't offer the equivalent, which means maintaining your own.. which is fine, but if you're relatively small, or a single person... time you dedicate to operations tasks is time you aren't developing features and/or fixing bugs. One's business is paramount... technology is just a tool to serve that.

Re: Introducing Empire: A Self-Hosted PaaS Built on Docker and Amazon ECS

#46
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DO's "most popular plan" is $10/mo [1] AWS's t2.micro in us-east is ~$10.30/mo with a standard 8GB disk [2] Both VMs are single core, 1GB RAM. DO gives you 30GB SSD, but AWS has a freely adjustable disk size. Upscaling from 8 to 30GB is another $2 - but how many single-core low ram instances use double-digit GB? In the middle, DO has 8 core, 16GB for $160/mo, AWS has 4 core 16GB for 185/mo + storage. At the top end o…

You seem to make the implicit assumption that a DO $10 VPS is equal in performance to a AWS t2.micro instance, which is not the case. For an example, check out: http://serverbear.com/compare?Sort=Host&Order=asc&Server+Typ... DO 1GB instance at $10/month has a UnixBench of 1041 [1], to beat that with AWS you have to spend $374/month. Also, with the t2.micro you get an EBS disk, whose I/O you have to pay in addition to…

Unixbench is a pretty awful benchmark unless the only thing you care about is disk IO (unlikely for a typical web app). The site you linked to doesn't even have data for AWS t2 instances types, so not really a useful data point for your comparison. The site only has data for instance types listed as "previous generation instances".

Re: Introducing Empire: A Self-Hosted PaaS Built on Docker and Amazon ECS

#47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You seem to make the implicit assumption that a DO $10 VPS is equal in performance to a AWS t2.micro instance, which is not the case. For an example, check out: http://serverbear.com/compare?Sort=Host&Order=asc&Server+Typ... DO 1GB instance at $10/month has a UnixBench of 1041 [1], to beat that with AWS you have to spend $374/month. Also, with the t2.micro you get an EBS disk, whose I/O you have to pay in addition to…

Unixbench is a pretty awful benchmark unless the only thing you care about is disk IO (unlikely for a typical web app). The site you linked to doesn't even have data for AWS t2 instances types, so not really a useful data point for your comparison. The site only has data for instance types listed as "previous generation instances".

It takes a little more effort to find it but they have data for t2 instances, for example:

http://serverbear.com/166-micro-amazon-web-services

Do you know of any other benchmark that paints a different picture?

Re: Introducing Empire: A Self-Hosted PaaS Built on Docker and Amazon ECS

#48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unixbench is a pretty awful benchmark unless the only thing you care about is disk IO (unlikely for a typical web app). The site you linked to doesn't even have data for AWS t2 instances types, so not really a useful data point for your comparison. The site only has data for instance types listed as "previous generation instances".

It takes a little more effort to find it but they have data for t2 instances, for example: http://serverbear.com/166-micro-amazon-web-services Do you know of any other benchmark that paints a different picture?

Check out http://www.cloudharmony.com/benchmarks for something with more current data.

Re: Introducing Empire: A Self-Hosted PaaS Built on Docker and Amazon ECS

#49
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

http://www.openshift.org/ or http://cloudfoundry.org/index.html , both used in production by f500 companies

Cloud Foundry requires a ton of (compute) overhead to get set up. It's very much intended for large projects. Hell, you need a separate VM just to install it. For anyone looking at a Dokku alternative, Cloud Foundry isn't one. Openshift is nice though.

Actually it's quite possible to run a full Cloud Foundry environment in a single VM, as seen with Stackato (http://www.stackato.com/), which can then be scaled out as necessary.
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