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Coolify’s rise to fame, and why it could be a big deal

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Re: Coolify’s rise to fame, and why it could be a big deal

#61

Post by RobotToaster »

lowkey wrote: post #60
RobotToaster wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Open source really needs something like the CC-BY-NC-ND* license. That seems akin to saying "vegan food really needs pork", since by definition a NC licence can't be open source. Not to mention such licences cause as many, if not more, problems than they solve. https://community.oscedays.org/t/why-are-non-commercial-lice...

Notably the open source foundation tried and failed to trademark the term open source in 1999. As such “by definition a NC license can’t be open source” is true only by certain definitions. Open source is a generic term, not owned by the OSI, despite the holy wars fought over it. I realize my post is controversial and may spur vitriol from some. It is an uncomfortable truth for many.

"Vegan" isn't trademarked either, but has a generally acknowledged meaning, just as open source has a generally acknowledged meaning of meeting the OSI open source definition.

Re: Coolify’s rise to fame, and why it could be a big deal

#62

Post by Zetaphor »

I'm starting to feel like the old man yelling at people to get off my lawn, but I don't understand why tools like this are desirable for something as critical as your infrastructure.

> Before that, I had only known pain. From renting a server, dockerizing, setting up a proxy, SSL certificates, monitoring—you name it!

Is this really so difficult? Especially in the age of docker I've never felt like deploying a new project was more straightforward. I have a handful of docker-compose files that I can copy-paste for any new project that get me spun up with a Node/Python server with LetsEncrypt SSL, optionally behind a reverse proxy. It takes me no more than 20 minutes to setup a new project which involves SSH'ing to the server, copying the files, and updating configs.

Why would I ever want to give up that level of control and reliability to saddle myself to a third party who does _magic_ to make my deployments happen? They can change their offering or their pricing at any time, and if I don't like it I now have to rip out all of their _proprietary magic_ in order to move to something more sensible.

I do think Coolify is an interesting exception as it's _self-hosted magic_, but that still leaves me with a single point of failure where I'm relying on someone else to make sure my backend keeps working. If your Coolify instance ever has a critical failure or your requirements are no longer compatible then you're right back to the same problem.

Am I out of touch? Are you really spinning up servers so frequently that this type of hard dependency is justified? Or are developers these days the ones who are out of touch (with their backend)?

Re: Coolify’s rise to fame, and why it could be a big deal

#63

Post by ffsm8 »

Zetaphor wrote: post #62

I'm starting to feel like the old man yelling at people to get off my lawn, but I don't understand why tools like this are desirable for something as critical as your infrastructure. > Before that, I had only known pain. From renting a server, dockerizing, setting up a proxy, SSL certificates, monitoring—you name it! Is this really so difficult? Especially in the age of docker I've never felt like deploying a new pro…

In my experience the actual time is usually vastly underestimated. You might take 20 minutes if you've just setup an equivalent project, but otherwise you're gonna take a lot longer to get everything wired up, including https certs. And you're likely only thinking of deploying already existing images right now, so you'll have to add another hour or so to configure a ci/CD pipeline, a container registry, permissions etc. unless you're fine doing deploys/builds manually. Unless you configure a cronjob to poll for changes via git, but now you're still gonna have to ssh in to check if everything worked with the build/deploy.

Tools like Coolify streamline this process and give you a preconfigured template to get everything wired up from a git repository push event to a deployment on a docker-swarm cluster, with a shiny UI to configure env variables and check the terminal output of the container etc

I'm not sure what you'd consider magic here though, it's mostly just quality of life templates and a coherent UI so you don't have to execute various commands via ssh

Re: Coolify’s rise to fame, and why it could be a big deal

#64

Post by oloila »

Coolify is good, I haven't found anything comparable. But it is so dumb silly in case of UX.

You switched to static container name for your release? (this turns off rolling updates) - try to find how to switch it back. I've not found.

It's complicated to understand what happened with your dockerfile build and find an error, because coolify wraps it with docker-compose dockerfile builders.

You want to move your deploy to another env? Oh, for some reason you can manage it inside deploy in Resource Operations inside deploy. You want to migrate 10 deploys? Haha, good luck.

Also I've met some problems while integrating private gitea with deploy sources for other deploys.

So, it's complicated and not just works, but there is nothing better

Re: Coolify’s rise to fame, and why it could be a big deal

#65

Post by zoomzoom »

Palmik wrote: post #58
zoomzoom wrote: post #27

At Coherence (withcoherence.com - I'm a cofounder) we are delivering the open-source benefits of Coolify (less vendor lock-in, cheap hosting costs) via our open-source CNC framework (cncframework.com) while still keeping a hosted SaaS control plane that eliminates the "few hours of fiddling with setup" that the blog author minimizes here. Maintenance and configuration complexity over time (as you customize and use cl…

How is this different from the Coolify hosted cloud, apart from the fact that you are the co-founder of Coherence and not Coolify. I've used neither solution, but just at a glance, right now I'd bet on Coolify -- it has more permissive license, it has active community of third party contributors and it amassed a large amount of private and corporate sponsors that likely make it sustainable. On the other hand, you've…

Appreciate the POV, and agree that Coolify has a much better community around it! A lot we can learn from. Not sure we agree on the license front since we do allow commercial use.

Coolify and cnc are very different technical solutions. Coolify is a server you deploy to a VM that then can schedule workloads onto that VM, managing features like ingress and updates. cnc is a client-side CLI that schedules workloads into managed cloud services like lambda, cloud run, ECS, or Kubernetes. It orchestrates public cloud provided services instead of providing them itself (e.g. RDS vs. MySQL in a docker container on a VM). The trade-offs here are too big for a comment and both are a great fit for different use cases. We dive in a bit deeper with our POV here: https://www.withcoherence.com/post/the-2024-web-hosting-repo...

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