4 ms·

Stripe for payments, AWS Elastic Beanstalk for hosting/deployments. Wish there was an even dumber alternative to Beanstalk. I've been tempted to build my own t

Stripe for payments, AWS Elastic Beanstalk for hosting/deployments. Wish there was an even dumber alternative to Beanstalk. I've been tempted to build my own thing to get closer to my ideal of uploading a jar and forgetting about it. (Raw javascript / vertx / postgres for actual development, but these aren't SaaS)

stockkid 6y ago
Beanstalk is cool. Just curious, in what ways could it be more simplified? I think we can already just upload our code and forget about it. It could be that I am missing something.
- jtolmar 6y ago
  There's a lot of configuration, and not a lot of debug output. Simple things that should be defaults like HTTPS forwarding instead require a barely-documented ngnx patch. If something goes wrong before your app comes up, it doesn't tell you. Logs are spread across several files, most of them meaningless because they're details about the AWS-generated environment. It does a good enough job of staying running once it's up though, so at least it's easy to forget why it was a pain to set up.
toomuchtodo 6y ago
Dumber Beanstalk would be Heroku?
WrtCdEvrydy 6y ago
CapRover can accept any docker file (or a zip file with a .captain file). You can provision most databases and external self hosted services on a simple UI. I self host it on a $5 droplet.
- jtolmar 6y ago
  Well the pitch is certainly good. I'll look into it, thanks!
mustardo 6y ago
My experience with Beanstalk was much the same had the feeling of a lot of hacky Ruby, Python scripts thrown together. Logs in random place, sometimes would get "stuck" Current project uses GCP App Engine "Flexible" which is easier and seems to be built on better foundations than Beanstalk. Build a docker image and run. Although like you we could skip the docker shenanigans and just need a JRE to run our uber .jar (distroless https://github.com/GoogleContainerTools/distroless/tree/master/java https://github.com/GoogleContainerTools/distroless/tree/mast... makes a basic JVM docker container easy)
kbyatnal 6y ago
This was a big reason why I switched over to Heroku. More expensive, for sure, but I'm so much more productive and don't have to worry about annoying config issues.

stockkid 6y ago

Beanstalk is cool. Just curious, in what ways could it be more simplified? I think we can already just upload our code and forget about it. It could be that I am missing something.

jtolmar 6y ago
There's a lot of configuration, and not a lot of debug output. Simple things that should be defaults like HTTPS forwarding instead require a barely-documented ngnx patch. If something goes wrong before your app comes up, it doesn't tell you. Logs are spread across several files, most of them meaningless because they're details about the AWS-generated environment. It does a good enough job of staying running once it's up though, so at least it's easy to forget why it was a pain to set up.

toomuchtodo 6y ago

Dumber Beanstalk would be Heroku?

WrtCdEvrydy 6y ago

CapRover can accept any docker file (or a zip file with a .captain file). You can provision most databases and external self hosted services on a simple UI. I self host it on a $5 droplet.

jtolmar 6y ago
Well the pitch is certainly good. I'll look into it, thanks!

mustardo 6y ago

My experience with Beanstalk was much the same had the feeling of a lot of hacky Ruby, Python scripts thrown together. Logs in random place, sometimes would get "stuck" Current project uses GCP App Engine "Flexible" which is easier and seems to be built on better foundations than Beanstalk. Build a docker image and run. Although like you we could skip the docker shenanigans and just need a JRE to run our uber .jar (distroless https://github.com/GoogleContainerTools/distroless/tree/master/java https://github.com/GoogleContainerTools/distroless/tree/mast... makes a basic JVM docker container easy)

kbyatnal 6y ago

This was a big reason why I switched over to Heroku. More expensive, for sure, but I'm so much more productive and don't have to worry about annoying config issues.