6 ms·

> Also people that want to start a business, there is a huge opportunity here, create software that makes managing Apache, Redis, PostgreSQL, ..., in dedicated

by nthj 14y ago

> Also people that want to start a business, there is a huge opportunity here, create software that makes managing Apache, Redis, PostgreSQL, ..., in dedicated servers very easy and robust. Traget a popular and robust non-commercial distribution like Ubuntu LTE, and provide all is needed to deploy web nodes, database nodes, with backups, monitoring, and everything else trivial. So the pitch is: clone Heroku, which has taken dozens of very smart engineer man-years to build and refine, then charge 5% of what the market will bear? > "I can only write my Ruby code but can't handle operations" is not the right attitude, grow up. I handled ops for 120+ Rails apps while managing a team of juniors and making time to write code. What a stupid waste of my time: ops is forever & never-ending, while implementing & delivering a new feature to 100K customers can bump sales' conversions permanently. If I can outsource relatively-linearly-increasing Ops costs and instead focus on delivering value that multiplies compounding-interest style, that's not childish. It's great business.

derefr 14y ago
No, presumably the pitch is: clone Heroku's software stack as an OSS project, then get the server/VPS sellers to let people opt to install it as a package when they rent out a node, the same way things like Wordpress can automatically be installed.
- nthj 14y ago
  Sure, see OpenStack: http://www.openstack.org/ http://www.openstack.org/ [that said, comparing automated scaling of a Ruby on Rails SaaS app with 100K+ users to a one-click WordPress install is kinda humorous. Even WordPress has a market for expert DevOps guys to manage your site: http://wpengine.com http://wpengine.com]
  - derefr 14y ago
    Well, Herouk's stack may indeed be way more impressive in sheer scope, but for any one individual user, there's no difference. As long as bringing up more than one node in your "application" gets them to start talking to one-another and auto-distributing load between them [including sometimes just electing one of them to serve as a router node that doesn't actually have apps running on it], your experience will be identical to paying Heroku, save for the fact that when one of the machines goes down--although the load will be redirected away from it--you'll have to "manually" fix it if you want it back. In the default case, this just means dropping the IaaS node responsible and provisioning a new one [possibly on a different IaaS provider, if there's a lot of failure in one provider]. Though if you did pay for physical hardware, there can be some pain here. ;) Basically, what I'm suggesting is a software stack that is to computation as Tahoe-LAFS is to storage. Just give it a set of machines that resemble Unix boxen--with more separate providers and regions = more better--and it'll give you something that looks like Heroku in exchange. It could even have an optional provisioner service running atop it, that globally aggregates known IaaS providers and gives them ratings based on machine response times from the perspective of various other components, then lets you just say "okay, you're allowed $N/mo more to scale me up" and it'll find places around the globe where your users are being underserved, find well-rated API-compatible IaaS providers in those places, and provision nodes in those locations, adding them to your mesh. And then dropping them back out for alternatives if they start to suck :) --you know, if this doesn't already exist, I might be willing to put in some time...
  - sciurus 14y ago
    I don't think OpenStack is the right comparison to make to Heroku. In the common parlance, OpenStack is infrastructure as a service, while Heroku is platform as a service. Cloud Foundry http://cloudfoundry.com/ http://cloudfoundry.com/ and OpenShift https://openshift.redhat.com/app/ https://openshift.redhat.com/app/ are more comparable. They're both open source.
    - antirez 14y ago
      I think OpenStack, CloudFoundry, ..., are still not what I have in mind, as this solutions are more designed at scale, that is, if you want to provide a PaaS service to third parties or if you are a very large organization. IMHO the missing piece here is something that you can install in just one or a few nodes to start providing easy-to-setup and monitored services, with proven configurations and setups and so forth.
      - bitcartel 14y ago
        Something like TurnkeyLinux? http://www.turnkeylinux.org/ http://www.turnkeylinux.org/
  - thenomad 14y ago
    And there are some VERY good reasons to invest in DevOps even for Wordpress. I'd write a lengthy post on this subject right here, but I already did so elsewhere: http://www.mmomeltingpot.com/2012/03/wpengine-review-after-1-month-and-250k-visitors-is-this-the-best-wordpress-hosting-money-can-buy/ http://www.mmomeltingpot.com/2012/03/wpengine-review-after-1... (And Patio11 wrote on the same topic a while ago, too: http://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/02/09/why-i-dont-host-my-own-blog-anymore/ http://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/02/09/why-i-dont-host-my-own-b... )
antirez 14y ago
That's what I think about your reasoning. 1) Once you develop a culture of PaaS the reality is, if you check the history of most startups, you'll continue along this way, and the money you'll burn will be massive. I suspect that if you build a sysop culture earlier, later you'll be able to just hire a full time sysop instead of spending a lot more. 2) If you don't understand very well your platform from the point of view of operations, likely you'll build a non scalable system (scalable not just from the point of view, let's distribute the load among N nodes, but about the constant times / CPU / energy it takes to serve a request). You'll end spending all the time again porting your app to another framework / language. This happens all the times. 3) The first months of a startup are usually not so critical from the point of view of operations, it is unlikely you'll spend a lot of time managing servers, unless... Unless you selected a platform that is too complex to start with. I think that many of the PaaS companies I see today are here mainly for two reasons: Rails & Java frameworks. So first of all, select your platform wisely.
- karterk 14y ago
  Unless you selected a platform that is too complex to start with. I think that many of the PaaS companies I see today are here mainly for two reasons: Rails & Java frameworks. Can't speak for Heroku but with EC2 you get the ability to dynamically add/remove instances. While this seems like it's needed only for certain kinds of startups, the reality is that most background processing is batch oriented and it's extremely cost effective to just spin up instances when I need them, crunch the data and terminate them after that. And, if you go for spot instances (and use a fault tolerant framework like Hadoop to distribute jobs), it's becomes even more cheaper.
  - davidw 14y ago
    I think EC2 is not quite "PaaS": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platform_as_a_service http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platform_as_a_service Since you still do need to administrate the instances you run.
- nthj 14y ago
  > Unless you selected a platform that is too complex to start with. I think that many of the PaaS companies I see today are here mainly for two reasons: Rails & Java frameworks. I think this is where I misunderstood you originally. For 3 days, Hacker News has been discussing the performance of -Rails- on Heroku. If I had understood at the beginning that your real argument is to use Sinatra/PHP/NodeJS/whatever (you're somewhat vague on recommended alternatives), I would not have jumped in. I do not have enough experience hosting other tech stacks at scale to be advising on the viability of open source solutions. As for your other 3 points, presuming a Rails stack: all of those smell like a premature optimization for any company with less than 500K customers. If I went to my clients and said "Hey, we should invest 1-2 days in spooling up a server, because if we gain traction 6 months from now, we'll have to pay Heroku a lot of money until we fix it!", they would grin a bit and say: "That would be a great problem to have. Now go back to shipping features so we gain traction and actually have to worry about fantastic problems like how to deal with having too many users."

by nthj 14y ago

derefr 14y ago

No, presumably the pitch is: clone Heroku's software stack as an OSS project, then get the server/VPS sellers to let people opt to install it as a package when they rent out a node, the same way things like Wordpress can automatically be installed.

nthj 14y ago
Sure, see OpenStack: http://www.openstack.org/ http://www.openstack.org/ [that said, comparing automated scaling of a Ruby on Rails SaaS app with 100K+ users to a one-click WordPress install is kinda humorous. Even WordPress has a market for expert DevOps guys to manage your site: http://wpengine.com http://wpengine.com]
- derefr 14y ago
  Well, Herouk's stack may indeed be way more impressive in sheer scope, but for any one individual user, there's no difference. As long as bringing up more than one node in your "application" gets them to start talking to one-another and auto-distributing load between them [including sometimes just electing one of them to serve as a router node that doesn't actually have apps running on it], your experience will be identical to paying Heroku, save for the fact that when one of the machines goes down--although the load will be redirected away from it--you'll have to "manually" fix it if you want it back. In the default case, this just means dropping the IaaS node responsible and provisioning a new one [possibly on a different IaaS provider, if there's a lot of failure in one provider]. Though if you did pay for physical hardware, there can be some pain here. ;) Basically, what I'm suggesting is a software stack that is to computation as Tahoe-LAFS is to storage. Just give it a set of machines that resemble Unix boxen--with more separate providers and regions = more better--and it'll give you something that looks like Heroku in exchange. It could even have an optional provisioner service running atop it, that globally aggregates known IaaS providers and gives them ratings based on machine response times from the perspective of various other components, then lets you just say "okay, you're allowed $N/mo more to scale me up" and it'll find places around the globe where your users are being underserved, find well-rated API-compatible IaaS providers in those places, and provision nodes in those locations, adding them to your mesh. And then dropping them back out for alternatives if they start to suck :) --you know, if this doesn't already exist, I might be willing to put in some time...
- sciurus 14y ago
  I don't think OpenStack is the right comparison to make to Heroku. In the common parlance, OpenStack is infrastructure as a service, while Heroku is platform as a service. Cloud Foundry http://cloudfoundry.com/ http://cloudfoundry.com/ and OpenShift https://openshift.redhat.com/app/ https://openshift.redhat.com/app/ are more comparable. They're both open source.
  - antirez 14y ago
    I think OpenStack, CloudFoundry, ..., are still not what I have in mind, as this solutions are more designed at scale, that is, if you want to provide a PaaS service to third parties or if you are a very large organization. IMHO the missing piece here is something that you can install in just one or a few nodes to start providing easy-to-setup and monitored services, with proven configurations and setups and so forth.
    - bitcartel 14y ago
      Something like TurnkeyLinux? http://www.turnkeylinux.org/ http://www.turnkeylinux.org/
- thenomad 14y ago
  And there are some VERY good reasons to invest in DevOps even for Wordpress. I'd write a lengthy post on this subject right here, but I already did so elsewhere: http://www.mmomeltingpot.com/2012/03/wpengine-review-after-1-month-and-250k-visitors-is-this-the-best-wordpress-hosting-money-can-buy/ http://www.mmomeltingpot.com/2012/03/wpengine-review-after-1... (And Patio11 wrote on the same topic a while ago, too: http://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/02/09/why-i-dont-host-my-own-blog-anymore/ http://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/02/09/why-i-dont-host-my-own-b... )

antirez 14y ago

That's what I think about your reasoning. 1) Once you develop a culture of PaaS the reality is, if you check the history of most startups, you'll continue along this way, and the money you'll burn will be massive. I suspect that if you build a sysop culture earlier, later you'll be able to just hire a full time sysop instead of spending a lot more. 2) If you don't understand very well your platform from the point of view of operations, likely you'll build a non scalable system (scalable not just from the point of view, let's distribute the load among N nodes, but about the constant times / CPU / energy it takes to serve a request). You'll end spending all the time again porting your app to another framework / language. This happens all the times. 3) The first months of a startup are usually not so critical from the point of view of operations, it is unlikely you'll spend a lot of time managing servers, unless... Unless you selected a platform that is too complex to start with. I think that many of the PaaS companies I see today are here mainly for two reasons: Rails & Java frameworks. So first of all, select your platform wisely.

karterk 14y ago
Unless you selected a platform that is too complex to start with. I think that many of the PaaS companies I see today are here mainly for two reasons: Rails & Java frameworks. Can't speak for Heroku but with EC2 you get the ability to dynamically add/remove instances. While this seems like it's needed only for certain kinds of startups, the reality is that most background processing is batch oriented and it's extremely cost effective to just spin up instances when I need them, crunch the data and terminate them after that. And, if you go for spot instances (and use a fault tolerant framework like Hadoop to distribute jobs), it's becomes even more cheaper.
- davidw 14y ago
  I think EC2 is not quite "PaaS": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platform_as_a_service http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platform_as_a_service Since you still do need to administrate the instances you run.
nthj 14y ago
> Unless you selected a platform that is too complex to start with. I think that many of the PaaS companies I see today are here mainly for two reasons: Rails & Java frameworks. I think this is where I misunderstood you originally. For 3 days, Hacker News has been discussing the performance of -Rails- on Heroku. If I had understood at the beginning that your real argument is to use Sinatra/PHP/NodeJS/whatever (you're somewhat vague on recommended alternatives), I would not have jumped in. I do not have enough experience hosting other tech stacks at scale to be advising on the viability of open source solutions. As for your other 3 points, presuming a Rails stack: all of those smell like a premature optimization for any company with less than 500K customers. If I went to my clients and said "Hey, we should invest 1-2 days in spooling up a server, because if we gain traction 6 months from now, we'll have to pay Heroku a lot of money until we fix it!", they would grin a bit and say: "That would be a great problem to have. Now go back to shipping features so we gain traction and actually have to worry about fantastic problems like how to deal with having too many users."