Open Source PaaS Built on Docker | Hacker News Reader

Open Source PaaS Built on Docker

github.com

87 pointsneokya33 comments

I've been following PaaSs built on docker for a while, and it seems like the new swarm mode in version 1.12 makes them pretty much obsolete. I was a huge fan of deis (deis.io), but it seems like they are pivoting away from docker to do something different (deis.com). At this point, think docker has become big enough such that building a platform on top of it is pretty much redundant, but something like this may prove useful for more modular container systems such as rkt.

My brief skim over the Swarm announcement was that, while it focuses on the orchestration problem, it's not a fully-fledged PaaS. It's somewhere closer to where Kubernetes is working.

Essentially, you turn on a swarm and then ... oh, I still need routing. And service injection. And I need something to build the app. Something to hold the images. I guess I need standard debugging interfaces. Standard performance measurement. And ... and ... and ...

PaaSes require a lot of engineering.

Disclosure: I work for Pivotal on the fringes of one such PaaS, Cloud Foundry.

PaaSes also require a lot of operational prowess. Once you have the engineering prototype up and running, keeping it running is a whole other story.

This is also true.

At Pivotal we dogfood the latest releases of Cloud Foundry by deploying it to Pivotal Web Services: our public, we-make-money-from-this, there-are-legal-and-marketing-consequences-for-fucking-up cloud service.

By and large, nobody notices when we do it. BOSH is pretty good at that stuff.

Deis isn't pivoting away from Docker and has always required additional pieces of infrastructures that are not strictly Docker (Kubernetes in v2 and CoreOS in v1). I haven't tried Swarm but I'd be surprised if it came close to Kubernetes in terms of stability and community support given the latter had a good head start and is backed by Google which uses it in production.

No relevant Google products are running on Kubernetes today. They do however offer a hosted Kubernetes product on Google Cloud.

The use of "today" there has me curious, has any relevant Google product ever run on Kubernetes? I was under the impression that Kubernetes was a productized descendant of Borg (which is what Google has always run everything relevant on).

This project has not been updated since February. Cursory searches are not showing more active forks. It might be interesting to look at the code for educational purposes, but I wouldn't recommend building on this.

Last commit 6 months ago

How does this compare against dokku (https://github.com/dokku/dokku)?

Also deis and flynn. http://deis.io/ https://flynn.io/

There's quite a few options in this area. I've recently started using dokku for personal projects. My current plan is to migrate to deis in future if/when I want multiple nodes.

If you're only targetting 2-3 systems for redundancy (each the same apps), you could configure them exactly the sime behind a load balancer, then have each deploy just run to all 2-3. Did this as a POC early last year.

How do you handle databases in that configuration?

In that case, it was using Azure Tables and an ElasticSearch cluster. Also, you'd probably want to manage databases used by multiple systems outside your dokku anyway, but I would just assume use a DBaaS offering given an option is suitable, I have less desire to manage a database/backups, etc.

Dokku is the greatest, makes personal projects so pleasant to manage

Very cool - there is Convox who does this as well.

one question - there have been a few open source PAAS out there for a while. But no real competitor to Heroku till now. What's missing ?

You mean like Scalingo http://scalingo.com ? ;-)

Disclaimer: I'm a co-founder

interesting.. serious advice: get a SAAS marketing expert. Pay whatever they want. Your discoverability is really bad.

Thanks for the advice. We'll do that.

> But no real competitor to Heroku till now.

Cloud Foundry predates pretty much everything else. It was decided in the early days to support the full buildpack lifecycle as defined by Heroku, to the point that a lot of Heroku buildpacks run on Cloud Foundry with no or minimal changes.

Disclosure: I work on buildpacks for Pivotal, the majority donor of engineering to Cloud Foundry.

Really pleased to see that they've open-sourced this work! I interviewed at Ooyala back in 2013 when they were just getting started on this project so it's quite satisfying to see how far they've taken this project!

This looks cool. I'm using dokku to do that and I'm very satisfied with it, but I would like something closer to core docker experience, which would make it easier to integrate with other tools/process (like swarm, which not to have on dokku is a big problem).

This is where I want to see docker go, being able to handle zero downtime deployment without pain, good luck!

I don't understand why this was necessary given Swarm, Mesos, Kubernetes, AWS... Can someone elaborate?

Unfortunately, none of those services or projects existed when we first started building Atlantis at Ooyala. I haven't been at Ooyala for a while now, so not sure what their plans are for this project now that open source tooling with wider support exists.

This is a good reason.

I hear similar questions about Cloud Foundry: "why did you write Diego instead of using Kubernetes?" -- because Kubernetes didn't exist. "Why BOSH instead of Terraform?" -- Terraform didn't exist (and has different opinions, anyhow). "Why Garden instead of Docker?" -- Docker just didn't exist. And so on.

I call it NIYS: Not Invented Yet Syndrome.

Disclosure: I work for Pivotal, which donates the majority of engineering on Cloud Foundry.

You are comparing apples and oranges.

AWS is IaaS. AWS does offer some 'PaaS' experience through the offerin go ElasticBeanstalk and ECS. But neither came close to a true PaaS.

Super cool! I've been using Singularity (https://github.com/hubspot/singularity) for the last year and love it.

(Also I work at HubSpot where Singularity was developed)

Don't forget supergiant.io which addresses the very kludgey way that Docker addresses stateful distributed apps

Your software, right?

I assume the "aaS" stands for "as a service", but what's the P stand for?

And yes, I looked at the link. It uses "PaaS" without defining it.

Platform as a Service - applies to services like Heroku and the like.

Would it really have been that hard to type the word "platform"? Sigh.

Thanks.

it's not exactly esoteric. paas, saas, iaas are broadly used terms and have been for a while.

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