The new sandbox: open-source and self-hosted
blog.dotcloud.com
blog.dotcloud.com
From the free options I've seen so far, AppFog comes closest, but last time I tried them the Python/Django documentation was pretty sketchy and the build process had some issues.
What are some other good free (tier) PaaS options out there?
I wouldn't expect to run a production application with 50GB/month traffic for free (unless it was some kind of great free service itself, and then you can probably talk it over with them).
Would anyone happe to know a trick to view localhost apps on the iOS Simulator, so I don't have to deploy to an external site to view how my CSS behaves on iOS devices?
> http://localhost:<port>/ works from Safari on the iPhone Simulator.Cheers!
Cloudbees for JVM apps. You can get started with a free tier git repo, Jenkins build service, db (MySQL default, Postgres available), Tomcat or JBoss instance, and custom domain, and set it up for continuous deployment whenever you push changes to your git repo.
I've been playing with the idea of building a App Engine gear able to run Python apps on top of OpenShift, but my day job is interfering with my hobbies...
First of all, I want to congratulate you guys on what you’re doing for the community by open-sourcing these projects. I have hope that it will lead to faster extension of the options provided by the already-slick configuration scheme to better support new variations on deployment strategies, as well as better documentation.
That being said, my days as a Dotcloud customer may be numbered. Back when I was evaluating PaaSs to use for my commercial project, I chose Dotcloud because I could be free to experiment and test using the Sandbox. While we use a Live application for our production deployment, my company still relies on the Sandbox for staging and one-off tests.
I have since run into a couple pain points using Dotcloud’s services. The first of these is the fact that your Postgres service cannot be easily scaled. Dotcloud support themselves recommended that I use Heroku’s Postgres hosting as an alternative. This seems to be just one step down the slope of potentially migrating our whole stack. The second pain point is that the instance-based model is not amenable to running New Relic for monitoring. This is not a problem specific to Dotcloud, but again, Heroku is outflanking you by integrating New Relic pricing directly into their basic pricing model. This provides for much more predictable and bounded billing–super important for my company in our bootstrapping stage.
While I certainly understand that the Sandbox flavor must come at a significant cost to your company, the fact that it’s phasing out is a significant reduction in value for mine. I’m sure this wasn’t an easy decision, but I hope you understand that this is a strong push toward testing out my deployment on your competitors’ services so I can evaluate the pros/cons of bailing. I hope you’ll consider this as just one customer data point.
It's not really clear how to self-host and how to transition from self-hosting to their platform if the need arises.
But I suppose the freemium model (I understand it's a kind of freemium) costs, again, too much in this case.
Not that I want to make the impression that there are any obvious alternatives for a fairly easy Django deployment experience.
Something like `dotcloud local push`. This way I don't have to mess with chef/vagrant/etc for my staging environments: I can simply use my dotcloud configurations for both local and production deployments.
It would be sad if I had to create one deployment system for testing environments, and something entirely different for production - because by the time I set things up for tests, I might as well use that same tool chain for prod!
I don't mind that the free tier is going away - because for me, it has been less about the "free" and more about the "easy to throw a stack together".
Exciting times!
If this existed, it would be really easy to convert self-hosting customers to the paid service for scalability and support, and maybe some of the Dashboard tools. But considering this could be months away, I really wish the Sandbox were sticking around for a while...
I'd love to talk about it some more - just drop by #docker@freenode anytime.
Those people were not concerned about the speed at which to convert, more about the sudden extra cash needed.
(note that I don't blame DotCloud for this really! Just giving a data point on something I heard).
I don't disagree with Dotcloud's decision! But our entire stack literally depends on them, so here is another data point about how this will affect us.
With that said the possibility of using the open source variety - bringing along with it the ability to use it outside of US East - sounds pretty promising.
You can keep it scaled to a minimum (but still >1 containers to catch scaling bugs) and destroy it after your tests.
The way I look at it, personally, is that we're not hardware providers. Instead, we provide some level of "ops as a service" -- partially through tooling and partially through highly skilled engineers.