Creating your own Heroku on EC2

This is an interesting article, but I have some beef with the way they go about it. Dokku is a solution, but I think it's not a strong one in the case of replicating Heroku or just as a wise choice for development; Dokku is fundamentally single-node and is neither fault tolerant nor scalable. Boo-urns. (I dig the `git push` integration, but you can do that a number of different ways that don't tie you to something like Dokku.)

I can't speak to databases, because RDS/ElasticCache/etc. are right there so I don't think about it as often as I probably should, but for application-level stuff I've found that Mesos with Marathon (or HubSpot's Singularity, which is really cool) addresses this much better, especially with Mesos's Docker executors. You also have the advantage of being able to use this cluster differently should you so choose--Marathon lets you run apps as does Daniel's Dokku setup, but you can use Chronos as a distributed, fault-tolerant cron system and you can also plug in Slack, ElasticSearch, etc. and reuse the same infrastructure as you need it.

It's also pretty easy to get rolling with, so I wouldn't use difficulty as a factor. =) A little more overhead, but a lot more future-proofing. I haven't (yet) open-sourced my "Mesos in a box" Vagrant stuff, because I haven't extricated it yet from my actual line-of-business stuff, but I built upon some (kind of hacky, much improved now) stuff I blogged about a few months ago:

http://github.com/eropple/mesos-experiments

http://edcanhack.com/2014/07/a-virtual-mesos-cluster-with-va...

This stuff is super interesting to me and I'm always looking for neat ways to use scalable infrastructure, so if anyone wants to chat about this stuff offline, email's in my profile.

Is it me or when there is talk about a "personal Heroku" the only thing that seems to be there is a git push deployment?

Heroku is much more than that from the deployment to the logging, to the collaboration. What about DB or all the other external systems a modern web app needs (memcache, redis, etc)?

We build custom apps for many different clients which each have their own server/db. Heroku is costly for that kind of setup, but I haven't found anything else that gives me the same peace of mind and sunny weekends.

In playing around with dokku for use on my VPS I just generally got the impression that it wasn't ready to be used in production. I repeatedly ran into snags or bugs, but so many steps had been automagically taken care of by dokku that I oftentimes didn't even know where to begin to look to try to resolve them. If something like dokku is going to do these things automatically it needs to do so much more reliably, otherwise it's worse than nothing at all.

I do believe dokku (or something else like it) will be the go-to in the future, but I think that's a ways off yet.

I was using heroku initially but went with digital ocean to reduce costs. From my experience with using heroku, it's pretty easy to scale without knowing server-side configs, etc. But depending on your app, getting onboarded with digital ocean or the likes of it is not too cumbersome either. For example, digital ocean gives you already baked in setup for django/python. You can simulate heroku by deploying code using git pull given it's on some git repo (not to say that's the only killer feature heroku has). You may have to be wary of some security pitfalls though. I've noticed default password for postgres db is same for all django/python instances in digital ocean. So if you were to allow connection to db outside from localhost without changing default password of db - that's a big, big security risk! I wonder if there may be some websites on digital ocean already impacted by it. In summary, you may be expected to learn gunicorn/nginx confgis (depending on the app) and have to be cautions of some security pitfalls if you were to go with IaaS. Depending on the scope of your app the work to get around these tasks may or may not be enough to justify using heroku.

Speaking of Docker on AWS - has anyone had trouble with deployments on micro instances? I'm able to deploy once, then subsequent deployments are killed due to a lack of free memory.

This seems like a great setup that I'd love to try at some point, but I think I'll have to fork over more $$$ if I actually want it to work. :/

I blogged last week about setting up Heroku git push style deploys on a cheap VPS. This is really easy to do, but it is not the Heroku experience with scaling, fault recovery, plugins, etc.

Hopefully not too far off topic, but there are other hosting options to also look at:

Microsoft BizSpark: I was accepted a while back, and I am using it to try to get a business idea off the ground. Basically free hosting for a few years to get new business ideas started. I am using a Linux server. Microsoft Azure is pretty cool, and worth a look.

IBM BlueMix: I recently became interested in BlueMix because I am helping a customer use the IBM Watson system in their application. Anyway, if you are already familiar with the Cloud Foundry command line tools, then there is no learning curve for using BlueMix. You can host an app that uses 512MB RAM for free. As you increase RAM and other resources, then it starts to cost.

We've had pretty nice results with Cloud66. Technically it's different: Dokku/Heroku use containers, Cloud66 uses full cloud instances. However, most using Heroku think of it as a simplified deployment mechanism, not really worrying about the underlying engineering details.

I tried this on Digital Ocean a while back. Seemed pretty decent.