10 ms·

Show HN: Heroku Alternative for Python/Django apps

183 points by appliku 5y ago

wartijn_ 5y ago
What are the benefits over using this instead of DO's app platform? https://www.digitalocean.com/products/app-platform/ https://www.digitalocean.com/products/app-platform/
- appliku 5y ago
  DO Apps platform in terms of pricing is as bad as Heroku's offering. They charge per instance of the process and it becomes pretty expensive. Appliku helps to reduce costs by putting processes on a single server. With Heroku Config Vars sync feature one of the customers managed to save around $7k/mo on fat Dynos that are insanely overpriced in Heroku. So while DO Apps platform will definitely have their target audience, Appliku allows to save a lot of cash. Hope I was able to answer your question :)
RussianCow 5y ago
This looks sleek, but I’ll ask the obvious question: Why use this over Heroku? I couldn’t find a good answer to that question from a quick look at the website, aside from maybe the fact that it uses AWS and Digital Ocean.
- capableweb 5y ago
  Heroku is a general apps platform. This seems to be tailored specifically to Django/Python (with the option of using your own Dockerfile so could deploy anything). One could easily imagine that the performance and stability should be a lot higher than with Heroku. If you're a Python-only shop, it might make more sense.
  - vldo 5y ago
    having something that specific, tailored for dynamic language, seems like overkill i'd undestand if it was for something highly performant and hard to deploy
    - capableweb 5y ago
      Maybe, but maybe not. If you're using Python/JavaScript and have a ton of dependencies, most of your deploy-time is gonna be spent downloading dependencies. If the host you're using is specifically setup for Python/JavaScript, they can run a registry mirror with 100% of the packages right next to the host, and remove basically most time spent downloading the packages. Same goes for other time-consuming activities like code coverage or even running the tests. If the applications running on the platform are somewhat heterogeneous, then you can start doing really aggressive performance work.
  - RussianCow 5y ago
    > One could easily imagine that the performance and stability should be a lot higher than with Heroku. No, I can’t imagine that. Why would performance be any different? I imagine most of these kinds of solutions use Docker behind the hood anyway, so they’re likely to be identical.
    - danielheath 5y ago
      Because Heroku is phenomenally expensive.
      - appliku 5y ago
        As i said in another comment Heroku is unbelievably expensive. What they offer for $250 per process can be done at $60/mo per whole app. When I helped them move all background workers and all non-production apps to Digital Ocean they ended up saving $7k/mo which blew my mind. It is easy to start on Heroku, but staying there is a black hole in any budget. Thankfully we've built Heroku Config Vars sync so one can move off of Heroku gradually.
        fnomnom 5y ago
        >Heroku is unbelievably expensive. only if developer/devops/admin time is free and for most it isnt. if 60 vs 250 /month is a breaking factor for you and your use case: go for it. if you need the software deployed to make real business it just doesnt matter.
        appliku 5y ago
        $250/mo per process. And with appliku it is done automatically so there is no need for admin/devops time.
        capableweb 5y ago
        > if you need the software deployed to make real business it just doesnt matter No wonder AWS can get away with the prices they have since people like you (and many more VC funded startups) simply have zero care about the price. For people who run "real" businesses (meaning you need to have a larger income than expense [meaning, everything not VC-funded]), price is always a part of the calculations, even when it comes to hosting.
- vldo 5y ago
  actually i'll ask something similar, why this over dokku?
  - appliku 5y ago
    You can do Dokku, you can setup dokku and deploy apps with dokku. no problem. But I wanted a solution where I don't need to remember anything DevOps while writing/shipping my apps. I also added a generous free plan that allows all features. Then AWS has free credits so one can start their next big thing without expenses and not learning a single thing about deployment at all
- appliku 5y ago
  Price. It is easy to start on Heroku. With one app, one process. When you have multiple apps and several processes there is a way to reduce costs and not loose in convenience. $10/mo droplet can hold plenty of apps and it is still $10/mo. If you don't need a production grade Database – Appliku has them at 0 cost. Back in a day I moved several of my side projects to Heroku. I was happy until i received a $90+ invoice by the end of the month. Now a $10/mo droplet holds even more projects for me.
  - eirki 5y ago
    This is my experience as well. $10 for each running process (server, worker, database) adds up very fast.
    - appliku 5y ago
      It doesn't seem like a lot when you enable one more resource for $7-10/mo. You can clearly see invoice "growth" when it adds app, right? :D
  - RussianCow 5y ago
    Thanks for the response. My two cents: price is not the thing that I would compete on. For any "real" business, the cost of Heroku is negligible compared to its benefits; a few hundred dollars per month in savings is just not enough to convince most companies to migrate to a completely new service that isn't as battle tested and has fewer features. At the same time, I'm not convinced you could make any significant amount of money tailoring your service to side projects. With that said, I think you have a great product and could probably make some decent money by offering some combination of niche features. Ideas off the top of my head: * Integrated metrics. Since you're primarily targeting Django apps, it should be feasible to collect health/performance stats from the apps and display them in a simple dashboard. You don't need to offer very much here; most companies would be more than happy with basic stats related to response times per route, although SQL query times would be really neat to see. * Automatic scaling for your Python projects. If you could apply the same ease of deployment to horizontal scaling, that would be really valuable. * Easy integration with AWS services like S3, SES, and SNS. You could do this in a number of ways. One idea is to provide a set of Django libraries that, for instance, makes sending SMS messages super simple, with no configuration needed when used via Appliku. Or you could integrate with existing libraries and just remove the configuration step for the developer. With at least one of the above (or some other differentiator), I could see Appliku taking off. In any case, you have a great product, and I wish you the best of luck!
- caymanjim 5y ago
  Heroku is AWS.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
rcarmo 5y ago
If you want to host your own, check out https://github.com/piku https://github.com/piku :)
- appliku 5y ago
  I wanted to host nothing. I wanted click click and deployed. But I've heard about piku many times seems like a great thing!
alexanderisora 5y ago
I am long time paid customer of Appliku. I've built a SaaS (https://unicornplatform.com https://unicornplatform.com) and before was hosted on Heroku. Migrating to Appliku saved me $400/mo in cloud costs. My app is React & Django and it works like a charm on Appliku. Good luck!
- howolduis 5y ago
  to all web developers: no one, absolutely no one, likes huge popups on their screen that covers the website.
- xu3u32 5y ago
  How are you serving react?
  - appliku 5y ago
    Built during the project build and uploaded to s3 and served via CDN.
    - xu3u32 5y ago
      No CORS hell there?
pbronez 5y ago
Can you talk a bit about the security model? Appliku requires an AWS user with: AmazonEC2FullAccess AmazonEC2ContainerRegistryFullAccess AmazonEC2ContainerServiceFullAccess AmazonS3FullAccess That's a lot of permissions into my AWS account. What are some easy ways to contain the damage that could be done if Appliku has a bug or the creditials are compromised?
- appliku 5y ago
  Hey! Thanks for question. I guess there is an article that needs updating. Appliku only needs AmazonEC2FullAccess. Well, if you feel that something is off you just revoke credentials. I will update the article now. Thanks again
  - mikepurvis 5y ago
    The point of a rich authorization model is not to have to rely on feelings.
- deberon 5y ago
  I would recommend dedicating an entire AWS account to this. Or, if you have a solid tagging strategy[0], you can craft your IAM policies to only allow Appliku access to resources tagged with a particular tag. 0 - https://docs.aws.amazon.com/IAM/latest/UserGuide/access_tags.html https://docs.aws.amazon.com/IAM/latest/UserGuide/access_tags...
  - appliku 5y ago
    Separate account will be the best strategy. I prefer having separate accounts for every project. Hustle to login between them, but the best isolation that can be between projects.
    - jpmoral 5y ago
      Sorry, 'hassle' not 'hustle'.
- 5y ago
slig 5y ago
Congrats on shipping! I could see myself using a service like yours, and bringing my own server is perfect as I can adjust and scale it up/down as needed. I'm thankful that Heroku prices are that extreme because it made me learn how to deploy and run everything by myself back in the day.
- appliku 5y ago
  Thanks for kind words. While I know how to deploy myself I am fed up with that. Especially when it comes to a new project. There are so many places where you can screw up with a typo or stuff like that. So while I know how to do it by myself, I don't enjoy doing that and that's how the project got started. By the way if curious i wrote a post about that: https://dev.to/kostjapalovic/tired-of-deployments-built-my-own-heroku-47ed https://dev.to/kostjapalovic/tired-of-deployments-built-my-o...
georgeleon 5y ago
We tried Heroku, and that was expensive. We tried deploying manually on AWS but it took a lot of time with a devops freelancer. Got sold on Appliku and haven't had to think about infrastructure and deployment at all. We also survived for a long time on the free plan, until we decided to have a separate server for staging environment. Works pretty well. Never had to learn anything about servers and SSH.
rvanlaar 5y ago
Hey Congrats on launching this. I really hope it'll grow. Here are my 2 cts. I've used dokku for this, running Django, for years and recently I moved a customer over to use the digital ocean app platform. There are a couple of things I find important when evaluating these platforms that I didn't see on the site: - is there database fail over with the multi server strong and powerful plans? - does appliku maintain the underlying servers and database? - is there monitoring?
- appliku 5y ago
  Hey, thanks for kind words! At the moment databases in Appliku are best fit for non-production environments. So while you can enjoy easy and great deployments of your apps, I am not ready yet to compete on the production databases front. So no, we don't offer fail over or even backups at the moment. Backups are in plans, but more advanced features for databases is not even in backlog.
  - derefr 5y ago
    Re: production-quality DBs, it's its whole own ball-game. Rather than getting into all of that, your time here might be better spent here finding DBaaS services that host on the same clouds Appliku deploys to, and partnering Appliku with them to guarantee predictable network-transit peering to the clouds your users are launching on; probably by setting up the install-time UX flow so that that DBaaS choice is made early in the setup flow, and constrains further choices (i.e. user chooses DBaaS X; Appliku knows what AZs it exists in in each cloud, and restricts user to deploying the app to those same AZs in order to ensure free transit.) In other words, do the backend work Heroku does to add a new DBaaS "add-on" partner, but without reselling/wrapping the resulting service, instead just giving a UX to bind to it.
    - appliku 5y ago
      One thought I have in mind is ability to provision AWS and/or Digital Ocean managed DB offerings so you don’t have to leave appliku interface to get a production grade DB. But Appliku will keep being deployment solution for apps.
thih9 5y ago
Congrats on the launch! > Create as many instances of Postgres, PostGIS, Mysql, Redis and RabbitMQ as you want. They are hosted on your servers and we don't charge extra for them. I'd love to learn more about this, I couldn't find any details. Is there a page with more information? Specifically, I'd like to know more about backups and upgrades.
- appliku 5y ago
  At this moment we are not fighting for the niche of Production grade databases with failovers and all these valuable things. The feature to back up at least postgres is planned, fail overs , replication, etc is not even planned yet. There are companies that have whole departments working on managed DB offerings, sadly – we don't. yet :)
_tardigrade 5y ago
recently started working on something very similar for Python/Django apps! I'll have more competition I guess
- appliku 5y ago
  It only proves there is market for that. The more solutions the better! Wish you best of luck!
conradbez 5y ago
Looks very interesting, will have to give it a shot! I made an open source “dashboard” for dokku that tries to give you Heroku ease of use with the cost of a single server. Basically you run one script on the server and it deploys a dokku app which manages the deployment of additional dokku apps. Gives you GUI access to deploying new apps, changing env variables etc. Would love feedback from anyone looking for an easy way to deploy dokku apps regularly. https://github.com/conradbez/dokku-dashboard https://github.com/conradbez/dokku-dashboard
- throwaway77384 5y ago
  Long-time dokku user here. This seems interesting. How nicely does this play with more complicated things, like configuring ports for SSL, or using additional Dokku plugins? How about things like configuring the container network and things like upload size variables, or the wait time when deploying, etc.?
  - conradbez 5y ago
    Haven't worked on this in a while so can't exactly remember but focuses more on the MVP functionality. Should be easy enough to add anything you could traditionally do through SSHing into the box though.
cabalamat 5y ago
The existence of Heroku/Appliku etc (and my personal experience) suggests that setting up web apps isn't hassle free. Maybe the fix for this would be to have a language/library combination designed from the ground up to make it as easy as possible? So for example, the language would come as standard with: - a web server for production use - a web server for development use - a built-in SQL database - a built-in NoSQL database - a web server library Then, as all the components for the system would part of the language's standard library/environment, the difficulty of configuring/running a server (such as a web server) on another machine would be limited.
- ezekg 5y ago
  It's not that setting up a server is hard. The reason Heroku exists is because they are your devops team -as-a-service.
  - appliku 5y ago
    I would correct the last part. Appliku is an automated devops as a service. Heroku is selling you a very much overpriced complete service. And that's where Appliku comes in as a way to fight insane costs. But yes, setting up a server is not super hard. Doing it often and with convenience that's where improvement is needed compared to doing it manually.
    - ezekg 5y ago
      I think your project is cool, but deploying an application to a server on `git push` is not devops. Heroku is selling managed servers and databases with easy deployment, you're selling easy deployment to unmanaged servers and databases.
  - cabalamat 5y ago
    If I understand you correctly, you say that setting up a server isn't hard, but then you seem to imply that it's hard enough that you might want to employ a team of people to do it, which seems pretty hard to me. So I'm not sure that I follow you.
john-radio 5y ago
We should get this added as as backend option for cookiecutter Django.
- appliku 5y ago
  I completely agree :)
howolduis 5y ago
So with Heorku, if an app has one dyno and that dyno doesn't receive any traffic in 1 hour, the dyno goes to sleep. Does Appliku have a similar thing or does it stay online longer?
- appliku 5y ago
  It happens for a free dyno. For paid dynos they are always up. Appiku doesn’t turn off your servers. Scaling and spinning up/down additional servers is in plans.
agustif 5y ago
I just have to say I'm very happy with Dokku/Ledokku for my Node/React apps!
axelthegerman 5y ago
If anyone is looking for a similar service to deploy Ruby/Rails apps, check out https://www.hatchbox.io https://www.hatchbox.io from Chris Oliver. Unfortunately doesn't come with a free tier but worth every penny!
- dayvough23 5y ago
  Seconding Chris' work. I love having not to worry about DevOps for my Rails apps.
  - excid3 5y ago
    Thanks for the support! Glad you've been enjoying Hatchbox. We're wrapping up v2 and can't wait to share it. Upgrading to Caddy for the web server has been wonderful.
    - appliku 5y ago
      Tell me more about Caddy vs Nginx. What are the biggest benefits? I honestly not exactly happy with nginx in some corner cases.
      - BilalBudhani 5y ago
        Bilal here, I’m working with Chris on v2. Caddy providers benefits compared to Nginx, like - Out of the box SSL certificates - REST api for providing configuration - A vibrant plugin ecosystem to extend traditional web server functionality - Easier setup for load balancer We are quite happy with the results so far.
        appliku 5y ago
        Yes, I can def-ly see it is way better. Question here, as far as i understand Caddy is a paid product, how its licensing works while deploying on customers servers?
saevarom 5y ago
This is very interesting to me. I'm essentially a one man devOps team at a small web agency hosting multiple client websites mostly based on Django. One question; what do you do about compiling and transpiling Javascript? Right now it's done via webpack in the local environment and then pushed out to S3/CDN.
- appliku 5y ago
  hey! I have a question. Are you deploying it to your servers/cloud accounts or clients’ accounts? Regarding your questions: it is responsibility of the app to build and upload the static assets where needed. If you want recommendation what to do, I’d say you’ll need a custom dockerfile, install node, run webpack in there and collect static. If you are not using collectstatic in that process then given the lack of details I’d say why are you doing it in the same repo at all. But again – you provided very little details. So if it is a website(server rendered pages, SEO is important,etc) - you should have node and do optimisations before pushing to s3. If it is an app (RIA,SPA) then I’d say don’t mix frontend and backend. Decouple it and ship frontend separately. Appliku Interface is built and served with Netlify. I still remember those dark times when I had frontend inside the main repo. It was largely inconvenient. Either way happy to chat about your issues in our discord server. I am more than happy to help you figuring this out.
  - saevarom 5y ago
    Yes well separation of frontend/backend is of course a good idea, but most of the projects are mostly django templates with some React sprinkled on top to make interaction and interfaces nicer. It's also a good idea if you have just a single project or a few of them. I'm talking about maybe 30-40 projects with django as base so it would make my job so much more complicated if I would split them all up in repos. The frontend code is mostly isolated but is shipped in the same repo to be built and distributed for django to find. So your answer about a custom dockerfile is probably what would be needed.
    - appliku 5y ago
      Oh yeah i totally understand what it means having so much projects – every minute spent on manual task becomes an hour if done on all projects. Let me know if you need another set of eyes or discuss it options. https://twitter.com/KostjaPalovic https://twitter.com/KostjaPalovic or in our discord https://appliku.com/discord https://appliku.com/discord
samirsd 5y ago
very cool. does this work with celery/redis?
- appliku 5y ago
  of course it does. Appliku out of the box provides a way to provision redis and rabbmitmq. I have yet to write a tutorial about celery. To specify processes to run you use Procfile. Specify your celery commands and enable them in Process tab in Appliku interface. In order to have celery beat working you should use redbeat: https://github.com/sibson/redbeat https://github.com/sibson/redbeat Other than that – no specific requirements. Drop me a line in contacts on our site if you need any help. Or in our Discord Community: https://appliku.com/discord https://appliku.com/discord
air7 5y ago
I must have been living under a rock but I don't fully understand the appeal of these types of services if I have to run my own server anyway. What I'm thinking is that it only saves me the initial setup of a web server and a git hook and perhaps a DB (which is one tutorial away for anyone with basic technical skills) after which deployment would just mean a git push. What am I missing?
- tamersalama 5y ago
  It's the difference between a managed service (getting the 3:00AM phonecall) vs doing it all yourself.
- appliku 5y ago
  In a nutshell it is delegating all this manual work to a service. I was happy with manual deployments for a while too, until i got fed up with this activity. It is just a question of quality of life, automation. Also, yes - there are tutorials, but what if you are not willing to spend time learning it even if you have tutorial? Most of developers have a very high pain tolerance for manual tasks and search for yet another tutorial how to do X by themselves instead of delegating a task to some app or service. Not everyone is like that.
TekMol 5y ago
The readme of the example app just says "R": https://github.com/appliku/appliku_start https://github.com/appliku/appliku_start Is there a demo of this app running somewhere?
- appliku 5y ago
  Please refer to more up to date Djangitos project template. https://github.com/appliku/djangitos https://github.com/appliku/djangitos I will rewrite ec2 deployment tutorial as soon as possible. Thanks for reminding me about it.
  - TekMol 5y ago
    Thanks. Woops, that is a pretty big beast. 2172 lines of code in 98 files. I would not feel comfortable by starting from a base that is already this complex.
kcb 5y ago
Is there any service that I can just upload a py file and a requirements.txt and it will just run? No bundling, packaging, git, cli, etc. Not even for a web app but main use case is to host a Discord bot.
- slig 5y ago
  GCF might be what you're looking for https://cloud.google.com/functions/docs/quickstart-python https://cloud.google.com/functions/docs/quickstart-python
pcardoso 5y ago
I have been using CapRover for this purpose (https://caprover.com https://caprover.com)
debarshri 5y ago
I have been following this space alot. Heroku like deployment spaces have exploded recently partly because people miss that experience, partly because buildpack is opensource[1], partly because we have gone through a techshift where it is pretty easy to emulate that. There are two broad categories - 1. Dokku's of the world, one VM (very recently tried adding multi node) and then more recently getporter.dev[2] and okteto[3] of the world that is trying to replicate heroku on kubernetes. One of things, I noticed is that, It looks really cool at first look but every organisation has their own complexity in deploying stuff. It is an integration hell, you have to provide white glove treatment to all customers and eventually you have a hard time scaling. We tried it too, and what we noticed if you have to go an enterprise and sell, you start doing leaky abstraction. It works really well for early stage startups but once they have the money you prefer something more customizable and robust solution. This project looks cool. I do not want to discourage anyone but again, it is a red ocean out there. [1] https://buildpacks.io/ https://buildpacks.io/ [2] https://www.getporter.dev/ https://www.getporter.dev/ [3] https://okteto.com/ https://okteto.com/
- zerkten 5y ago
  The problem is the layering of the abstractions. Having PaaS on top of Kubernetes in a way that you move down to a more powerful primitive is going to be the most scalable. What happened in the public cloud space was a disparate set of services which made the choices really costly. Azure went in heavy on PaaS while AWS was focused on VMs. The easy adoption and migration was on AWS. K8s seems like a reasonable abstraction that reduces the cost of these decisions because people seem to agree that K8s is a reasonable base. Being able to slide on a compatible PaaS layer shouldn't negate that K8s investment, and make it easier to adopt for some organizations, or parts of those organizations. But, I wouldn't argue that we are the point where that layer is mature.
  - debarshri 5y ago
    I do not agree with you. PaaS abstraction becomes super leaky on top kubernetes as you start solving real world problems. That is one the first mistakes newly formed platform teams in a company makes, abstracting infrastructure. Happy flow of PaaS on kubernetes is great. It is magical to certain extent. But negative flows is a really mess. The customer no clue why certain things do not work and you as a engineer had no clue that this would have happened. Secondly, the amount breaking changes you have deal with as a result of abstraction is crazy. People pushing code does not care. It is basically moving complexity from one place to another.
DarthNebo 5y ago
Does anyone know of a FOSS app to help setup something similar to managed databases w/ Postgres/Mongo, but with ease of use just like AWS/DO have? Handling backups, scaling with minimal user intervention yet self-hostable?
reducesuffering 5y ago
I'm learning to run a Django app and have been toying with deploying to DigitalOcean. Decided on this to learn atleast some generic DevOps things as opposed to too-proprietary (Heroku) and too-expensive (AWS). There's a decent amount of Nginx, Gunicorn, and Postgres things that seem to need to be scripted, and I'm still not sure how to quickly reproduce the server automatically (scripts?) and replicate the server environment on my Mac without adding Docker/Podman to the mix (running Django app on my Mac and deploying to Ubuntu server env could cause issues unknown locally). How does Appliku help address these issues? Edit: Also, is Appliku itself deployed with Appliku? If so, if Appliku experiences issues, do you have a quick method of deploying the fix outside your usual deployment?
- heurisko 5y ago
  > I'm still not sure how to quickly reproduce the server automatically (scripts?) I use Ansible. I'm not a DevOps person and found it very easy to get working. It just requires SSH. I also use Docker locally, because it's convenient, even if I don't containerise my application. I've tested Digital Ocean's managed Postgres and it seems to work well. Welcome to hear what Appliku offers more than this, however.
  - reducesuffering 5y ago
    Thanks. When people say they use Docker, there seems to be several different ways. Are you using Docker Desktop (Mac/Linux?), docker-compose, Podman, or something else?
    - heurisko 5y ago
      I use docker-compose on Ubuntu and when I'm on Mac, I use the same docker-compose.yml file running under Docker Desktop. My docker-compose.yml file includes services for integration testing, like MailHog.
- hnarayanan 5y ago
  Use Ansible. Here is an example of one of my Django apps’ setup scripts: https://github.com/scancer-org/setup https://github.com/scancer-org/setup
stephanreynolds 5y ago
Interestin idea.

183 points by appliku 5y ago

What are the benefits over using this instead of DO's app platform? https://www.digitalocean.com/products/app-platform/ https://www.digitalocean.com/products/app-platform/

appliku 5y ago
DO Apps platform in terms of pricing is as bad as Heroku's offering. They charge per instance of the process and it becomes pretty expensive. Appliku helps to reduce costs by putting processes on a single server. With Heroku Config Vars sync feature one of the customers managed to save around $7k/mo on fat Dynos that are insanely overpriced in Heroku. So while DO Apps platform will definitely have their target audience, Appliku allows to save a lot of cash. Hope I was able to answer your question :)

RussianCow 5y ago

This looks sleek, but I’ll ask the obvious question: Why use this over Heroku? I couldn’t find a good answer to that question from a quick look at the website, aside from maybe the fact that it uses AWS and Digital Ocean.

capableweb 5y ago
Heroku is a general apps platform. This seems to be tailored specifically to Django/Python (with the option of using your own Dockerfile so could deploy anything). One could easily imagine that the performance and stability should be a lot higher than with Heroku. If you're a Python-only shop, it might make more sense.
- vldo 5y ago
  having something that specific, tailored for dynamic language, seems like overkill i'd undestand if it was for something highly performant and hard to deploy
  - capableweb 5y ago
    Maybe, but maybe not. If you're using Python/JavaScript and have a ton of dependencies, most of your deploy-time is gonna be spent downloading dependencies. If the host you're using is specifically setup for Python/JavaScript, they can run a registry mirror with 100% of the packages right next to the host, and remove basically most time spent downloading the packages. Same goes for other time-consuming activities like code coverage or even running the tests. If the applications running on the platform are somewhat heterogeneous, then you can start doing really aggressive performance work.
- RussianCow 5y ago
  > One could easily imagine that the performance and stability should be a lot higher than with Heroku. No, I can’t imagine that. Why would performance be any different? I imagine most of these kinds of solutions use Docker behind the hood anyway, so they’re likely to be identical.
  - danielheath 5y ago
    Because Heroku is phenomenally expensive.
    - appliku 5y ago
      As i said in another comment Heroku is unbelievably expensive. What they offer for $250 per process can be done at $60/mo per whole app. When I helped them move all background workers and all non-production apps to Digital Ocean they ended up saving $7k/mo which blew my mind. It is easy to start on Heroku, but staying there is a black hole in any budget. Thankfully we've built Heroku Config Vars sync so one can move off of Heroku gradually.
      - fnomnom 5y ago
        >Heroku is unbelievably expensive. only if developer/devops/admin time is free and for most it isnt. if 60 vs 250 /month is a breaking factor for you and your use case: go for it. if you need the software deployed to make real business it just doesnt matter.
        appliku 5y ago
        $250/mo per process. And with appliku it is done automatically so there is no need for admin/devops time.
        capableweb 5y ago
        > if you need the software deployed to make real business it just doesnt matter No wonder AWS can get away with the prices they have since people like you (and many more VC funded startups) simply have zero care about the price. For people who run "real" businesses (meaning you need to have a larger income than expense [meaning, everything not VC-funded]), price is always a part of the calculations, even when it comes to hosting.
vldo 5y ago
actually i'll ask something similar, why this over dokku?
- appliku 5y ago
  You can do Dokku, you can setup dokku and deploy apps with dokku. no problem. But I wanted a solution where I don't need to remember anything DevOps while writing/shipping my apps. I also added a generous free plan that allows all features. Then AWS has free credits so one can start their next big thing without expenses and not learning a single thing about deployment at all
appliku 5y ago
Price. It is easy to start on Heroku. With one app, one process. When you have multiple apps and several processes there is a way to reduce costs and not loose in convenience. $10/mo droplet can hold plenty of apps and it is still $10/mo. If you don't need a production grade Database – Appliku has them at 0 cost. Back in a day I moved several of my side projects to Heroku. I was happy until i received a $90+ invoice by the end of the month. Now a $10/mo droplet holds even more projects for me.
- eirki 5y ago
  This is my experience as well. $10 for each running process (server, worker, database) adds up very fast.
  - appliku 5y ago
    It doesn't seem like a lot when you enable one more resource for $7-10/mo. You can clearly see invoice "growth" when it adds app, right? :D
- RussianCow 5y ago
  Thanks for the response. My two cents: price is not the thing that I would compete on. For any "real" business, the cost of Heroku is negligible compared to its benefits; a few hundred dollars per month in savings is just not enough to convince most companies to migrate to a completely new service that isn't as battle tested and has fewer features. At the same time, I'm not convinced you could make any significant amount of money tailoring your service to side projects. With that said, I think you have a great product and could probably make some decent money by offering some combination of niche features. Ideas off the top of my head: * Integrated metrics. Since you're primarily targeting Django apps, it should be feasible to collect health/performance stats from the apps and display them in a simple dashboard. You don't need to offer very much here; most companies would be more than happy with basic stats related to response times per route, although SQL query times would be really neat to see. * Automatic scaling for your Python projects. If you could apply the same ease of deployment to horizontal scaling, that would be really valuable. * Easy integration with AWS services like S3, SES, and SNS. You could do this in a number of ways. One idea is to provide a set of Django libraries that, for instance, makes sending SMS messages super simple, with no configuration needed when used via Appliku. Or you could integrate with existing libraries and just remove the configuration step for the developer. With at least one of the above (or some other differentiator), I could see Appliku taking off. In any case, you have a great product, and I wish you the best of luck!
caymanjim 5y ago
Heroku is AWS.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

rcarmo 5y ago

If you want to host your own, check out https://github.com/piku https://github.com/piku :)

appliku 5y ago
I wanted to host nothing. I wanted click click and deployed. But I've heard about piku many times seems like a great thing!

alexanderisora 5y ago

I am long time paid customer of Appliku. I've built a SaaS (https://unicornplatform.com https://unicornplatform.com) and before was hosted on Heroku. Migrating to Appliku saved me $400/mo in cloud costs. My app is React & Django and it works like a charm on Appliku. Good luck!

howolduis 5y ago
to all web developers: no one, absolutely no one, likes huge popups on their screen that covers the website.
xu3u32 5y ago
How are you serving react?
- appliku 5y ago
  Built during the project build and uploaded to s3 and served via CDN.
  - xu3u32 5y ago
    No CORS hell there?

pbronez 5y ago

Can you talk a bit about the security model? Appliku requires an AWS user with: AmazonEC2FullAccess AmazonEC2ContainerRegistryFullAccess AmazonEC2ContainerServiceFullAccess AmazonS3FullAccess That's a lot of permissions into my AWS account. What are some easy ways to contain the damage that could be done if Appliku has a bug or the creditials are compromised?

appliku 5y ago
Hey! Thanks for question. I guess there is an article that needs updating. Appliku only needs AmazonEC2FullAccess. Well, if you feel that something is off you just revoke credentials. I will update the article now. Thanks again
- mikepurvis 5y ago
  The point of a rich authorization model is not to have to rely on feelings.
deberon 5y ago
I would recommend dedicating an entire AWS account to this. Or, if you have a solid tagging strategy[0], you can craft your IAM policies to only allow Appliku access to resources tagged with a particular tag. 0 - https://docs.aws.amazon.com/IAM/latest/UserGuide/access_tags.html https://docs.aws.amazon.com/IAM/latest/UserGuide/access_tags...
- appliku 5y ago
  Separate account will be the best strategy. I prefer having separate accounts for every project. Hustle to login between them, but the best isolation that can be between projects.
  - jpmoral 5y ago
    Sorry, 'hassle' not 'hustle'.
5y ago

slig 5y ago

Congrats on shipping! I could see myself using a service like yours, and bringing my own server is perfect as I can adjust and scale it up/down as needed. I'm thankful that Heroku prices are that extreme because it made me learn how to deploy and run everything by myself back in the day.

appliku 5y ago
Thanks for kind words. While I know how to deploy myself I am fed up with that. Especially when it comes to a new project. There are so many places where you can screw up with a typo or stuff like that. So while I know how to do it by myself, I don't enjoy doing that and that's how the project got started. By the way if curious i wrote a post about that: https://dev.to/kostjapalovic/tired-of-deployments-built-my-own-heroku-47ed https://dev.to/kostjapalovic/tired-of-deployments-built-my-o...

georgeleon 5y ago

We tried Heroku, and that was expensive. We tried deploying manually on AWS but it took a lot of time with a devops freelancer. Got sold on Appliku and haven't had to think about infrastructure and deployment at all. We also survived for a long time on the free plan, until we decided to have a separate server for staging environment. Works pretty well. Never had to learn anything about servers and SSH.

rvanlaar 5y ago

Hey Congrats on launching this. I really hope it'll grow. Here are my 2 cts. I've used dokku for this, running Django, for years and recently I moved a customer over to use the digital ocean app platform. There are a couple of things I find important when evaluating these platforms that I didn't see on the site: - is there database fail over with the multi server strong and powerful plans? - does appliku maintain the underlying servers and database? - is there monitoring?

appliku 5y ago
Hey, thanks for kind words! At the moment databases in Appliku are best fit for non-production environments. So while you can enjoy easy and great deployments of your apps, I am not ready yet to compete on the production databases front. So no, we don't offer fail over or even backups at the moment. Backups are in plans, but more advanced features for databases is not even in backlog.
- derefr 5y ago
  Re: production-quality DBs, it's its whole own ball-game. Rather than getting into all of that, your time here might be better spent here finding DBaaS services that host on the same clouds Appliku deploys to, and partnering Appliku with them to guarantee predictable network-transit peering to the clouds your users are launching on; probably by setting up the install-time UX flow so that that DBaaS choice is made early in the setup flow, and constrains further choices (i.e. user chooses DBaaS X; Appliku knows what AZs it exists in in each cloud, and restricts user to deploying the app to those same AZs in order to ensure free transit.) In other words, do the backend work Heroku does to add a new DBaaS "add-on" partner, but without reselling/wrapping the resulting service, instead just giving a UX to bind to it.
  - appliku 5y ago
    One thought I have in mind is ability to provision AWS and/or Digital Ocean managed DB offerings so you don’t have to leave appliku interface to get a production grade DB. But Appliku will keep being deployment solution for apps.

thih9 5y ago

Congrats on the launch! > Create as many instances of Postgres, PostGIS, Mysql, Redis and RabbitMQ as you want. They are hosted on your servers and we don't charge extra for them. I'd love to learn more about this, I couldn't find any details. Is there a page with more information? Specifically, I'd like to know more about backups and upgrades.

appliku 5y ago
At this moment we are not fighting for the niche of Production grade databases with failovers and all these valuable things. The feature to back up at least postgres is planned, fail overs , replication, etc is not even planned yet. There are companies that have whole departments working on managed DB offerings, sadly – we don't. yet :)

_tardigrade 5y ago

recently started working on something very similar for Python/Django apps! I'll have more competition I guess

appliku 5y ago
It only proves there is market for that. The more solutions the better! Wish you best of luck!

conradbez 5y ago

Looks very interesting, will have to give it a shot! I made an open source “dashboard” for dokku that tries to give you Heroku ease of use with the cost of a single server. Basically you run one script on the server and it deploys a dokku app which manages the deployment of additional dokku apps. Gives you GUI access to deploying new apps, changing env variables etc. Would love feedback from anyone looking for an easy way to deploy dokku apps regularly. https://github.com/conradbez/dokku-dashboard https://github.com/conradbez/dokku-dashboard

throwaway77384 5y ago
Long-time dokku user here. This seems interesting. How nicely does this play with more complicated things, like configuring ports for SSL, or using additional Dokku plugins? How about things like configuring the container network and things like upload size variables, or the wait time when deploying, etc.?
- conradbez 5y ago
  Haven't worked on this in a while so can't exactly remember but focuses more on the MVP functionality. Should be easy enough to add anything you could traditionally do through SSHing into the box though.

cabalamat 5y ago

The existence of Heroku/Appliku etc (and my personal experience) suggests that setting up web apps isn't hassle free. Maybe the fix for this would be to have a language/library combination designed from the ground up to make it as easy as possible? So for example, the language would come as standard with: - a web server for production use - a web server for development use - a built-in SQL database - a built-in NoSQL database - a web server library Then, as all the components for the system would part of the language's standard library/environment, the difficulty of configuring/running a server (such as a web server) on another machine would be limited.

ezekg 5y ago
It's not that setting up a server is hard. The reason Heroku exists is because they are your devops team -as-a-service.
- appliku 5y ago
  I would correct the last part. Appliku is an automated devops as a service. Heroku is selling you a very much overpriced complete service. And that's where Appliku comes in as a way to fight insane costs. But yes, setting up a server is not super hard. Doing it often and with convenience that's where improvement is needed compared to doing it manually.
  - ezekg 5y ago
    I think your project is cool, but deploying an application to a server on `git push` is not devops. Heroku is selling managed servers and databases with easy deployment, you're selling easy deployment to unmanaged servers and databases.
- cabalamat 5y ago
  If I understand you correctly, you say that setting up a server isn't hard, but then you seem to imply that it's hard enough that you might want to employ a team of people to do it, which seems pretty hard to me. So I'm not sure that I follow you.

john-radio 5y ago

We should get this added as as backend option for cookiecutter Django.

appliku 5y ago
I completely agree :)

howolduis 5y ago

So with Heorku, if an app has one dyno and that dyno doesn't receive any traffic in 1 hour, the dyno goes to sleep. Does Appliku have a similar thing or does it stay online longer?

appliku 5y ago
It happens for a free dyno. For paid dynos they are always up. Appiku doesn’t turn off your servers. Scaling and spinning up/down additional servers is in plans.

agustif 5y ago

I just have to say I'm very happy with Dokku/Ledokku for my Node/React apps!

axelthegerman 5y ago

If anyone is looking for a similar service to deploy Ruby/Rails apps, check out https://www.hatchbox.io https://www.hatchbox.io from Chris Oliver. Unfortunately doesn't come with a free tier but worth every penny!

dayvough23 5y ago
Seconding Chris' work. I love having not to worry about DevOps for my Rails apps.
- excid3 5y ago
  Thanks for the support! Glad you've been enjoying Hatchbox. We're wrapping up v2 and can't wait to share it. Upgrading to Caddy for the web server has been wonderful.
  - appliku 5y ago
    Tell me more about Caddy vs Nginx. What are the biggest benefits? I honestly not exactly happy with nginx in some corner cases.
    - BilalBudhani 5y ago
      Bilal here, I’m working with Chris on v2. Caddy providers benefits compared to Nginx, like - Out of the box SSL certificates - REST api for providing configuration - A vibrant plugin ecosystem to extend traditional web server functionality - Easier setup for load balancer We are quite happy with the results so far.
      - appliku 5y ago
        Yes, I can def-ly see it is way better. Question here, as far as i understand Caddy is a paid product, how its licensing works while deploying on customers servers?

saevarom 5y ago

This is very interesting to me. I'm essentially a one man devOps team at a small web agency hosting multiple client websites mostly based on Django. One question; what do you do about compiling and transpiling Javascript? Right now it's done via webpack in the local environment and then pushed out to S3/CDN.

appliku 5y ago
hey! I have a question. Are you deploying it to your servers/cloud accounts or clients’ accounts? Regarding your questions: it is responsibility of the app to build and upload the static assets where needed. If you want recommendation what to do, I’d say you’ll need a custom dockerfile, install node, run webpack in there and collect static. If you are not using collectstatic in that process then given the lack of details I’d say why are you doing it in the same repo at all. But again – you provided very little details. So if it is a website(server rendered pages, SEO is important,etc) - you should have node and do optimisations before pushing to s3. If it is an app (RIA,SPA) then I’d say don’t mix frontend and backend. Decouple it and ship frontend separately. Appliku Interface is built and served with Netlify. I still remember those dark times when I had frontend inside the main repo. It was largely inconvenient. Either way happy to chat about your issues in our discord server. I am more than happy to help you figuring this out.
- saevarom 5y ago
  Yes well separation of frontend/backend is of course a good idea, but most of the projects are mostly django templates with some React sprinkled on top to make interaction and interfaces nicer. It's also a good idea if you have just a single project or a few of them. I'm talking about maybe 30-40 projects with django as base so it would make my job so much more complicated if I would split them all up in repos. The frontend code is mostly isolated but is shipped in the same repo to be built and distributed for django to find. So your answer about a custom dockerfile is probably what would be needed.
  - appliku 5y ago
    Oh yeah i totally understand what it means having so much projects – every minute spent on manual task becomes an hour if done on all projects. Let me know if you need another set of eyes or discuss it options. https://twitter.com/KostjaPalovic https://twitter.com/KostjaPalovic or in our discord https://appliku.com/discord https://appliku.com/discord

samirsd 5y ago

very cool. does this work with celery/redis?

appliku 5y ago
of course it does. Appliku out of the box provides a way to provision redis and rabbmitmq. I have yet to write a tutorial about celery. To specify processes to run you use Procfile. Specify your celery commands and enable them in Process tab in Appliku interface. In order to have celery beat working you should use redbeat: https://github.com/sibson/redbeat https://github.com/sibson/redbeat Other than that – no specific requirements. Drop me a line in contacts on our site if you need any help. Or in our Discord Community: https://appliku.com/discord https://appliku.com/discord

air7 5y ago

I must have been living under a rock but I don't fully understand the appeal of these types of services if I have to run my own server anyway. What I'm thinking is that it only saves me the initial setup of a web server and a git hook and perhaps a DB (which is one tutorial away for anyone with basic technical skills) after which deployment would just mean a git push. What am I missing?

tamersalama 5y ago
It's the difference between a managed service (getting the 3:00AM phonecall) vs doing it all yourself.
appliku 5y ago
In a nutshell it is delegating all this manual work to a service. I was happy with manual deployments for a while too, until i got fed up with this activity. It is just a question of quality of life, automation. Also, yes - there are tutorials, but what if you are not willing to spend time learning it even if you have tutorial? Most of developers have a very high pain tolerance for manual tasks and search for yet another tutorial how to do X by themselves instead of delegating a task to some app or service. Not everyone is like that.

TekMol 5y ago

The readme of the example app just says "R": https://github.com/appliku/appliku_start https://github.com/appliku/appliku_start Is there a demo of this app running somewhere?

appliku 5y ago
Please refer to more up to date Djangitos project template. https://github.com/appliku/djangitos https://github.com/appliku/djangitos I will rewrite ec2 deployment tutorial as soon as possible. Thanks for reminding me about it.
- TekMol 5y ago
  Thanks. Woops, that is a pretty big beast. 2172 lines of code in 98 files. I would not feel comfortable by starting from a base that is already this complex.

kcb 5y ago

Is there any service that I can just upload a py file and a requirements.txt and it will just run? No bundling, packaging, git, cli, etc. Not even for a web app but main use case is to host a Discord bot.

slig 5y ago
GCF might be what you're looking for https://cloud.google.com/functions/docs/quickstart-python https://cloud.google.com/functions/docs/quickstart-python

pcardoso 5y ago

I have been using CapRover for this purpose (https://caprover.com https://caprover.com)

debarshri 5y ago

I have been following this space alot. Heroku like deployment spaces have exploded recently partly because people miss that experience, partly because buildpack is opensource[1], partly because we have gone through a techshift where it is pretty easy to emulate that. There are two broad categories - 1. Dokku's of the world, one VM (very recently tried adding multi node) and then more recently getporter.dev[2] and okteto[3] of the world that is trying to replicate heroku on kubernetes. One of things, I noticed is that, It looks really cool at first look but every organisation has their own complexity in deploying stuff. It is an integration hell, you have to provide white glove treatment to all customers and eventually you have a hard time scaling. We tried it too, and what we noticed if you have to go an enterprise and sell, you start doing leaky abstraction. It works really well for early stage startups but once they have the money you prefer something more customizable and robust solution. This project looks cool. I do not want to discourage anyone but again, it is a red ocean out there. [1] https://buildpacks.io/ https://buildpacks.io/ [2] https://www.getporter.dev/ https://www.getporter.dev/ [3] https://okteto.com/ https://okteto.com/

zerkten 5y ago
The problem is the layering of the abstractions. Having PaaS on top of Kubernetes in a way that you move down to a more powerful primitive is going to be the most scalable. What happened in the public cloud space was a disparate set of services which made the choices really costly. Azure went in heavy on PaaS while AWS was focused on VMs. The easy adoption and migration was on AWS. K8s seems like a reasonable abstraction that reduces the cost of these decisions because people seem to agree that K8s is a reasonable base. Being able to slide on a compatible PaaS layer shouldn't negate that K8s investment, and make it easier to adopt for some organizations, or parts of those organizations. But, I wouldn't argue that we are the point where that layer is mature.
- debarshri 5y ago
  I do not agree with you. PaaS abstraction becomes super leaky on top kubernetes as you start solving real world problems. That is one the first mistakes newly formed platform teams in a company makes, abstracting infrastructure. Happy flow of PaaS on kubernetes is great. It is magical to certain extent. But negative flows is a really mess. The customer no clue why certain things do not work and you as a engineer had no clue that this would have happened. Secondly, the amount breaking changes you have deal with as a result of abstraction is crazy. People pushing code does not care. It is basically moving complexity from one place to another.

DarthNebo 5y ago

Does anyone know of a FOSS app to help setup something similar to managed databases w/ Postgres/Mongo, but with ease of use just like AWS/DO have? Handling backups, scaling with minimal user intervention yet self-hostable?

reducesuffering 5y ago

I'm learning to run a Django app and have been toying with deploying to DigitalOcean. Decided on this to learn atleast some generic DevOps things as opposed to too-proprietary (Heroku) and too-expensive (AWS). There's a decent amount of Nginx, Gunicorn, and Postgres things that seem to need to be scripted, and I'm still not sure how to quickly reproduce the server automatically (scripts?) and replicate the server environment on my Mac without adding Docker/Podman to the mix (running Django app on my Mac and deploying to Ubuntu server env could cause issues unknown locally). How does Appliku help address these issues? Edit: Also, is Appliku itself deployed with Appliku? If so, if Appliku experiences issues, do you have a quick method of deploying the fix outside your usual deployment?

heurisko 5y ago
> I'm still not sure how to quickly reproduce the server automatically (scripts?) I use Ansible. I'm not a DevOps person and found it very easy to get working. It just requires SSH. I also use Docker locally, because it's convenient, even if I don't containerise my application. I've tested Digital Ocean's managed Postgres and it seems to work well. Welcome to hear what Appliku offers more than this, however.
- reducesuffering 5y ago
  Thanks. When people say they use Docker, there seems to be several different ways. Are you using Docker Desktop (Mac/Linux?), docker-compose, Podman, or something else?
  - heurisko 5y ago
    I use docker-compose on Ubuntu and when I'm on Mac, I use the same docker-compose.yml file running under Docker Desktop. My docker-compose.yml file includes services for integration testing, like MailHog.
hnarayanan 5y ago
Use Ansible. Here is an example of one of my Django apps’ setup scripts: https://github.com/scancer-org/setup https://github.com/scancer-org/setup

stephanreynolds 5y ago

Interestin idea.