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Show HN: InstaDocker – Run any Docker container on the cloud instantly
- joshstrange 11y agoWould be neat to pair this service or one like it with the "Deploy on Heroku"-type buttons/badges I've seen on github before. A "Run this container now" type thing.
- tahaozket 11y agoSounds great! It could make things even way faster.
- joshstrange 11y agoRight, and/or a way to test something just to see it in action for <1hr or so.
- nickstinemates 11y agoThere was a YC proposal by a couple of cofounders who wanted to start a business around this premise and had a working prototype, including WEB IDE integration for quick PR submissions. I met with them about a year ago, thanks for reminding me to check in!
- tahaozket 11y agoWe also would like to meet with them! If you reach them, could you also introduce us? You can reach me from tahaozket[at]gmail.com
- kordless 11y agoHow about doing that with cryptocurrencies? ;)
- tarikozket 11y agoHaha sounds like a great idea! I think only concern would be publishing your crypto-currency private key publicly :/
- kordless 11y agoActually you only need use your private key to sign a message to pay, which then triggers the deployment. I have an example, if you are so inclined: https://www.stackmonkey.com/demo/splunk/ https://www.stackmonkey.com/demo/splunk/
- masta 11y agoThis sounds like a REALLY bad idea. Docker is not really meant to run untrusted images.
- gtirloni 11y agoThat was my first reaction as well. It seems that with all the downvotes, that's not something we should be really worried about.
- nickstinemates 11y agoI created something like this a long time ago (about 2 years, in fact) in the now defunct tryrethink.info[1] I worked on it some more after doing a few try* sites, and open sourced a version [2] which could take any docker image name and do the same. 1: https://blog.docker.com/2013/07/try-rethinkdb-in-the-cloud-with-docker/ https://blog.docker.com/2013/07/try-rethinkdb-in-the-cloud-w... 2: http://github.com/keeb/any-saas http://github.com/keeb/any-saas
- tarikozket 11y agoWhat kept you from continuing?
- nickstinemates 11y agoMy day job :)
- tarikozket 11y agoJust noticed that you are working at Docker :) Were you there at that time?
- nickstinemates 11y agoYes, I joined a few months prior. I have been here pretty much the same capacity since the beginning
- tahaozket 11y agoWow, so does it mean even Docker workers thought having such a service like InstaDocker would be great at some time?
- nickstinemates 11y agoI thought it was a great demonstration of the technology, and there are a number of people/companies who came to the same conclusion.
- lyschoening 11y agoWould love to use this for on-demand IPython parallel computing.
- tarikozket 11y agoInteresting idea. Do you have any Docker configs currently for that?
- lyschoening 11y agoSorry, no. This here is somewhat related though: A dockerized web service that launches a new IPython notebook instance for each user who connects. https://github.com/jupyter/tmpnb https://github.com/jupyter/tmpnb
- tarikozket 11y agoThat one also has too many stars, interesting. I'll check it in detail. Did you apply for early access? If not, please do. We'd like to be in contact with you. Here is the link: http://goo.gl/forms/c9uNRsrsPq http://goo.gl/forms/c9uNRsrsPq
- toddkazakov 11y agoYou can try https://www.dominodatalab.com/ https://www.dominodatalab.com/
- monatron 11y agoPiCloud did something like this, but they were bought by Dropbox. Haven't heard much about them since.
- lyschoening 11y agoThe company that was supposed to take over never did.
- keedot 11y agoOn mobile, nothing is readable in what I'm guessing is the Q&A section at the bottom.
- tahaozket 11y agoThank you very much for heads up! We fixed it.
- kordless 11y agoI just did a continuously integrated container post that achives the same thing with Wercker and Giant Swarm: https://github.com/giantswarm/swarm-wercker https://github.com/giantswarm/swarm-wercker
- tarikozket 11y agoInteresting, I'll check it later. Are there any services using it currently?
- kordless 11y agoIf you are referring to Giant Swarm, yes, we have a few private deployments in production in Europe. If you are referring to the CI project, nah, it's just an example of what you can do! :)
- Procrastes 11y agoCool idea. Will you have support for passing environment variables?
- tahaozket 11y agoYes, you will be able to easily pass env variables when you start a container. What is your opinion about passing variables as JSON or web based form?
- Procrastes 11y agoI'm torn. Your UX is about convenience, so probably expose a form for the MVP, so I can set an initial user and DB credentials for WordPress, for instance. I would probably implement it as JSON from the start though, then make it available when the REST API is ready.
- tarikozket 11y agoForm sounds pretty but how would you understand which Docker file needs how many and which variables? Do you have any ideas?
- joshmn 11y agoInteresting choice in building this atop DigitalOcean. Not that it's wrong by any means, but I'd be interested in hearing what process you took in choosing them. (just curiosity)
- tarikozket 11y agoWow, you are the first person who noticed that! :) We already had a couple of DigitalOcean servers running and wanted to add this one next to them. Do you have any recommendations? Why are you curious about it?
- joshmn 11y agoMakes sense! I've said this before and time and time again, but I LOVE what they're doing over at RunAbove (OVH incubated). I'm not affiliated by any means, just a very, very very very very happy customer. The performance is unmatched and the price is so competitive!
- tarikozket 11y agoThe team also seemed worth to check. Why don't they change their website design?
- xur17 11y agoReally great implementation. I was delighted to see that clicking on the 'Run Now' button immediately launched a container - no sign in, etc required. I've been working on a similar idea for running docker containers on a cron schedule. I use them for data processing, and web crawling, but don't have a good way to manage their schedules / logs. Right now I run everything off a single box with a cron schedule for each one.
- tarikozket 11y agoThank you very much! Scheduling could be an interesting feature. Why do you schedule your containers? Have you tried another approach?
- xur17 11y agoI schedule them so I can run a recurring task every day. Examples: 1. Crawl a website, and store the data to a database - update every few hours. 2. Check a website for changes. 3. Process log data, and save it to another location. Docker may be overkill for some of these, but it provides a simple way to launch a new task in a container with all dependencies installed. The overhead seems to be relatively small for starting a new container, so it's worth the overhead vs. configuring a machine to run the container.
- tarikozket 11y agoSeams reasonable. I think it also can help to not have zombie processes after cronjobs. Well, then we'll definitely consider having scheduling. Thanks mate!
- mayli 11y ago"This container will be alive for next 15 minutes. If you would like to keep it running more than 15 minutes please contact us on Twitter." - Changing 12 hours to 15 minutes, is the server overloaded?
- tarikozket 11y agoWe already receive a lot of interest but we just wanted to have more engagement on Twitter too :) We hit 300Mbps on our traffic and 30% on our CPU load. So, we still have more resources to serve. Also, our clusters are waiting to be spinned. Do you have any other recommendations to handle those requests and processes?
- xur17 11y ago15 minutes seems reasonable to me. I thought the original 12 hours was too long - I was done with the container I spun up a few minutes after I started it.
- tarikozket 11y agoThanks for the feedback! Just like we thought. But we also wanted to be generous :)
- kiernan 11y agoWhat are people planning on using this for? Testing their own containers, or more testing things that rely on the services provided by existing published containers?
- ilaksh 11y agoI made a couple of things sort of like this, one I spent several months on. Another was simpler. Neither was finished since I needed to work eventually for money. Here is the simpler one which is a backend for a barely started mobile front end. https://github.com/runvnc/oicapp https://github.com/runvnc/oicapp I basically came to the conclusion that for scale simplicity and security I needed a new Digital Ocean VPS for each container so that's what I did. To make it faster you could sort of pool them ahead of time.