Last.Backend becomes open-source | Hacker News Reader

Last.Backend becomes open-source

blog.lastbackend.com

96 pointssandGorgon47 comments

How does this compare to Deis? https://deis.com/

Hi, I'm one of Last.Backend maintainers. We are cloud, not only PaaS. Cloud with CI/CD included by default.

But Deis is solution you need to deploy on your servers. With LB you don't need to use another hosting, setup it, deploy another solutions to get our features.

If a private self-hosted PaaS is what I want, then how does it compare to Deis Workflow?

Last.Backend a bit more complex solution. In main idea, with LB you'll can build, deploy and auto-deploy your apps from git repos, via push-2-deploy, or by hook from docker registry.

We are creating now our registry with approved apps templates, which you can deploy with 1 click.

This is a complex solution in the box. If you have more questions, I'll try to answer. BTW we are preparing our documentation to cover more possible questions.

Deis also does push-2-deploy. Still I'm not sure how they compare. From my experience with Deis I expect it to serve in pretty much the same niche like LB, but to be more mature and feature complete.

Yeah, Deis is good.. We inspected it all. We are a quite young, but have a big motivation to create a new good cloud solution. So we are always open to discuss and would like to hear your ideas and features you need in modern cloud.

I think a comparison page with other solutions out there would help point out the differences, because most people can't tell what the features are that you're providing and how they compare with the same feature with a different provider. Think a 3 column, 10 row table with the other 2 main competitors.

This will be the first we'll add on our home page. We'll be at next release. Thx!

All of the features you've described thusfar are also in RedHat's Openshift, which is a thick veneer ontop of Kubernetes. Can you comment on how you differentiate between them and last.backend?

As a good comment below - We'll add a table with our differentiation with most known tools. Just give us a bit time.

similarly, how does it compare with [dokku](http://dokku.viewdocs.io/dokku/)?

dokku and deis is tools you need to setup on your infrastructure. They provides you heroku like style push to deploy.

LB is complete platform build on top of kubernetes, support clusters, apps builds (like dokku and deis), apps build from git url, GitHub, ... , deploy from prepared templates (mongoldb cluster, elk cluster.. ) supports custom docker registry.. hook system and many other things.

LB Cloud is an apps cloud hosting comes with LB under the hood. Where you can buy compute cloud resources and receive all LB functionality with dashboard and other cool tools.

Just to get this straight: Do you still need to host with lastbackend or will it be possible to provision some servers with aws, or bare metal with Hetzner and use this opensource tool to somehow manage kubernetes on top?

You can use open-source version on any servers you want. But if you'll use LB servers, you'll get a bit more )

Does LB give you a separate instance of LB, or are you on a shared instance with other customers?

We have many options. Shared instances and private instance. you can choose what you prefer

Interesting. So you would support a private instance running a customized LB, and potentially give that person (if they were a contributor) a 20% discount?

Why not. Dedicated cloud option. We prefer to run our LB version on it, but why not. If you'll need it - we try to help.

It seems that everyone and everyone's mums have their own Kubernetes PaaS platform these days. It's such a competitive area.

That's actually quite surprising considering how complex the technology is.

>That's actually quite surprising considering how complex the technology is

I tried installing Kubenetes on my own set of VPS instances to play around with it and learn, and initially failed. I'm sure I could have figured it out eventually, but installing k8s isn't simple.

I found stackpoint.io, and was pretty impressed. Though they support other backends, like AWS, Google Cloud, and so on, they also support Digital Ocean. So, I was able to spin up a kube cluster with almost zero effort, and the low runtime cost of 3 DO VPS instances.

I'm not sure I would use it for production, since it has dependencies on their infrastructure. But, for experimenting and learning, it was a huge help. It's also, at least for now, free.

Disclaimer: No association with stackpoint, just a happy customer.

It's easier to install and maintain than Mesos. If you're not doing any big-data (which is 99.99% of people out there), it's good enough.

The docs say that RethinkDB is a requirement. Is anyone maintaining RethinkDB in a sustainable way at this point now that they've shut down? Seems questionable to rely on it for infrastructure if nobody is on the hook to keep it viable and updated.

RethinkDB now maintained by community. If it something will be bad with it, we'll change it to something. I guess we'll add ability to support custom databases by choice a bit later.

> Last.Backend provides some benefits for active contributors, via 20% discount for our cloud resources.

That's interesting - this is the first project I've heard of that does something like that.

This is only a first our benefit. We have resource - we're ready to share it. Why not?) I hope, we'll can offer much more soon.

Hello my Russian friends, it would be really nice if you can find someone who can write down more details about lastbackend

http://thenewstack.io/kubernetes-not-scary-complex-even-conf...

Starting from this https://github.com/lastbackend/lastbackend/wiki/Getting-Star...

Hi) Yeah. We'll starting today ))

how are you deploying lastbackend itself ? it seems you are not using any of the popular tools like kops or kargo.

It would be interesting to know how you are managing storage (statefulsets, etc)

We are manually deploying it. We'll describe this process a bit later in our docs. And provide scripts for ansible.

All information about how we managing storage, we'll describe in separate blog post. I think it will be interesting for devs and ops )

it would be great if you could fit in with the kargo or kops ecosystem (P. S. kargo is built on top of ansible).

Even if you dont consider the fact that it will be easier adoption for the community... it will help you in the long run because of the momentum behind these cluster ops tools.

For anyone else having trouble finding Kargo, it looks like it's now called Kubespray.

umm.. thats not entirely true. kubespray is the org that created kargo. its not a kubernetes incubator project.

https://github.com/kubernetes-incubator/kargo

Thanks for clearing that up. It's not at all clear from their website.

Why not. I think LB should to be integrated as much as possible. I'll check these ecosystems in a week. And add these integrations into our roadmap

I know you guys know this, but just so you hear it again, documentation documentation documentation! :)

I remember seeing this in beta when it was posted here — the design was beautiful. It's just as nice now, though less tech-y.

Really looking forward to seeing some Ruby examples.

Thank you. We are focusing on it now.

Sorry, this is a little off topic but I'm curious, what's the startup/tech world like in Russia? My wife's Russian and I'd love to live there, I just get the feeling the job market for engineers isn't that great.

Bloomberg's Hello World just did a fairly good* episode titled: "How to build a sovereign tech empire: Russian Edition": https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2016-hello-world-russia/?...

* from the perspective of an outsider who doesn't live there, so my "fairly good" estimate might be total horsehockey.

Hmm.. Our servers are around the world. Our team is distributed around the world. There is 21 century now and from my opinion tech startups now are focused globally. Thx to the internet and another technologies. You don't need to be in Europe to create cloud in Europe. And you can always jump to the airplane and be anywhere in a day. But there is a big plus - here we have great engineers and low cost ecosystem to live and make great things.

So what is the relation with deployit.io ?

I see lots of similarities in concept, website and prices.

Same people as well. Deployit redirects to lastbackend.

It was our project all time. But not a few month ago we decided to combine all technologies and make one good open source project. Thx for be the first who starred us )

Can Last.Backend deploy LB clusters (ie. is it self hosting)?

Is there documentation on how to make your own template?

What do you mean template? Apps template? We are describing our templates registry and publish it soon. So it will be section in main doc, and how to contribute and add own templates. BTW we are planning to realize deploy templates from git and gists.

Thanks!

Half way through, I realized I wasn't reading about last.fm's backend being opensource :)

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