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I have been a paid customer of Zeit for a while and have really loved their products thus far. But v2 is making me reconsider my plans. The other day, I tried t

I have been a paid customer of Zeit for a while and have really loved their products thus far. But v2 is making me reconsider my plans. The other day, I tried to scale an existing app to an additional region and I promptly found out that Node apps are not supported in their newer regions, such as GRU. The new regions only support v2 and can't even run a Hello World without Docker, which is completely stupid. I'm not going to add any bloat to my app just to use those regions. And even if I did, I wouldn't want to go "serverless" any time soon, given the much more mature and robust ecosystem for traditional server frameworks. Lots of things around serverless are still being figured out. Yes, it is totally doable to run some things that way in production, but it's not yet what I would personally choose for most of my apps.

igneo676 8y ago
If I'm not mistaken, V1 just takes normal Node apps and wraps them in a Docker container. At least, that's how they handle deploying to platforms outside of Zeit such as AWS. V2 just makes that process explicit and normalized across all languages/frameworks
- sholladay 8y ago
  I believe you are correct that v1 uses Docker behind the scenes. And that's fine with me so long as it doesn't infect my project, which hasn't been a problem until now. The beauty of Zeit's v1 platform was precisely that it would take my code and run it smoothly with no fancy configuration or modifications. It Just Works. I generally prefer explicit behavior, but this is a case where the behavior is not something I want to know or care about. My app should run on any common platform without special configuration or modification. And it does, everywhere... except on Now v2. I wanted to like it, but the desire is just not there. Maybe I'll keep using them for DNS but host elsewhere. Zeit's command line experience is top notch and I'd like to keep that aspect where I can.
diminoten 8y ago
Docker's pretty great, I recommend at least trying to put a simple container around your app, if that'll get you onto v2. It's probably a lot easier than migrating your whole app off of their platform. Also, look at it from their perspective. They support everything when they support Docker, no need to have specific tooling for Node.JS.
- sholladay 8y ago
  I have no use for Docker. It's literally just an extra layer that does nothing useful for me. npm starts the server and I'm good to go: npm start for production, npm run start-local to run with a local database. Keep It Simple, Stupid. I see so many people using Docker as their scripting file, even though it actually adds complexity. I have no problem with it existing for those who need it, but most apps absolutely do not benefit from it. In fact, I've occasionally had to write code to handle Docker containers in a special way... completely defeats the purpose of normalizing the environment.
- wishinghand 8y ago
  Docker was needless before v2 and then making us add it to just run ‘npm start’ is kind of dumb.
Rauchg 8y ago
To be perfectly clear: Now 2.0 is already fully rolled out to all regions. As a matter of fact, this is an example of executing `now --regions all` :) https://twitter.com/rauchg/status/1060616737215795200 https://twitter.com/rauchg/status/1060616737215795200
- sholladay 8y ago
  I ran that exact command a few weeks ago and it tried to scale my existing app to GRU (which is what I want!) and it immediately threw an error saying that GRU requires the v2 Docker serverless crap. Not gonna happen! Maybe it's ignoring GRU now, but that just leaves me without a region that I wanted...

igneo676 8y ago

If I'm not mistaken, V1 just takes normal Node apps and wraps them in a Docker container. At least, that's how they handle deploying to platforms outside of Zeit such as AWS. V2 just makes that process explicit and normalized across all languages/frameworks

sholladay 8y ago
I believe you are correct that v1 uses Docker behind the scenes. And that's fine with me so long as it doesn't infect my project, which hasn't been a problem until now. The beauty of Zeit's v1 platform was precisely that it would take my code and run it smoothly with no fancy configuration or modifications. It Just Works. I generally prefer explicit behavior, but this is a case where the behavior is not something I want to know or care about. My app should run on any common platform without special configuration or modification. And it does, everywhere... except on Now v2. I wanted to like it, but the desire is just not there. Maybe I'll keep using them for DNS but host elsewhere. Zeit's command line experience is top notch and I'd like to keep that aspect where I can.

diminoten 8y ago

Docker's pretty great, I recommend at least trying to put a simple container around your app, if that'll get you onto v2. It's probably a lot easier than migrating your whole app off of their platform. Also, look at it from their perspective. They support everything when they support Docker, no need to have specific tooling for Node.JS.

sholladay 8y ago
I have no use for Docker. It's literally just an extra layer that does nothing useful for me. npm starts the server and I'm good to go: npm start for production, npm run start-local to run with a local database. Keep It Simple, Stupid. I see so many people using Docker as their scripting file, even though it actually adds complexity. I have no problem with it existing for those who need it, but most apps absolutely do not benefit from it. In fact, I've occasionally had to write code to handle Docker containers in a special way... completely defeats the purpose of normalizing the environment.
wishinghand 8y ago
Docker was needless before v2 and then making us add it to just run ‘npm start’ is kind of dumb.

Rauchg 8y ago

To be perfectly clear: Now 2.0 is already fully rolled out to all regions. As a matter of fact, this is an example of executing `now --regions all` :) https://twitter.com/rauchg/status/1060616737215795200 https://twitter.com/rauchg/status/1060616737215795200

sholladay 8y ago
I ran that exact command a few weeks ago and it tried to scale my existing app to GRU (which is what I want!) and it immediately threw an error saying that GRU requires the v2 Docker serverless crap. Not gonna happen! Maybe it's ignoring GRU now, but that just leaves me without a region that I wanted...