Bushido: the future of hosting | Hacker News Reader

Bushido: the future of hosting

swombat.com

64 pointsswombat11 comments

Looks awesome, but I'm skeptical there's a significant market for "easier than Heroku". The reason being that if you have a bottleneck setting up things on Heroku, then you're likely pushing way too many apps to afford to pay a monthly fee for each one.

I think the target market will be looking for something open source combining AWS provisioning and pre-baked Chef recipe collection.

I assume that they will eventually support Python, but at the outset, I think Bushido has more implications for average consumers than developers. I don't know who of the two is going to be the early adopter, but this is what makes it so interesting to me compared to Heroku.

I already have some Django projects in mind that might replace other services that were much easier to install before - but still a hassle. This way, people will get both a better product and a better installation experience.

I could see the value in a "want to host this open source thingy somewhere? click >this< button", especially for people who are not primarily techies.

That's an awesome vision :)

Yeah, that could be a real sweet spot if marketed properly. I hadn't really thought about that.

I would personally love this. Even though I am by most measures a techie (I get paid to write software), I find deployment / configuration to be very different from development and generally a whole bucket of hurt that I don't want to get involved in. Have some projects that I simply never wrote because I knew they'd need server setup that I didn't want to do. Now if only there were support for something besides rails...

Interesting, I founded La Distribution http://ladistribution.net/ and we also wants to help people easily install web applications, and take care of everything (configuration, permission, updates, backups, ...)

The difference with Heroku and clones, we're targeting end users rather than developers. Also, we're currently focusing on PHP web apps (Wordpress, Dokuwiki, Status.net, Firefox Sync, ...) but will hopefully expand to other stacks (Ruby, Python) in the future.

Oh, and we're open source https://github.com/ladistribution :-)

This niche is currently filled by bitnami and others that provide a native binary, VMware or AMI file.

When I want to roll out a quick new trac/redmine/etc, this is one way I can get it demo-ready without a lot of hassle. However this requires someone to have "done the work" building the respective deployment patterns.

Also sometimes the deployment isn't quite what I want (so I need to install Passenger for example).

If I could do a single click, and start injecting data/config, that'd be more than awesome.

I wrote a thesis proposal that came from the opposite direction. If the unit of distribution is a virtual image, why bother to aim for cross-OS portability in your application architecture? Might as well design as though you have a machine to yourself because virtually you do.

Flaggers: please see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2438564

sounds like recipe script automation + cloud API. if so, nothing magically new. i may have missed something though.

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