Show HN: I built self-hosted deployment automation tool for Windows and IIS | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: I built self-hosted deployment automation tool for Windows and IIS

fdeploy.com

35 pointsdt3ft23 comments

Seven years in the making (I admit that I did get a kid at some point which slowed down progress and brought it to a halt quite a few times), I decided to finaly release it, with a rather drastic change to the now (I believe) generous licensing model.

Unlike current major players in this field, I decided to go with uncrippled, free version for commercial use for corps with up to 1M USD ARR. I poured my heart and soul into this, not because I was looking for financial success, but because I felt it just had to be done, given the price hikes wherever you look today. While my wife and kid were enjoying the beach during a vacation, I was using the time to figure out how to best tackle the problem with variable substitution and snapshots, a rather important part of the software. Pulling your hair kind of thing, many of you have likely been there, but darn does it feel good once you solve it! I know, not the best use of my time, but on the other hand, I hate the beach, so I guess this was an escape mechanism for me at that time :)

I had received quite a few encouraging emails from people eager to try fDeploy back when I only had a tiny landing page out, but life has its own course and it took a while to even gather the courage to publish the first beta!

As everything that sounds too good to be true in this day and age, fDeploy is no different. It does not support multi tenancy (a rather big feature which I'd love to work down the road) and a few other things may be missing which some companies may find crucial. Either way, I see this covering the needs of a large chunk of small to medium sized companies, so some "assembly" may be required. If only HN had the crowd which likes to get their hands dirty and find ways to make things work ;)

I'd love to hear your thoughts and if you could take it for a spin. No signups, should be a smooth ride to get up and running and experimenting in minutes.Thanks!

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The deployment process is edited in the dashboard rather than defined in source control.

There probably are businesses doing clickops who'd spend $2900 on a tool, but that market is rapidly shrinking. AI can write pretty decent terraform.

It can also write good kubernetes GitOps files, although that doesnt necessarily make terraform or ansible unnecessary (especially if you have to set up a diverse set of resources at a cloud provider)

True. The point here is that a tool that isn't gitops is diminishing useful, so releasing one now and charging $thousands for it is an odd choice.

Having gotten my start on Windows and IIS, two things:

1. well done.

2. I don’t tell you my troubles.

Does Microsoft still maintain IIS? I thought it hadn't been meaningfully updated in about 8 years.

Sharepoint, Exchange webmail, and other stuff uses it... that is why it's officially NOT depricated... but man imagine having to keep up an ASP codebase today, it's not unheard of, it's just rough.

Do they still maintain it as in, it gets bug fixes and security patches? Technically yes, bug fixes and security patches are still produced for Windows Server. I wouldn't call it a good level of effort but it exists. They are happy to take your money for such a mediocre level of effort though.

Is it Microsoft happy path? No. Microsoft STRONGLY recommends that if you are running .Net (Core), you run under Kestrel on Linux in a container. Performance under Linux is much better than Windows.

Kestrel is more performant under Windows than Linux, but the container support isn't there

This is incorrect, all benchmarks including those from Microsoft have proven 10%-30% performance increase under Linux.

https://aka.ms/aspnet/benchmarks

Here is Microsoft official ones, Linux beats out Windows in almost every metric.

Do any web servers have meaningful updates? It’s pretty standard stuff. IIS can do quite a bit of the same things. It’s common in my industry. We set up URL rewrites, reverse proxys, asp.net, even node.js or python (flask) based apps using WSGI. Separate app pools for everything all on the same server sometimes. It’s never been a bottleneck because it’s pretty streamlined code. Haven't had any security issues with the web server ever. It’s nice there is a GUI but when you start looking at the configuration (xml based) a lot of the directives are familiar if you’re used to nginx.conf or httpd and with htaccess (web.config) in site directories.

I am always a bit annoyed with having to install URL rewrite module by hand as it is not included in windows server installation checkboxes.

It has newest TLS stuff like TLS 1.3, it has HTTP2/HTTP3 and QUICK implemented. I do think those are meaningful updates, well http2 was 11 years ago but QUICK is more like 3 years ago with HTTP3.

That is isn’t even IIS but mostly SCHANNEL and http.sys.

Correct me if I am wrong but I always thought http.sys is IIS.

I guess if they can do changes to SCHANNEL but not to IIS for TLS stuff that would be good engineering. But it also makes argument mute ... because if Apache and Nginx and Caddy get updates to support new TLS and IIS is not because it is separate, then a question who does it right?

I'm kind of having a hard time understanding what problem this is trying to solve? I can't even tell what this is actually doing from the site. There is barely any information.

I mean Visual Studio automatically has a way of deploying directly to IIS for years now. Also as others have added, IIS isn't even used anymore with the rise of caddy and nginx.

The pricing itself seems really steep as well $3K a year?!? I don't exactly know who this is targeting.

There is still plenty of Window Server using enterprises churning out .Net Framework code that must run on IIS. It's shrinking market for sure but it's still a market.

If they are willing to spend money on Windows Server, 3k a year to make it not less painful is probably worth it. Remember, any company using Windows Server is not hiring skilled DevOps/SRE/Ops, it's probably average at best, low paid workers. It's the type of people who have probably never heard of HackerNews either so it makes advertising here an interesting choice.

we still use windows server and IIS, and I can assure you we're never spending 3k to make anything less painful. our middle name is pain. and we bill hourly for that

Same, the per instance price is a non-starter when talking to procurement.

Not painful enough to justify additional tooling in any case.

exactly what I'm saying, 3K per server is pretty damn steep.

Its free and unlimited for corps under 1M ARR.

Like the sibling comment mentioned, there's still lots of .net framework apps that target IIS. I haven't used IIS in about 15 years, but this looks like it provides a similar feature set to what Octopus Deploy had back then (Octopus seems to have changed a lot since then). i.e. more than what VS deployment can do.

No one connects to prod directly from VS in corporate setup. You do it via pipelines.

It is for when you want to have accountability of deployments and at least what we had in Octopus deploy I could promote versions from test/acc to prod based on triggers or manual click of a button.

So you can have build pipelines separate from actual deploy pipelines and manage artefacts built by the build pipeline. It is required in some environments, but totally useless and waste of time in smaller environments.

I understand what you are saying, but with AI now, I don't see writing a pipeline as a hurdle anymore.

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