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Comment by Andys | Hacker News Reader

What people are waiting for is a set of tools that lets them run their own "mini Heroku" across multiple IaaS providers.

I should be able to glue together my own cloud-based load balancer, deploying my app to webservers on different continents, with a monitored master-slave database set up -- all with freely available open-source software tools.

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https://openshift.redhat.com/app/

OpenShift is Redhat's open sorce PaaS. Ruby, node, python, java, php, etc. They run a free service on top of AWS, and you can deploy it on top of AWS, rackspace, hp, or anywhere on top of fedora or RHEL 6.2.

I looked at OpenShifts codebase and I would throw this away after 15 minutes of code review. Looks like they wrote it in Rails because it was cool at the time, but had no idea how to build Rails apps.

Would you mind adding more specifics? I'm curious about what bad Rails practices you found in the OpenShift codebase. (I've never worked on it, used it, or looked at the code, so my question comes from simple curiosity.)

You should have a look at Stackato (http://www.activestate.com/stackato). While it is Cloud Foundry based, it is a fork with significant improvements, including secure containers, integrated web console useful to both users and admins, user/group delineation, and ... Heroku buildpack support. Heroku-in-a-box, you run it where you want, on your terms.

You might be interested in CloudFoundry and Openshift which are both trying to do this.

My opinions:

CloudFoundry - overblown, complex design. very heavy making it hard to test and contribute

Openshift - too redhat-centric

Your opinions make no sense at all. What are you comparing them to? Heroku? How can you evaluate Heroku in this context?

Heroku is completely closed source, you can't evaluate for complexity or design, you could never test or contribute to Heroku source code.

Sorry -- I assumed too much knowledge. Cloud Foundry is really not at the point where it can replace Heroku. Its 80% of the way there, but every needs a different part of the last few % so you can expect to have to add to it based on what you need.

> Cloud Foundry is really not at the point where it can replace Heroku.

I'm curious what Heroku still does that CF can't.

As another person who is building infrastructure on Cloud Foundry like Lucas, I am biased, and don't quite agree with you.

I think from a user perspective, you can do as much with CF as Heroku.

Architecture wise, you can't compare CF to Heroku because its closed source. Heroku could be even more overblown and complex than CF for all you know. And even then, a PaaS by nature is sort of complex.

Administration wise, CF still has a ways to go. It isn't the easiest to deploy and manage, docs need work, etc. But that isn't something that is user facing or comparable to Heroku.

We make heavy use of Cloud Foundry, and have modified existing services and written an entirely new on and integrated it all via the included bus system. It seems like a logical enough design (though the code can be messy at times, it's alright).

I'm curious what parts seemed overblown or complex?

Check out Dokuen[1]. If enough people are interested I might start taking it in that direction.

[1]: https://github.com/peterkeen/dokuen

Have you checked out Nodejitsu? http://nodejitsu.com/

You still have to implement in app load balancing but this is easy via Hook.io, by the same group.

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