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Ask HN: Stackmob/Parse/Kinvey-like FOSS project?

• aespinoza 15y ago
  Why do you want to maintain your own web stack? I ask this, because my start-up is building a BaaS and we are testing our idea, where our main hypothesis is that developers don't want to host/maintain these services, they just want to be able to create them and use them. If you really aren't interested in setting up the environment to perform logic, access a DB and serve JSON, then why look for something that isn't hosted? Whatever framework and/tools you find, you still need to maintain right?
  • backendpupil 15y ago
    I'm a pretty broadly experienced guy and, within my skillset, I can do basic-to-intermediate sysadmining. I was born in 87 so I went through the era where people bought colos and servers and maintained their own web stack - though was too young at the time to ever get that notch in my belt. I'm a power user who likes to tweak things and observe internal, often over looked processes. I don't like losing raw control behind a user friendly abstraction. I'm interested in crunching statistical data from my own raw data logs. Deep down, I don't expect my small projects and personal blog to ever cumulatively reach a server-melting velocity. (If they did, that'd be sweet, though.) I own a Linode that I consider woefully underused. Combine all of that and, for whatever reason, it just seems to me to be a good idea to at least attempt to roll my own web stack. At least, until something melts, is outside of my skillset, and I need to fallback to a quickly scalable, low maintenance, cloud-based solution. That said, there is still a side of me that doesn't want to expend more effort than he has to and, ultimately, wants to tinker with new technologies and frameworks... so that leads me to the hunt for an interesting solution to lightweight API frameworks. And, hell, if I take the hard road and find a solution with an advantage and is something that can be scaled, well, that sounds like a business idea to me.
    • aespinoza 15y ago
      Then I recommend Gearman (http://gearman.org/ http://gearman.org/). I think this is just part of the puzzle, but you can definitely build around it. You can tweak it, and get every performance bit you want. Nodejs (http://nodejs.org/ http://nodejs.org/) can definitely help you as well. It is also another part of the puzzle not an out of the box solution for BaaS. If you are looking for a out of the box solution, I don't really know any open source BaaS so far. You can build your own, but you will still have to install and manage your stack on your own. At the time when we started, we were also looking for something we could use. We couldn't find anything so we built our own. We started to improve it and make it better. And that is why we are now making it a start-up. We have definitely thought about open sourcing it, but I don't think we are ready for that yet. I would really appreciate if you would test our service. No strings attached. We are still in beta, and still validating the idea. Your feedback would be of great help. Additionally you might get ideas for building your own. If you are interested just check it out in http://iknode.com http://iknode.com and register in http://iknode.com/register.php http://iknode.com/register.php
• bmelton 15y ago
  The answer, as best I can tell, is to use Linode and their 'StackScripts' deployment process.[1] I just checked, and there's a stack for Apache, MySQL and Ruby [2], or this one[3], which is an Nginx config with Passenger. It won't write the code for you, but you can have a StackScript deployed in almost no time at all, and Linode is a great host that is reasonably priced. It doesn't automatically scale like some other cloud solutions, but with StackScripts, git, and a load balancer StackScripted box in front of them, you can scale out pretty easily. [1] - http://www.linode.com/stackscripts/ http://www.linode.com/stackscripts/ [2] - http://www.linode.com/stackscripts/view/?StackScriptID=207 http://www.linode.com/stackscripts/view/?StackScriptID=207 [3] - http://www.linode.com/stackscripts/view/?StackScriptID=1291 http://www.linode.com/stackscripts/view/?StackScriptID=1291
  • backendpupil 15y ago
    These are an awesome option for setting up a specific server configuration which - I can see what you're saying - could significantly reduce the time to getting a Rails-based JSON serving backend prepared, for example. However, it saddens me there's not one, single, ready-to-go FOSS library for this purpose.
    • bmelton 15y ago
      There are a bunch of tools that can kind of sort of get you there, but there's way too much variance in getting 'what you want' to get everything going. If you were using Python, you could probably use Silver Lining[1] for this, which lets you set up an Ubuntu server and install packages as needed and deploy your application to it. I'm speaking anecdotally, as I've never personally used it, but it's supposed to have the capability to even manage scaling by spinning up new instances as needed, and configuring them to spec if necessary. I don't know if a similar such tool exists for Ruby, or how well Silver Lining works in practice. [1] - http://cloudsilverlining.org/ http://cloudsilverlining.org/