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I agree with the author that writing your own snowflake PaaS is a mistake. I work at Pivotal on the fringes of CloudFoundry; OpenShift Origin is a competing sys

I agree with the author that writing your own snowflake PaaS is a mistake. I work at Pivotal on the fringes of CloudFoundry; OpenShift Origin is a competing system. Either way, you should be using a full PaaS instead of rolling your own. But this is the bit that surprises me: They get you hooked for free and the next level is $1,496 per month… wtf! MongoLabs is little better. $1500 per month, versus weeks of engineering time spent tinkering with and upgrading and bug-fixing and trouble-shooting and security-patching a hand-made solution is a fantastic bargain. Supposing the author was running on Pivotal Web Services. It would've taken less time to add a MongoLab service (about 2 minutes, 3 if you include a re-stage) than to perform the CloudFormation calculation (say, half an hour, resulting in no running software). PaaSes like Heroku, Cloud Foundry and OpenShift are feature-complete for the cases that application engineers and operators care about. If you roll your own you're directing effort to something that doesn't provide user value. If I walked in on someone at a regular dev company rolling their own operating system for a web service, I'd be surprised. Writing their own programming language? I'd be skeptical. Oh you built a new HTTP server? Why? Outside of a research environment, why are you doing that? And so it is with PaaSes. The marker was passed years ago. We don't need to go on these spiritual quests any more. Disclaimer: I work for Pivotal, which donates the majority of engineering effort on Cloud Foundry. I'm actually in Pivotal Labs, the agile consulting division, which is where I morphed into a lay preacher for just-using-a-PaaS-dammit.

FooBarWidget 11y ago
> $1500 per month, versus weeks of engineering time spent tinkering with and upgrading and bug-fixing and trouble-shooting and security-patching a hand-made solution is a fantastic bargain. That's only true if you look at it from the point of view of an enterprise, a startup with VC funding, or generally a "rich" company. If you're a cash-strapped startup/small business with only a few thousand dollars profit per month, $1500/mo is a huge deal.
- wbkang 11y ago
  Wouldn't need to worry about auto scaling Mongo yourself if you at that stage of the company though? You'd need to have quite a bit of traffic to need it. And if you do, hopefully you have generated $ needed to support it.
- jacques_chester 11y ago
  Engineering time isn't free, even for cash-strapped startups. For a startup, your hyperfocus has to be on creating a product that is attractive to users. Everything else is entirely secondary.
- curun1r 11y ago
  This is especially true when you consider what that same $1500/mo will buy you using something like DynamoDB or Aurora. Both those solutions will give you more storage, are managed for you and will mostly scale up with you, meaning you don't have to start anywhere near $1500/mo. I know the article said tying yourself to Amazon feels wrong. But focusing your time and energy on managing infrastructure that could be managed by Amazon instead of focusing your time and energy on your product feels more wrong to me. There are exactly zero startups that have succeeded because they had a more reliable and performant MongoDB installation.
  - nzoschke 11y ago
    A big +1 for DynamoDB + S3 for a cash strapped startup. If you are writing an app from scratch, and the cost of data services is a big concern, then don't pick a data store with complex and expensive replication properties. DynamoDB is admittedly harder to understand and use than Postgres or Mongo, but when you figure it out its a HTTP data API with no setup or maintenance costs. $8/mo of DynamoDB can easily cover your users and other CRUD.
- vacri 11y ago
  > If you're a cash-strapped startup/small business with only a few thousand dollars profit per month, $1500/mo is a huge deal If it takes 30+ hours of engineering time per month (less than one work week), then you've hit your break-even point. This is assuming the engineer is $50/hour, including overheads.
vinceguidry 11y ago
Yes, I think devs sometimes forget that this is the bleeding-est of bleeding edges. Hell, I can't even get a normal Digital Ocean server instance to programmatically drop and recreate doing minimal things like creating a user and setting SSH keys. I suppose if I wanted to learn something heavyweight like Chef or Puppet I could, but for now, I just maintain a list of commands to run, and understand that Digital Ocean servers can't quite be treated like livestock just yet, though I can fake it pretty well. Eventually Digital Ocean will get around to making the platform changes, which are all already in feature request. Engineering time is very limited and the support cases are exponentially large. The author wanted MongoDB supported in the hard case. Well, that means you also need to support 4 or 5 other, similar databases the same way. If you want a bleeding-edge PaaS with corporate support, you should expect to pay corporate prices. If the project / organization doesn't allow for that, then either the requirements or the mindset is off-kilter. I think the what the author is really mad about is the vendor lock-in. That used to bother me too, until I realized that learning new platforms is done on my employer's dime and not mine. A few more years, and some other challenge will be on the bleeding edge and this one will be mostly solved, meaning that open-source community solutions will exist that you can build once and forget about it. Knowing most devs, they'll spend all their time complaining about whatever the new edge is instead of marveling at how much easier things are now compared to the 'bad old days' of 2015.
- m-app 11y ago
  > Hell, I can't even get a normal Digital Ocean server instance to programmatically drop and recreate doing minimal things like creating a user and setting SSH keys. I suppose if I wanted to learn something heavyweight like Chef or Puppet I could, but for now, I just maintain a list of commands to run, and understand that Digital Ocean servers can't quite be treated like livestock just yet, though I can fake it pretty well. Eventually Digital Ocean will get around to making the platform changes, which are all already in feature request. It sounds like you might benefit from Cloud-config for droplets: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/an-introduction-to-cloud-config-scripting https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/an-introduc... Or have you tried that already? It's also available through their API, BTW.
vidarh 11y ago
> And so it is with PaaSes. The marker was passed years ago. We don't need to go on these spiritual quests any more. The CloudFoundry installation instructions alone makes me run away screaming. Same with OpenStack. There's no "spiritual quest" involved, but a lack of willingness to add unnecessary complexity. Of course it looks different when you've already eaten the cost of getting it up and running and/or has readily available in-house expertise.
- jacques_chester 11y ago
  > The CloudFoundry installation instructions alone makes me run away screaming. BOSH is getting some much-needed love right now for this reason. Incidentally, for long-running stateful services, BOSH is the right tool for the job. We use it for Cloud Foundry, MySQL and a bunch of others I don't recall right now. Anyhow. If you just want to see quickly if CF fits your needs, the place to go is Lattice[1], explicitly designed to be installable on a laptop. In the meantime, you can let Pivotal host you on Pivotal Web Services[2]. That plucky startup from Armonk, IBM, are the second-largest donor of engineering effort to Cloud Foundry. Their public installation is BlueMix[3]. Other hosted installations of Cloud Foundry are CenturyLink AppFog[4], anynines[5] and Swisscom Application Cloud[6]. When you decide you want something in-house, you can buy Pivotal Cloud Foundry with all the support bells and whistles. Or you can just use the standard cf-release repo and deploy it to you own OpenStack or vSphere environment. Or on AWS. Or on Azure. Or some mixture of the above. [1] http://lattice.cf http://lattice.cf [2] https://run.pivotal.io https://run.pivotal.io [3] https://console.ng.bluemix.net/ https://console.ng.bluemix.net/ [4] https://www.ctl.io/appfog/ https://www.ctl.io/appfog/ [5] http://www.anynines.com/ http://www.anynines.com/ [6] https://www.swisscom.ch/en/business/enterprise/offer/cloud-data-center-services/paas/application-cloud.html https://www.swisscom.ch/en/business/enterprise/offer/cloud-d... Edit: I'd be interested in hearing why people object to this comment.
  - bjterry 11y ago
    It reads as an extended advertisement for you company's services, and your comment doesn't really respond to the statement of the person you replied to. He said CloudFoundry's installation instructions were bad, then you replied as if he said he was unsure if CF "fit his needs" and was looking for more ways to try it out, which is a pretty salesy response. I think mostly it's a question of tone and length. If you had a couple sentences acknowledging that the installation instructions sucked, and saying he should go with BOSH, you probably wouldn't have gotten downvoted.
orf 11y ago
On what planet is it worth paying $20,000 per month for a vm??

FooBarWidget 11y ago

> $1500 per month, versus weeks of engineering time spent tinkering with and upgrading and bug-fixing and trouble-shooting and security-patching a hand-made solution is a fantastic bargain. That's only true if you look at it from the point of view of an enterprise, a startup with VC funding, or generally a "rich" company. If you're a cash-strapped startup/small business with only a few thousand dollars profit per month, $1500/mo is a huge deal.

wbkang 11y ago
Wouldn't need to worry about auto scaling Mongo yourself if you at that stage of the company though? You'd need to have quite a bit of traffic to need it. And if you do, hopefully you have generated $ needed to support it.
jacques_chester 11y ago
Engineering time isn't free, even for cash-strapped startups. For a startup, your hyperfocus has to be on creating a product that is attractive to users. Everything else is entirely secondary.
curun1r 11y ago
This is especially true when you consider what that same $1500/mo will buy you using something like DynamoDB or Aurora. Both those solutions will give you more storage, are managed for you and will mostly scale up with you, meaning you don't have to start anywhere near $1500/mo. I know the article said tying yourself to Amazon feels wrong. But focusing your time and energy on managing infrastructure that could be managed by Amazon instead of focusing your time and energy on your product feels more wrong to me. There are exactly zero startups that have succeeded because they had a more reliable and performant MongoDB installation.
- nzoschke 11y ago
  A big +1 for DynamoDB + S3 for a cash strapped startup. If you are writing an app from scratch, and the cost of data services is a big concern, then don't pick a data store with complex and expensive replication properties. DynamoDB is admittedly harder to understand and use than Postgres or Mongo, but when you figure it out its a HTTP data API with no setup or maintenance costs. $8/mo of DynamoDB can easily cover your users and other CRUD.
vacri 11y ago
> If you're a cash-strapped startup/small business with only a few thousand dollars profit per month, $1500/mo is a huge deal If it takes 30+ hours of engineering time per month (less than one work week), then you've hit your break-even point. This is assuming the engineer is $50/hour, including overheads.

vinceguidry 11y ago

Yes, I think devs sometimes forget that this is the bleeding-est of bleeding edges. Hell, I can't even get a normal Digital Ocean server instance to programmatically drop and recreate doing minimal things like creating a user and setting SSH keys. I suppose if I wanted to learn something heavyweight like Chef or Puppet I could, but for now, I just maintain a list of commands to run, and understand that Digital Ocean servers can't quite be treated like livestock just yet, though I can fake it pretty well. Eventually Digital Ocean will get around to making the platform changes, which are all already in feature request. Engineering time is very limited and the support cases are exponentially large. The author wanted MongoDB supported in the hard case. Well, that means you also need to support 4 or 5 other, similar databases the same way. If you want a bleeding-edge PaaS with corporate support, you should expect to pay corporate prices. If the project / organization doesn't allow for that, then either the requirements or the mindset is off-kilter. I think the what the author is really mad about is the vendor lock-in. That used to bother me too, until I realized that learning new platforms is done on my employer's dime and not mine. A few more years, and some other challenge will be on the bleeding edge and this one will be mostly solved, meaning that open-source community solutions will exist that you can build once and forget about it. Knowing most devs, they'll spend all their time complaining about whatever the new edge is instead of marveling at how much easier things are now compared to the 'bad old days' of 2015.

m-app 11y ago
> Hell, I can't even get a normal Digital Ocean server instance to programmatically drop and recreate doing minimal things like creating a user and setting SSH keys. I suppose if I wanted to learn something heavyweight like Chef or Puppet I could, but for now, I just maintain a list of commands to run, and understand that Digital Ocean servers can't quite be treated like livestock just yet, though I can fake it pretty well. Eventually Digital Ocean will get around to making the platform changes, which are all already in feature request. It sounds like you might benefit from Cloud-config for droplets: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/an-introduction-to-cloud-config-scripting https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/an-introduc... Or have you tried that already? It's also available through their API, BTW.

vidarh 11y ago

> And so it is with PaaSes. The marker was passed years ago. We don't need to go on these spiritual quests any more. The CloudFoundry installation instructions alone makes me run away screaming. Same with OpenStack. There's no "spiritual quest" involved, but a lack of willingness to add unnecessary complexity. Of course it looks different when you've already eaten the cost of getting it up and running and/or has readily available in-house expertise.

jacques_chester 11y ago
> The CloudFoundry installation instructions alone makes me run away screaming. BOSH is getting some much-needed love right now for this reason. Incidentally, for long-running stateful services, BOSH is the right tool for the job. We use it for Cloud Foundry, MySQL and a bunch of others I don't recall right now. Anyhow. If you just want to see quickly if CF fits your needs, the place to go is Lattice[1], explicitly designed to be installable on a laptop. In the meantime, you can let Pivotal host you on Pivotal Web Services[2]. That plucky startup from Armonk, IBM, are the second-largest donor of engineering effort to Cloud Foundry. Their public installation is BlueMix[3]. Other hosted installations of Cloud Foundry are CenturyLink AppFog[4], anynines[5] and Swisscom Application Cloud[6]. When you decide you want something in-house, you can buy Pivotal Cloud Foundry with all the support bells and whistles. Or you can just use the standard cf-release repo and deploy it to you own OpenStack or vSphere environment. Or on AWS. Or on Azure. Or some mixture of the above. [1] http://lattice.cf http://lattice.cf [2] https://run.pivotal.io https://run.pivotal.io [3] https://console.ng.bluemix.net/ https://console.ng.bluemix.net/ [4] https://www.ctl.io/appfog/ https://www.ctl.io/appfog/ [5] http://www.anynines.com/ http://www.anynines.com/ [6] https://www.swisscom.ch/en/business/enterprise/offer/cloud-data-center-services/paas/application-cloud.html https://www.swisscom.ch/en/business/enterprise/offer/cloud-d... Edit: I'd be interested in hearing why people object to this comment.
- bjterry 11y ago
  It reads as an extended advertisement for you company's services, and your comment doesn't really respond to the statement of the person you replied to. He said CloudFoundry's installation instructions were bad, then you replied as if he said he was unsure if CF "fit his needs" and was looking for more ways to try it out, which is a pretty salesy response. I think mostly it's a question of tone and length. If you had a couple sentences acknowledging that the installation instructions sucked, and saying he should go with BOSH, you probably wouldn't have gotten downvoted.

orf 11y ago

On what planet is it worth paying $20,000 per month for a vm??