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Comment by ddollar | Hacker News Reader

Hello! I'm part of the Convox core team and happy to answer any questions.

Convox is an app deployment platform that you can install into your own AWS account. It uses ECS, ELB, Kinesis, and many other great AWS services under the hood but automates it all away to give you a deployment experience even easier than Heroku.

Convox uses Docker under the hood so if you want to customize anything (distro, dependencies, etc) you can simply add a Dockerfile to your project.

Convox is entirely open source. Check it out at https://github.com/convox

To get started with our installer go to: http://docs.convox.com/docs/getting-started-with-convox

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Is there likely to be support for other clouds in the future? Amazon is great and you're far cheaper than Heroku itself but I'd love to throw this on DigitalOcean or Vultr.

We're strongly considering other clouds but are focused on AWS for the moment.

Vultr's website looks... interesting. And their control panel is also... interesting. BUT.

I've been very impressed by the performance of my nodes.

Tops DigitalOcean easily. I don't have any hard numbers (I can provide some if people would like) but with the performance and number of locations they provide it's hard to beat.

$50 credits for two months: http://vultr.com/freetrial

Vultr also offers a "dedicated cloud" which I think is just dedicated resources — similar to RunAbove (http://www.runabove.com)

Whenever I talk about hosting, I seem like I'm affiliated with the providers. I am not :) I am simply a vet, a student, and a product of the hosting space.

If anyone has any questions, see my profile and reach out. I love to talk hosting :)

I'm also a big fan of Vultr, hence why I mention them :)

When I've run tests, they beat DO on every metric on unixbench (for equivalently priced/RAM filled instances [0][1]) and they let you use whichever ISOs/images you want (including fun stuff like BSD), unlike DO.

Their SATA storage nodes are really handy too.

You didn't post numbers but here are mine:

[0] Vultr benchmark: https://gist.github.com/bobobo1618/0972fc51f49d90fb37af

[1] DigitalOcean benchmark: https://gist.github.com/bobobo1618/81aa3f413b99aaab1f0d

This looks like a really great idea. Does Convox provide a convenient way to set up SSL for custom domains? The custom domains page (https://docs.convox.com/docs/custom-domains) didn't say much about it, but I may just be looking in the wrong place.

Hey I'm Matt, another member of the Convox core team.

SSL setup isn't in the product yet, but it's coming soon. For now you can set up SSL using the AWS cli: http://docs.aws.amazon.com/ElasticLoadBalancing/latest/Devel...

Sorry I downvoted by mistake... I was trying to upvote so quickly that I pressed the wrong button. I love what you have built! Definitely spending the rest of the weekend playing with this...

Haha :)

We're excited about it, too. Hit us up via the www.convox.com Intercom button or support@convox.com if you have any questions.

Looks awesome! It might be just what we need for a project we're working on at my company. :-)

Do you perhaps have a writeup or something about the convox architecture? (Which AWS services it uses, how etc)

We don't yet, unfortunately, but we will add one soon.

If you'd like to see for yourself you can install it and then check the Resources tab on your CloudFormation page in the AWS web console to inspect everything it created.

https://docs.convox.com/docs/getting-started-with-convox

You can uninstall when you're done to avoid paying for the AWS resources if you're not ready to use it yet.

https://docs.convox.com/docs/uninstall-convox

Cool, thanks for the tip!

You're welcome! Please contact us if you have more questions.

@oreng put together a nice high-level diagram: http://oren.github.io/blog/convox.html

We're using CloudFormation and Lambda to create and update everything.

The "convox" stack the installer creates makes a VPC, ASG, ECS cluster and ELB, and registers an ECS task and service for the API and private registry.

It also creates DynamoDB table for recording every build and release. And creates a KMS key for encrypting all the environment variables before we save them to S3.

An app stack the "convox deploy" command creates makes ECS tasks and services and an ELB for all the containers in `docker-compose.yml`, and creates a Kinesis stream for app logs.

Take a look at the CloudFormation tools as a starting point:

https://github.com/convox/kernel/blob/master/dist/kernel.jso... https://github.com/convox/app/blob/master/template/staging.t...

This project looks great!

Is anybody working full-time on the project? Are there plans to commercialize any aspects of this? How confident are you that the project will get to "1.0".

Yes! We have formed a business behind convox and current have a small team working on it full time. We are very confident that it will hit 1.0. Thanks for your interest :)

Thanks! Yes right now we have a small team working on this full time. We do plan to commercialize it, but intend to always keep it open source.

We're super confident it will get to a more mature state. We have some resources to keep working on it ourselves, and we're seeing lots of interest and participation from the open source community as well.

Looks interesting! How is ECS working out so far for you?

And what's your minimum per-application cost for single-container Docker web app with SSL?

ECS is working out great for us. We host all of our own internal infrastructure on Convox and have been very happy.

The minimum per-application cost would be for an ELB. Counting the slice of runtime cluster needed to run it I'd estimate around $20-25 per app as a minimum.

Can Convox do non-internet-facing services? i.e. private internal services not routable from outside the VPC?

Absolutely! You can decide not to use a front-end load balancer. We have one user using Convox to spin up large worker pools on AWS.

We also have plans on our roadmap to integrate with internal (inside the VPC only) ELBs for internal APIs and things of that nature.

> We also have plans on our roadmap to integrate with internal (inside the VPC only) ELBs for internal APIs and things of that nature.

This is what I'm getting at. Also just saw the issue pertaining to HIPAA, which probably requires the same thing.

Apps deployed on Empire apparently are only available inside the VPC unless a domain name is added, it doesn't actually work like that (when I deployed the Empire stack all boxes had public IPs and a security group allowing ingress from the internet 😓), but the idea is a good one I think.

Oh, and thanks. Knowing you're behind it I'm sure Convox will be great. I'm looking forward to watching it develop and using it myself.

That's very kind of you to say :)

Currently the EC2 instances in your Convox installation all have public IP addresses but this is currently being addressed

https://github.com/convox/kernel/issues/92

Hey! Creator of Empire here. The demo stack we provide isn't suitable for production use as you found out already. Empire can definitely be deployed in a production ready manor where you can have internal and external services, which is how we have it setup at Remind. The docs are a little lacking right now unfortunately, but we'll be improving this in the future.

We actually have a production ready example stack using our stack provisioning tool called stacker: https://github.com/remind101/stacker/pull/43.

Could you tell me in which way it it different than elastic beanstalk? Ease of use?

How are backups handled?

Will you be adding some comments or tests?

@ddollar: This is Michael from Livecoding.tv Do you want to demo Convox live on Livecoding.tv? Would be cool to see this in action and ask questions My email is michael@livecoding.tv

Hey Michael that sounds great. Sending you an email now.

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