Integration over Invention | Hacker News Reader

Integration over Invention

blog.convox.com

104 pointsbgentry13 comments

At Opendoor, we've been running an important piece of our data science infrastructure on Convox. Their philosophy of relying on battle-tested AWS primitives has made Convox more stable than any non-Heroku PaaS I've ever encountered.

We wrote a post on this last week: https://labs.opendoor.com/moving-opendoors-data-science-stac...

So the main question I have is... Obviously someone has to do the invention. How will this pan out after all these container tools settle?

What if Kubernetes is it? The primary solid implementation of the hardest parts of distributed state management. Google uses this to power GCE, Amazon supports plugging this into ECS, and anyone building their own data center uses it for a control plane.

Is this the dream? Or is this a bad outcome for lack of technology diversity?

I've used both Kubernetes and ECS. In my opinion, both of those are still pretty raw for developers. There's a lot of generating configuration files (which need to be understood) and configuration that's best left to a DevOps team. Want to setup an ECS cluster? You have to understand VPC, EC2, IAM, CloudFormation etc. Google's situation is a little better, but there's still a lot to understand and some weirdness around connecting that cluster to a cloud MySQL database.

If you look at what Convox is shooting for, its sensible defaults. Developers should be able to put together a docker-compose.yml file that describes their infrastructure services and deploy that into some stack that can figure it out. They just need to know a few convox commands without having to understand the bajillion pieces in the AWS stack that would have to be put together manually.

At the very least, convox will force all of these other clustering tools to simplify and think more about the developer experience, which is a net win for the entire ecosystem.

Author of the post and core member of Convox here. Happy to answer any questions about this engineering strategy and all things Convox and ECS.

I really appreciate the thinking behind the post & convox itself. What's the business model for you guys? Just commercial support?

For starters, the news just broke that we're backed by YCombinator for our first phase of the business:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10050481

First we're focusing on making the open-source foundation awesome. Take a look at our GitHub for our current work making the installation easy, builds fast, and supporting all the AWS services and regions that everyone wants:

https://github.com/convox/

The next phase will be commercial support and managed hosting. Reach out to support@convox.com if this is something you or your team are interested in.

Past that, we are carefully studying other successful open-source technology companies. Something like the nginx "open core" could work great for "enterprise" features like role based access control or auditing.

As I'm interested in this myself, what companies are you studying?

Cloudera, MongoDB, nginx and GitLab.

I'm intrigued by Convox... and since the founders / engineers are lurking, allow me to ask a few questions that might help convince someone like myself:

- How do you handle updates? Heroku was on the early deployment for Postgres security patches. Will Convox deployments auto-upgrade, or do they require sys admin-style intervention on docker specifications to track security issues?

- What about other popular addons: Postgres, Mailgun, NewRelic, etc? Are there equivalents?

- Is it easy to setup automated backups and recovery for the database (eg. Heroku's pgbackups are amazing!).

- And perhaps most importantly: I don't see any mention of pricing on your homepage...?

Hey, Convox cofounder Matt here. Great questions!

1) You can update your Convox rack and cli using the cli. `convox update && convox system update`. http://docs.convox.com/docs/updating-convox/

2) We're working on an RDS provisioning service today and hope to release something this weekend. We're also in early talks with other addon (we call them "services") providers. For now if you want to use one of these services you can connect to them using environment variables. http://docs.convox.com/docs/environment-variables/

3) Our RDS service will eventually handle backups and recovery, but those features aren't implemented yet. We're also exploring partnering with other hosted database services that already have these features.

4) Convox is open source https://github.com/convox and totally free. You can use it however you want and you only have to pay for the AWS expenses. We're also experimenting with managed hosting, which we'll charge a small premium for, so please let me know if you're interested in that.

"In 10 minutes Convox installs a system that takes over the management of your AWS servers, networking, and data and lets you deploy applications to the Internet with a single command."

Sounds like an ad for an botnet exploit.

I find Convox incredibly exciting and compelling, and yet I too read the first half of that sentence and thought it was a description of some terrible piece of malware that's been found out in the wild.

Interesting comparison. So far one of the best applications is to use Convox to spin up a lot of resources for data science. Not dissimilar to what a black hat would do with a botnet for cracking passwords.

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