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Comment by bacongobbler | Hacker News Reader

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bacongobbler

> Deis and Convox are both trying but not really "hitting it".

Can you elaborate on this? Any feedback on how we "missed the mark" is always helpful.

(I am an engineer working @ Deis)

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First, important to note: You are awesome and doing amazing work. (Link to what I am doing later in this message).

The problem with all projects, not just deis is that the end user needs to know too much.

I launch about 30 projects a year on top of Heroku and it never ceases to amaze me how simple it is. Yes, the applications are simple. Classic app->db. That being said, the setup is stupid simple.

When I started working on the-startup-stack[1], I was amazed on how much you need to do when you start from scratch. Things I forgot I even did since I have a system running in production with incremental changes for 5 years.

You need to configure networking, decide on DNS, decide on so many thing. It's a lot of work.

Here's what I want (and what I am trying to do with the-startup-stack[1]).

0. AWS KeyPair 1. create-stack 2. launch-app

Lot of what's missing is best practices and production-ready environments.

Going back to that same lunch discussion I had with the CTO of a big company doing a replatforming of their infrastructure: Generalization is the hardest thing here. Reasoning on who's the customer and what does their stack look like.

If you give Deis/OpenShift/Kubernetes to the typical YC founder (I am not trying to insult anyone here) that's trying to get their app in their cloud, it's just too much. It's too much of things they don't care about right now. By not caring about it right now they are likely vendor-locking themselves for a very long time.

[1] http://docs.the-startup-stack.com

and b.t.w, this is all AFTER you have a docker container. Lets not forget about the huge leap of master -> ci -> docker -> deploy headache.

Agreed. That's the problem with running your own private Heroku; you've gotta know the entire stack to use it.

We had this dream that users can use Deis as a self-serve dev shop but we've been seeing a lot of people interested in running their entire PaaS stack, so the docs definitely reflect the administrator more so than the platform user (like Heroku).

I'll be willing to help with facing engineers directly with docs.

You might have already seen this but you might want to check out [1] for inspiration.

[1]: https://github.com/segmentio/stack

It came out of our infrastructure at Segment and works really well.

Is there a reason not to stay with Heroku and then shift to another PaaS later?

Deis and Cloud Foundry both support buildpacks, so to some extent, it would be possible to move off when the time is right.

Disclosure: I work for Pivotal, we're the majority donors of engineering to Cloud Foundry. (I'm on the buildpacks team as it happens)

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