ddollar

If you're looking for the simplicity of Heroku but want to run on raw AWS check out Convox. It's open source and free to try.

https://convox.com

Disclosure: I'm one of the cofounders

We've got some changes coming along these lines. Looks like we might also be able to use CloudFront for hostname routing.

This is a really great point. So far our strategy for this has been to build containers that mock various AWS services locally. This approach is still a bit experimental but please feel free to check out these repos:

https://github.com/convox/aws-dynamodb

https://github.com/convox/aws-s3

We picked Rack because we like the conceptual analogy. The naming conflict is unfortunate but there are a limited set of good words available. We hope that context will make the meaning clear.

Thank you for commenting :)

That's for the default of t2.small

ECS is incredibly powerful but definitely a lower-level primitive. We look at it sort of like a Kubernetes that we don't have to run for ourselves.

Scale has been great. We have customers running hundreds of containers on a single app without breaking a sweat.

I've noticed this as well. It seems like the docker.local hostname can sometimes take a long time to resolve. If I resolve that hostname and visit the IP directly it generally works great.

Definitely check out the beta forums as most of the issues I've found have already been reported with workarounds.

One of the founders of Convox here. Happy to answer any questions about Convox or deploying to AWS in general.

If you're using ECS to manage your clusters on AWS take a look at Convox. We're building an open source platform that makes building, versioning, and deploying code to AWS via ECS incredibly easy.

https://convox.com

Absolutely! Our plan is to release support for the container registry as soon as it's generally available.

It may be possible but it would take a substantial amount of work and I wouldn't recommend it. Convox achieves much of its stability and scalability from relying on hosted a AWS services.

You could definitely do this. Create one master app and then have it connect back to ECS to spawn more apps.

Absolutely! We have a few people using Convox to run and scale workers without a web app.

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 for the interest :) We have been trying to figure out the best way to describe our platform and "private cloud" seems the closest.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_computing#Private_cloud

Woops, I ninja-edited my comment above before I saw this. Yes you can do this, see the CLI command above.

This was recently added by a contributor!

https://github.com/convox/cli/pull/48

You can update an existing cluster using something like `convox system scale --count 5 --type c4.xlarge` from the CLI. If you change the instance type your cluster will be rolled one at a time with no downtime.

Let us know if there's any way we can help. You can reach me at david@convox.com

Let us know if there's anything we can do to help! I'm david@convox.com

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

We are considering other vendors but currently focused on AWS. What vendors would you like to see?

Currently we only offer Convox the open-source platform :) In the future we are considering paid support and other monetization strategies but the base platform itself will always be open-source and available for you to do with as you please.

Yes, we have people using this in production, including ourselves! Most of the scale right now is on the small-to-moderate end but once your application is up and running you're really only limited by how much AWS you want to pay for :)

Empire is awesome, we think it's a great project. We have been swapping notes with the folks working on it.

The primary difference is that Convox is backed by a company for which this is our product and has a full-time team dedicated to it.

Yes, there is a business behind Convox. The founders are all ex-Heroku engineers and have we all have a great deal of experience building this type of tooling and automation.

For now we are focused on building a great open-source platform.

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.

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

Unless it has changed since I last look Dokku only runs on a single server.

The other major difference is that software like Dokku is trying to run anywhere. Because we are only trying to run on AWS we do not need to build custom schedulers, load balancers, routers, etc. We believe this will reduce your operational costs over time.

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.

You're quite welcome! All three of the Convox founders are huge proponents of open source. We've already seen the benefit from this as a user has mapped out the missing pieces to host HIPAA-compliant applications on Convox and has already started making the necessary changes.

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