is there ANY way i can spin up a server, add the ssh keys to some configuration file somewhere and just "docker-magic push" and have my rails application running ?
or do "docker-magic bundle exec db:migrate" and have that command run on the server.
Or push a Procfile with worker definitions and have the PAAS automatically pick it up, add it to supervisord/systemd and run it ?
There is, however, still a hump to get over in installation -- you need to learn what BOSH is, install BOSH, then install Cloud Foundry with BOSH. In the long run, for a production deployment, this is what you want. But it certainly doesn't feel that way when you just want to kick some damn tires.
If you just want to tinker, you can try PCFDev[0]. It's a fully-functional Cloud Foundry installation in a single VM.
Disclosure: I work for Pivotal, we donate the majority of engineering on Cloud Foundry.
[0] https://pivotal.io/platform/pcf-tutorials/getting-started-wi...
Edit: yes, I know we ask you to signup during the PCFDev install. I hate it too. We have to for export compliance, it can't be avoided.
CF is already a relatively successful business with hundreds of million dollars in annual revenues across a pile of companies. Kubernetes and Docker are small in comparison as "businesses" but of course the momentum there is surging in terms of both pure open source adoption and contribution. It's likely going to be a big market with a lot of choice like Deis, or plain k8s, or RedHat OpenShift, or IBM bluemix, Pivotal , Docker Datacenter, or Mesos/Marathon, etc. It's a bit of a market war brewing and that competition will make for better solutions.
What is great about open source vs. past tech "gold rushes" is that these experiments and feedback loops exist across communities that are otherwise competing and overlapping. Mesos adopted the Docker image format independently of the Docker runtime ; Kubernetes introduced pods independently but also reused parts of Docker. Docker container networking and volumes are being used compatibly in the latest incubated CF releases. RedHat submitted a way to get CF style buildpacks working on K8S. Someone found a way to make CF run on Mesos; I could see a similar attempt on Kubernetes some day. It's a confusing and busy time but also an explosion of activity. And even if there is competition for dollars in the end among all these players that will lead to tension , the work is out in the open mainly.
Most of Cloud Foundry is built the way I like software to be built. Pair programming, TDD, small balanced teams, prioritising for user valu.
That style of development is actually baked into the Cloud Foundry Foundation rules. Companies who join the Foundation are expected to send engineers to ramp up on developing in this style. And voting rights are based on the number of full-time engineers you have assigned to the effort.
The reason I mention all this is that I trust the way we build Cloud Foundry. We still get production bugs and oversights and mistakes. It's around 4 million lines of code that turns into a distributed system of ~50 different interacting processes. We built a fully-featured, robust PaaS, using containers, in about 3 years, starting from scratch.
Nobody outside Google had built a container platform of this level before. Nobody but Heroku had built a fully-featured PaaS of this level before. We are, to my knowledge, the first system to do both of these things. Certainly the first opensource one.
The reason you never hear about Cloud Foundry is because we've already built all the components other folks are trying to roll up into full PaaSes. "It just works, already" is a boring story.
But again, quite seriously: I am obviously very biased.
Please excuse me while I take an hour to digest that.
Right now the companies who provide the most engineering -- Pivotal and IBM -- are laser-focused on capturing enterprise dollars.
Which from a business perspective makes perfect sense. Pivotal's commercial distribution of Cloud Foundry (PivotalCF) holds the record for fastest-growing sales of any opensource product. Ever.
But there's not much effort on promoting to devs and startups (IBM are starting to do this more with BlueMix, which is their CF distribution). But it's early days.
So basically you'll usually find that I and a sprinkling of my colleagues show up in threads like these out of the goodness of our hearts and fondness for our work.
Obviously I have a financial interest. Pivotal makes money from PivotalCF, I work for Pivotal I'm on an options plan as well. So YMMV.
But I think Cloud Foundry is just ... way ahead, in terms of actually getting work done.
Edit: and since I'm musing aloud about business-y things, I should emphasise again that nothing I say is in an official capacity, consult your lawyer, financial planner and astrologer, etc etc.
In a very specific case, Heroku is the best solution for my problem. Sounds like it is for you too.
http://nickjanetakis.com/courses/scaling-docker-on-aws
It covers using RDS, ElastiCache and also handles load balancing your app + much more.
Yep, it costs $20. Basically the cost of chinese food for 2, to ensure guaranteed victory in learning the essentials of AWS' platform while having a guided tour on how to deploy a fault tolerant web app with Amazon ECS from start to finish.
You can definitely learn everything for free, but the value in a course is that you're getting a cohesive learning path that was carefully planned and tested. You get a system that you can apply to your own projects and plenty of source code to reference.
You're paying the $20 so you can avoid spending 6 months trying to figure out everything on your own while stringing together a bunch of half-assed blog posts and tutorials.
You pay the small fee for certainty and it's well worth it because your time (and sanity) is not infinite.
I see that you recently left Amazon after making 200k/year there (a comment you made 5 days ago). I can see why you don't like people promoting Amazon products, I fully understand.