6 ms·

Gondor.io Django hosting is now publicly available

87 points by SeanOC 15y ago

ChrisLTD 15y ago
This news was posted yesterday: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2955740 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2955740
eli 15y ago
Anyone have any experience with using Gondor versus e.g. Linode? If I'm reading it right, Gondor costs more than twice as much. But that might be worth it to get a server set up very nicely and good Django-specific support.
- jtauber 15y ago
  On top of what Linode offers (which, in Gondor's case is provided by Rackspace Cloud Servers) Gondor is fully managed with an automated provisioning and deployment platform. It's really another layer on top of what a VPS provider is doing.
  - bsergean 15y ago
    Yeah it's closer to something like Google App Engine if we want to stick to comparing things. I remember enjoying deployment with GAE so it must be the same kind of service. So maybe if I was doing some serious stuff and wanted to move fast I'd forget about money in the short term (and it doesn't look too expensive), but for my own little website I have a VPS that serve a bunch of tiny stuff (blog, Trac, 2 tiny wsgi apps) and that here if you know how to administer a VPS it's hard to beat price wise. (running the VPS on Linode which is a great service). But to make this scale it's not as easy as another pip deploy like it seems to be with Gondor ...
thedjpetersen 15y ago
Good work Gondor team! It is nice to see another quick deploy service launched. It looks the pricing is a little cheaper than Heroku as well, should be an interesting alternative.
pbreit 15y ago
Is it conceivable that a service like this could be distilled into Fabric scripts to be run against any hosting provider? I could do without the auto scaling since it would be easy enough to issue the command manually when needed.
- jvoorhis 15y ago
  Absolutely. After all, we use fabric for some administrative tasks at AppFog. You will also need to write a provisioning layer so you can add, remove and replace hosts as needed. By the time you are finished, you will have your own PaaS.
- Pewpewarrows 15y ago
  Yes. I'll be releasing a Django tool this fall (tentatively titled Prometheus), which is essentially a beefed-up django-admin.py startproject, full of best practices for front and back-end development, and sysops stuff, including a fabric script that lets you do this kind of commit to deploy automatically, with any hosting provider or setup (within reason).
  - philipn 15y ago
    Take a look at https://github.com/dziegler/django-create-project https://github.com/dziegler/django-create-project & maybe collaborate?
    - jtauber 15y ago
      or Pinax :-)
      - Pewpewarrows 15y ago
        Pinax development's stalled, and it's only about halfway to what I'm hoping to accomplish. They've also made more than a few architectural differences that are pretty incompatible with how I'm doing things. It'll make more sense when you see Prometheus in action.
prayag 15y ago
Gondor looks fantastic. I love the fact that PaaS is picking up and there is more competition. It is such a fantastic idea. We have been hosting on DotCloud for our django apps and are extremely happy with it. The fact that we can scale up on demand is great. We can add any number of instances by using a simple push command. On top of that the support that DotCloud provides is superb. All the best to Gondor and DotCloud, I think the pie is big enough for both of them.
j2labs 15y ago
This team of people is ridiculously good. They probably wrote half of the Django packages you use.
tomaszkubacki 15y ago
would love to see reasonable mono hosting service (and yes mono not .net due to mono specific features)
joeyespo 15y ago
Anybody know how well this compares to ep.io? As far as I can tell, ep.io is pretty similar, only Epio targets more frameworks than just Django. For better or for worse.
drewcrawford 15y ago
It's too bad there's not a development plan available. I have quite a bit of AppEngine projects I'd be interested in porting over, but not if 100 requests/day + 500kb SQL (what I would use during the port) would cost me $20/month.
- andrewcamel 15y ago
  I completely agree. The simplicity that Gondor offers makes the service very appealing, but I'm not going to pay $100/month to host my 5 Django projects that I'm working on concurrently.
- LeafStorm 15y ago
  Yeah, that's one thing I noticed too. A small free quota on the order of ep.io's (1 WSGI process that maybe gets shut down when not in use + 50-100 MB data + 16 MB Redis) would probably be a good idea.
arbrandes 15y ago
Good timing. Will probably attract tons of scared App Engine orphans.
ch0wn 15y ago
Is there support for WSGI applications in general, like Flask apps?
- joeyespo 15y ago
  Not yet, but there's a customer feedback page for it. Anyone interested in this should vote this up. http://support.gondor.io/forums/111943-general/suggestions/2002349-support-for-flask-projects http://support.gondor.io/forums/111943-general/suggestions/2...
overshard 15y ago
I'm afraid to use Gondor. I'm not sure how solid they are yet, whereas Heroku runs Django apps just fine and is definitely here to stay.
- prayag 15y ago
  >whereas Heroku runs Django apps just fine How?
  - msbarnett 15y ago
    Heroku's Cedar stack can host just about anything. There was a discussion of running Django on it not too long ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2612943 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2612943
  - X-Istence 15y ago
    Take a look at the Cedar stack... it will happily read and install a requirements.txt file. http://www.askthepony.com/blog/2011/07/getting-django-on-heroku-prancing-8-times-faster/ http://www.askthepony.com/blog/2011/07/getting-django-on-her...
- dstufft 15y ago
  Gondor has been running for ~2 years as the internal hosting platform for Eldarion. A lot has changed (for the better!) over those 2 years, but it is not a brand new system. This is just a signifying of making it usable for anyone and not just Eldarion.
superdude 15y ago
As a small anecdote, before I purchased a VPS I applied to all of the Django-only hosts and visited each one's IRC channel. Gondor was the only one that actually let me try the beta and they were also the only one that had a human on IRC at the time to help with any problems.
traldan 15y ago
I'd be scared of the Tolkien estate.

87 points by SeanOC 15y ago

This news was posted yesterday: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2955740 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2955740

eli 15y ago

Anyone have any experience with using Gondor versus e.g. Linode? If I'm reading it right, Gondor costs more than twice as much. But that might be worth it to get a server set up very nicely and good Django-specific support.

jtauber 15y ago
On top of what Linode offers (which, in Gondor's case is provided by Rackspace Cloud Servers) Gondor is fully managed with an automated provisioning and deployment platform. It's really another layer on top of what a VPS provider is doing.
- bsergean 15y ago
  Yeah it's closer to something like Google App Engine if we want to stick to comparing things. I remember enjoying deployment with GAE so it must be the same kind of service. So maybe if I was doing some serious stuff and wanted to move fast I'd forget about money in the short term (and it doesn't look too expensive), but for my own little website I have a VPS that serve a bunch of tiny stuff (blog, Trac, 2 tiny wsgi apps) and that here if you know how to administer a VPS it's hard to beat price wise. (running the VPS on Linode which is a great service). But to make this scale it's not as easy as another pip deploy like it seems to be with Gondor ...

thedjpetersen 15y ago

Good work Gondor team! It is nice to see another quick deploy service launched. It looks the pricing is a little cheaper than Heroku as well, should be an interesting alternative.

pbreit 15y ago

Is it conceivable that a service like this could be distilled into Fabric scripts to be run against any hosting provider? I could do without the auto scaling since it would be easy enough to issue the command manually when needed.

jvoorhis 15y ago
Absolutely. After all, we use fabric for some administrative tasks at AppFog. You will also need to write a provisioning layer so you can add, remove and replace hosts as needed. By the time you are finished, you will have your own PaaS.
Pewpewarrows 15y ago
Yes. I'll be releasing a Django tool this fall (tentatively titled Prometheus), which is essentially a beefed-up django-admin.py startproject, full of best practices for front and back-end development, and sysops stuff, including a fabric script that lets you do this kind of commit to deploy automatically, with any hosting provider or setup (within reason).
- philipn 15y ago
  Take a look at https://github.com/dziegler/django-create-project https://github.com/dziegler/django-create-project & maybe collaborate?
  - jtauber 15y ago
    or Pinax :-)
    - Pewpewarrows 15y ago
      Pinax development's stalled, and it's only about halfway to what I'm hoping to accomplish. They've also made more than a few architectural differences that are pretty incompatible with how I'm doing things. It'll make more sense when you see Prometheus in action.

prayag 15y ago

Gondor looks fantastic. I love the fact that PaaS is picking up and there is more competition. It is such a fantastic idea. We have been hosting on DotCloud for our django apps and are extremely happy with it. The fact that we can scale up on demand is great. We can add any number of instances by using a simple push command. On top of that the support that DotCloud provides is superb. All the best to Gondor and DotCloud, I think the pie is big enough for both of them.

j2labs 15y ago

This team of people is ridiculously good. They probably wrote half of the Django packages you use.

tomaszkubacki 15y ago

would love to see reasonable mono hosting service (and yes mono not .net due to mono specific features)

joeyespo 15y ago

Anybody know how well this compares to ep.io? As far as I can tell, ep.io is pretty similar, only Epio targets more frameworks than just Django. For better or for worse.

drewcrawford 15y ago

It's too bad there's not a development plan available. I have quite a bit of AppEngine projects I'd be interested in porting over, but not if 100 requests/day + 500kb SQL (what I would use during the port) would cost me $20/month.

andrewcamel 15y ago
I completely agree. The simplicity that Gondor offers makes the service very appealing, but I'm not going to pay $100/month to host my 5 Django projects that I'm working on concurrently.
LeafStorm 15y ago
Yeah, that's one thing I noticed too. A small free quota on the order of ep.io's (1 WSGI process that maybe gets shut down when not in use + 50-100 MB data + 16 MB Redis) would probably be a good idea.

arbrandes 15y ago

Good timing. Will probably attract tons of scared App Engine orphans.

ch0wn 15y ago

Is there support for WSGI applications in general, like Flask apps?

joeyespo 15y ago
Not yet, but there's a customer feedback page for it. Anyone interested in this should vote this up. http://support.gondor.io/forums/111943-general/suggestions/2002349-support-for-flask-projects http://support.gondor.io/forums/111943-general/suggestions/2...

overshard 15y ago

I'm afraid to use Gondor. I'm not sure how solid they are yet, whereas Heroku runs Django apps just fine and is definitely here to stay.

prayag 15y ago
>whereas Heroku runs Django apps just fine How?
- msbarnett 15y ago
  Heroku's Cedar stack can host just about anything. There was a discussion of running Django on it not too long ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2612943 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2612943
- X-Istence 15y ago
  Take a look at the Cedar stack... it will happily read and install a requirements.txt file. http://www.askthepony.com/blog/2011/07/getting-django-on-heroku-prancing-8-times-faster/ http://www.askthepony.com/blog/2011/07/getting-django-on-her...
dstufft 15y ago
Gondor has been running for ~2 years as the internal hosting platform for Eldarion. A lot has changed (for the better!) over those 2 years, but it is not a brand new system. This is just a signifying of making it usable for anyone and not just Eldarion.

superdude 15y ago

As a small anecdote, before I purchased a VPS I applied to all of the Django-only hosts and visited each one's IRC channel. Gondor was the only one that actually let me try the beta and they were also the only one that had a human on IRC at the time to help with any problems.

traldan 15y ago

I'd be scared of the Tolkien estate.