Migrating from Heroku to Magic Containers | Hacker News Reader

Migrating from Heroku to Magic Containers

bunny.net

36 pointspimterry12 comments

We have an app on Heroku and obviously the writing is on the wall there. We looked around a bit and picked Digital Ocean as our next host:

* their app hosting product is similar to Heroku.

* very easy onboarding and controls for modest complexity apps. Unlike the extreme hoop-jumping required to do anything on one of the major cloud providers.

* everything looks reasonably up to date.

* it's an actual operating profitable company that's been around a while and probably will be for a long time... not a startup burning capital.

That said, this magic containers thing looks more analogous to Google Cloud Run, which I think is an absolutely fantastic offering. Unlike almost everything else out there, Cloud Run and presumably Magic Containers can do things like have a whole bunch of versions of your app up and running ready to come to life when a request arrives, but scaled to zero in the meantime. This category of hosting should be far more popular than it is, and it is wonderful to see another company offer it.

Cloud Run makes lots of sense when running lots of small apps, apps scale to zero automatically.

I have been building https://github.com/openrundev/openrun which provides similar scale down to zero functionality, on a single machine with Docker or on top of Kubernetes.

Took me a moment to understand that "Magic Containers" here are a product offered by bunny.net https://bunny.net/magic-containers/

Magic containers can only pull images from DockerHub or Github, no other registry is supported. I wish they supported private registries (or BitBucket). These limitations make me reluctant to use it, and I wonder what else is missing.

Same. That was probably the main off-putting aspect to me. Hope they see this discussion (Hi bunny)

Ideally they let you pull from any url plus publish all bunny IPs so that one set up a registry & firewall everything except their IPs

I think whoever came up with this at Bunny is missing the magic sauce of Heroku. That magic sauce is Devs don't have to think about container builds/finding a container registry and creating a Dockerfile. They just fling code at Git and shows up running in production if Heroku supported the language and framework. Bunny just created their version of Cloud Run.

As SRE, one of most frustrating aspects of my job is dealing with that behavior.

I wonder where this sits when compared with Cloudflare's product offerings. CF Containers seem like it, but the pricing gap is huge. The bunny.net spend (if run 24/7) comes to almost a dollar an hour. Which is easily ~$700 a month.

You can have a CF implementation for as little as $70-80 a month (running 24/7).

I thought same but when i threw a hello world on there and left it for a bit the actual spend ended up way lower than expected.

They're not doing a great job communicating this imo. Felt closer to cloud function style billing to me where its active or sleeping and the pricing alludes to that "pay only for CPU time used"...yet the dollar number they give is full time for 8 cores (I think)?

Props for very honesty but they're not doing themselves any favours there imo

Yes you're right. The CPU you get is pretty beefy, and they do a really poor job of marketing it.

I am not sure the average budget constrained developer is the right audience for this product. Might be a steal for enterprises though if they can run intense tasks at the edge for just $600-700 bucks.

>I am not sure the average budget constrained developer is the right audience for this product.

Actually think that's their #1 audience.

They absolute take an L on raw pricing, but their "don't send me surprise 100k bills" story is very strong. Their billing is prepay and when I was looking at their WAF even the free tier thing it looked solid on rate limit features

> intense tasks at the edge for just $600-700 bucks.

I'd venture that it would be the wrong tool for that anyway. I'd probably do something like static page on their CDN, dynamic requests to a magic container/function and that passes it on to something VM-ish that isn't publicly exposed. To me 100s of dollar spend in exposed edge compute just doesn't make sense

> To me 100s of dollar spend in exposed edge compute just doesn't make sense

Agreed. The example they give for this is something like image processing. Might work well for large publishers I guess.

Custom docker repo is really needed.

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