[HN Gopher] Show HN: Heroku Alternative for Python/Django apps
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       Show HN: Heroku Alternative for Python/Django apps
        
       Author : appliku
       Score  : 161 points
       Date   : 2021-09-09 11:53 UTC (11 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (appliku.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (appliku.com)
        
       | reducesuffering wrote:
       | I'm learning to run a Django app and have been toying with
       | deploying to DigitalOcean. Decided on this to learn atleast some
       | generic DevOps things as opposed to too-proprietary (Heroku) and
       | too-expensive (AWS). There's a decent amount of Nginx, Gunicorn,
       | and Postgres things that seem to need to be scripted, and I'm
       | still not sure how to quickly reproduce the server automatically
       | (scripts?) and replicate the server environment on my Mac without
       | adding Docker/Podman to the mix (running Django app on my Mac and
       | deploying to Ubuntu server env could cause issues unknown
       | locally).
       | 
       | How does Appliku help address these issues?
       | 
       | Edit: Also, is Appliku itself deployed with Appliku? If so, if
       | Appliku experiences issues, do you have a quick method of
       | deploying the fix outside your usual deployment?
        
         | hnarayanan wrote:
         | Use Ansible. Here is an example of one of my Django apps' setup
         | scripts: https://github.com/scancer-org/setup
        
         | heurisko wrote:
         | > I'm still not sure how to quickly reproduce the server
         | automatically (scripts?)
         | 
         | I use Ansible. I'm not a DevOps person and found it very easy
         | to get working. It just requires SSH.
         | 
         | I also use Docker locally, because it's convenient, even if I
         | don't containerise my application.
         | 
         | I've tested Digital Ocean's managed Postgres and it seems to
         | work well.
         | 
         | Welcome to hear what Appliku offers more than this, however.
        
           | reducesuffering wrote:
           | Thanks. When people say they use Docker, there seems to be
           | several different ways. Are you using Docker Desktop
           | (Mac/Linux?), docker-compose, Podman, or something else?
        
             | heurisko wrote:
             | I use docker-compose on Ubuntu and when I'm on Mac, I use
             | the same docker-compose.yml file running under Docker
             | Desktop.
             | 
             | My docker-compose.yml file includes services for
             | integration testing, like MailHog.
        
         | appliku wrote:
         | As a developer you only pick your repo and pick a server size
         | and region.
         | 
         | If you need customization you can make your own dockerfile that
         | will be used to build your image.
         | 
         | If you need to move to another server - you provision another
         | server through appliku interface and change deployment to
         | happen on that server.
         | 
         | Appliku itself is deployed with help of GitLab CI and can be
         | redeployed to another location pretty fast.
         | 
         | Hope i was able to answer your questions.
        
       | kcb wrote:
       | Is there any service that I can just upload a py file and a
       | requirements.txt and it will just run? No bundling, packaging,
       | git, cli, etc. Not even for a web app but main use case is to
       | host a Discord bot.
        
         | slig wrote:
         | GCF might be what you're looking for
         | https://cloud.google.com/functions/docs/quickstart-python
        
       | rvanlaar wrote:
       | Hey Congrats on launching this. I really hope it'll grow.
       | 
       | Here are my 2 cts.
       | 
       | I've used dokku for this, running Django, for years and recently
       | I moved a customer over to use the digital ocean app platform.
       | 
       | There are a couple of things I find important when evaluating
       | these platforms that I didn't see on the site: - is there
       | database fail over with the multi server strong and powerful
       | plans? - does appliku maintain the underlying servers and
       | database? - is there monitoring?
        
         | appliku wrote:
         | Hey, thanks for kind words!
         | 
         | At the moment databases in Appliku are best fit for non-
         | production environments. So while you can enjoy easy and great
         | deployments of your apps, I am not ready yet to compete on the
         | production databases front. So no, we don't offer fail over or
         | even backups at the moment. Backups are in plans, but more
         | advanced features for databases is not even in backlog.
        
           | derefr wrote:
           | Re: production-quality DBs, it's its whole own ball-game.
           | 
           | Rather than getting into all of that, your time here might be
           | better spent here finding DBaaS services that host on the
           | same clouds Appliku deploys to, and partnering Appliku with
           | them to guarantee predictable network-transit peering to the
           | clouds your users are launching on; probably by setting up
           | the install-time UX flow so that that DBaaS choice is made
           | early in the setup flow, and constrains further choices (i.e.
           | user chooses DBaaS X; Appliku knows what AZs it exists in in
           | each cloud, and restricts user to deploying the app to those
           | same AZs in order to ensure free transit.)
           | 
           | In other words, do the backend work Heroku does to add a new
           | DBaaS "add-on" partner, but without reselling/wrapping the
           | resulting service, instead just giving a UX to bind to it.
        
             | appliku wrote:
             | One thought I have in mind is ability to provision AWS
             | and/or Digital Ocean managed DB offerings so you don't have
             | to leave appliku interface to get a production grade DB.
             | 
             | But Appliku will keep being deployment solution for apps.
        
               | iampims wrote:
               | That's probably the way to go. Easy
               | provisioning/scaling/backup based on RDS or equivalent.
        
         | danjac wrote:
         | As a long-time Dokku user, have you done any multi-server
         | deployments or just stayed to a single server? I'm happy with
         | Dokku for side projects but would be interested in what Dokku
         | users use when they need to move up to a multi-server setup.
        
           | futhey wrote:
           | Not OP but very happy with Dokku for multi-server clusters,
           | with some light load balancing or failover at the DNS level.
           | 
           | Admittedly, this works great for clusters of 1-10 machines.
           | There's definitely some missing stuff that's hard to add for
           | larger deployments.
           | 
           | But, I'd venture to say that most of Dokku's target audience
           | doesn't need to worry about scaling past a couple of servers.
        
       | howolduis wrote:
       | So with Heorku, if an app has one dyno and that dyno doesn't
       | receive any traffic in 1 hour, the dyno goes to sleep. Does
       | Appliku have a similar thing or does it stay online longer?
        
         | appliku wrote:
         | It happens for a free dyno. For paid dynos they are always up.
         | 
         | Appiku doesn't turn off your servers.
         | 
         | Scaling and spinning up/down additional servers is in plans.
        
       | DarthNebo wrote:
       | Does anyone know of a FOSS app to help setup something similar to
       | managed databases w/ Postgres/Mongo, but with ease of use just
       | like AWS/DO have? Handling backups, scaling with minimal user
       | intervention yet self-hostable?
        
       | alexanderisora wrote:
       | I am long time paid customer of Appliku. I've built a SaaS
       | (https://unicornplatform.com) and before was hosted on Heroku.
       | Migrating to Appliku saved me $400/mo in cloud costs.
       | 
       | My app is React & Django and it works like a charm on Appliku.
       | 
       | Good luck!
        
         | xu3u32 wrote:
         | How are you serving react?
        
           | appliku wrote:
           | Built during the project build and uploaded to s3 and served
           | via CDN.
        
         | howolduis wrote:
         | to all web developers: no one, absolutely no one, likes huge
         | popups on their screen that covers the website.
        
       | wartijn_ wrote:
       | What are the benefits over using this instead of DO's app
       | platform?
       | 
       | https://www.digitalocean.com/products/app-platform/
        
         | appliku wrote:
         | DO Apps platform in terms of pricing is as bad as Heroku's
         | offering. They charge per instance of the process and it
         | becomes pretty expensive. Appliku helps to reduce costs by
         | putting processes on a single server.
         | 
         | With Heroku Config Vars sync feature one of the customers
         | managed to save around $7k/mo on fat Dynos that are insanely
         | overpriced in Heroku.
         | 
         | So while DO Apps platform will definitely have their target
         | audience, Appliku allows to save a lot of cash.
         | 
         | Hope I was able to answer your question :)
        
       | pbronez wrote:
       | Can you talk a bit about the security model? Appliku requires an
       | AWS user with:
       | 
       | AmazonEC2FullAccess
       | 
       | AmazonEC2ContainerRegistryFullAccess
       | 
       | AmazonEC2ContainerServiceFullAccess
       | 
       | AmazonS3FullAccess
       | 
       | That's a lot of permissions into my AWS account. What are some
       | easy ways to contain the damage that could be done if Appliku has
       | a bug or the creditials are compromised?
        
         | onphonenow wrote:
         | Google got this right w project focused permissions- accounts
         | work aws side but
        
         | appliku wrote:
         | Hey! Thanks for question. I guess there is an article that
         | needs updating. Appliku only needs AmazonEC2FullAccess.
         | 
         | Well, if you feel that something is off you just revoke
         | credentials.
         | 
         | I will update the article now. Thanks again
        
           | mikepurvis wrote:
           | The point of a rich authorization model is not to have to
           | rely on feelings.
        
         | deberon wrote:
         | I would recommend dedicating an entire AWS account to this. Or,
         | if you have a solid tagging strategy[0], you can craft your IAM
         | policies to only allow Appliku access to resources tagged with
         | a particular tag.
         | 
         | 0 -
         | https://docs.aws.amazon.com/IAM/latest/UserGuide/access_tags...
        
           | appliku wrote:
           | Separate account will be the best strategy. I prefer having
           | separate accounts for every project. Hustle to login between
           | them, but the best isolation that can be between projects.
        
       | slig wrote:
       | Congrats on shipping! I could see myself using a service like
       | yours, and bringing my own server is perfect as I can adjust and
       | scale it up/down as needed.
       | 
       | I'm thankful that Heroku prices are that extreme because it made
       | me learn how to deploy and run everything by myself back in the
       | day.
        
         | appliku wrote:
         | Thanks for kind words.
         | 
         | While I know how to deploy myself I am fed up with that.
         | Especially when it comes to a new project. There are so many
         | places where you can screw up with a typo or stuff like that.
         | 
         | So while I know how to do it by myself, I don't enjoy doing
         | that and that's how the project got started.
         | 
         | By the way if curious i wrote a post about that:
         | https://dev.to/kostjapalovic/tired-of-deployments-built-my-o...
        
       | thih9 wrote:
       | Congrats on the launch!
       | 
       | > Create as many instances of Postgres, PostGIS, Mysql, Redis and
       | RabbitMQ as you want. They are hosted on your servers and we
       | don't charge extra for them.
       | 
       | I'd love to learn more about this, I couldn't find any details.
       | Is there a page with more information? Specifically, I'd like to
       | know more about backups and upgrades.
        
         | appliku wrote:
         | At this moment we are not fighting for the niche of Production
         | grade databases with failovers and all these valuable things.
         | 
         | The feature to back up at least postgres is planned, fail overs
         | , replication, etc is not even planned yet. There are companies
         | that have whole departments working on managed DB offerings,
         | sadly - we don't. yet :)
        
       | RussianCow wrote:
       | This looks sleek, but I'll ask the obvious question: Why use this
       | over Heroku? I couldn't find a good answer to that question from
       | a quick look at the website, aside from maybe the fact that it
       | uses AWS and Digital Ocean.
        
         | capableweb wrote:
         | Heroku is a general apps platform. This seems to be tailored
         | specifically to Django/Python (with the option of using your
         | own Dockerfile so could deploy anything). One could easily
         | imagine that the performance and stability should be a lot
         | higher than with Heroku. If you're a Python-only shop, it might
         | make more sense.
        
           | vldo wrote:
           | having something that specific, tailored for dynamic
           | language, seems like overkill i'd undestand if it was for
           | something highly performant and hard to deploy
        
             | capableweb wrote:
             | Maybe, but maybe not. If you're using Python/JavaScript and
             | have a ton of dependencies, most of your deploy-time is
             | gonna be spent downloading dependencies. If the host you're
             | using is specifically setup for Python/JavaScript, they can
             | run a registry mirror with 100% of the packages right next
             | to the host, and remove basically most time spent
             | downloading the packages.
             | 
             | Same goes for other time-consuming activities like code
             | coverage or even running the tests. If the applications
             | running on the platform are somewhat heterogeneous, then
             | you can start doing really aggressive performance work.
        
           | RussianCow wrote:
           | > One could easily imagine that the performance and stability
           | should be a lot higher than with Heroku.
           | 
           | No, I can't imagine that. Why would performance be any
           | different? I imagine most of these kinds of solutions use
           | Docker behind the hood anyway, so they're likely to be
           | identical.
        
             | capableweb wrote:
             | See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28468943
             | 
             | To clarify, I mention "performance" in terms of the speed
             | of "from commit to deploy", not the CPU/IO performance of
             | an already deployed application.
        
               | RussianCow wrote:
               | That makes more sense, but the deploy cycle is already
               | really fast with Heroku. I'm not sure if there is very
               | much value in trying to shave off a few more seconds.
        
               | appliku wrote:
               | Depending on your requirements build ties in Heroku can
               | be quite long. One app i've recently observed take 7
               | minutes to build because it always had to build both JS
               | and Django parts(buildpacks for both were executed every
               | time). We made it way faster with custom docker file that
               | used caches and often built under 40 seconds. i am not
               | saying that is not doable in Heroku, but would take more
               | effort.
        
             | danielheath wrote:
             | Because Heroku is phenomenally expensive.
        
               | appliku wrote:
               | As i said in another comment Heroku is unbelievably
               | expensive.
               | 
               | What they offer for $250 per process can be done at
               | $60/mo per whole app.
               | 
               | When I helped them move all background workers and all
               | non-production apps to Digital Ocean they ended up saving
               | $7k/mo which blew my mind.
               | 
               | It is easy to start on Heroku, but staying there is a
               | black hole in any budget.
               | 
               | Thankfully we've built Heroku Config Vars sync so one can
               | move off of Heroku gradually.
        
               | fnomnom wrote:
               | >Heroku is unbelievably expensive.
               | 
               | only if developer/devops/admin time is free and for most
               | it isnt. if 60 vs 250 /month is a breaking factor for you
               | and your use case: go for it. if you need the software
               | deployed to make real business it just doesnt matter.
        
               | appliku wrote:
               | $250/mo per process. And with appliku it is done
               | automatically so there is no need for admin/devops time.
        
         | vldo wrote:
         | actually i'll ask something similar, why this over dokku?
        
           | appliku wrote:
           | You can do Dokku, you can setup dokku and deploy apps with
           | dokku. no problem.
           | 
           | But I wanted a solution where I don't need to remember
           | anything DevOps while writing/shipping my apps.
           | 
           | I also added a generous free plan that allows all features.
           | Then AWS has free credits so one can start their next big
           | thing without expenses and not learning a single thing about
           | deployment at all
        
         | appliku wrote:
         | Price.
         | 
         | It is easy to start on Heroku. With one app, one process.
         | 
         | When you have multiple apps and several processes there is a
         | way to reduce costs and not loose in convenience.
         | 
         | $10/mo droplet can hold plenty of apps and it is still $10/mo.
         | If you don't need a production grade Database - Appliku has
         | them at 0 cost.
         | 
         | Back in a day I moved several of my side projects to Heroku. I
         | was happy until i received a $90+ invoice by the end of the
         | month. Now a $10/mo droplet holds even more projects for me.
        
           | RussianCow wrote:
           | Thanks for the response. My two cents: price is not the thing
           | that I would compete on. For any "real" business, the cost of
           | Heroku is negligible compared to its benefits; a few hundred
           | dollars per month in savings is just not enough to convince
           | most companies to migrate to a completely new service that
           | isn't as battle tested and has fewer features. At the same
           | time, I'm not convinced you could make any significant amount
           | of money tailoring your service to side projects.
           | 
           | With that said, I think you have a great product and could
           | probably make some decent money by offering some combination
           | of niche features. Ideas off the top of my head:
           | 
           | * Integrated metrics. Since you're primarily targeting Django
           | apps, it should be feasible to collect health/performance
           | stats from the apps and display them in a simple dashboard.
           | You don't need to offer very much here; most companies would
           | be more than happy with basic stats related to response times
           | per route, although SQL query times would be really neat to
           | see.
           | 
           | * Automatic scaling for your Python projects. If you could
           | apply the same ease of deployment to horizontal scaling, that
           | would be really valuable.
           | 
           | * Easy integration with AWS services like S3, SES, and SNS.
           | You could do this in a number of ways. One idea is to provide
           | a set of Django libraries that, for instance, makes sending
           | SMS messages super simple, with no configuration needed when
           | used via Appliku. Or you could integrate with existing
           | libraries and just remove the configuration step for the
           | developer.
           | 
           | With at least one of the above (or some other
           | differentiator), I could see Appliku taking off. In any case,
           | you have a great product, and I wish you the best of luck!
        
             | appliku wrote:
             | Thanks A LOT for kind words.
             | 
             | So first I am thinking what is the best way to offer
             | scaling. There are so many ways how it can be done and in
             | other comment threads there are hot debates happening about
             | that. It is still an open question.
             | 
             | I was thinking about tailoring more features for django
             | too. Not only price is different, but I picked Django for a
             | reason. It is a great suggestion about metrics per route. I
             | haven't thought about it before.
             | 
             | Integration with AWS services - Yes. That's why initially i
             | had a wide range of recommended Policies to include in AWS
             | credentials. My goal was to make automation around creating
             | not only app but all auxiliary services without the need
             | for user to deal with AWS manually.
             | 
             | basically let appliku orchestrate 3rd party services in
             | order to get the "recommended setup".
             | 
             | So not only I have limited positioning to Python/Django
             | niche, but next tools that will appear will make people
             | using this popular framework way happier by taking away
             | their pain.
             | 
             | Thanks for your suggestions. Hope to speak with you in our
             | Discord :) https://appliku.com/discord
        
           | eirki wrote:
           | This is my experience as well. $10 for each running process
           | (server, worker, database) adds up very fast.
        
             | appliku wrote:
             | It doesn't seem like a lot when you enable one more
             | resource for $7-10/mo. You can clearly see invoice "growth"
             | when it adds app, right? :D
        
         | caymanjim wrote:
         | Heroku is AWS.
        
       | pcardoso wrote:
       | I have been using CapRover for this purpose
       | (https://caprover.com)
        
       | axelthegerman wrote:
       | If anyone is looking for a similar service to deploy Ruby/Rails
       | apps, check out https://www.hatchbox.io from Chris Oliver.
       | Unfortunately doesn't come with a free tier but worth every
       | penny!
        
         | dayvough23 wrote:
         | Seconding Chris' work. I love having not to worry about DevOps
         | for my Rails apps.
        
           | excid3 wrote:
           | Thanks for the support! Glad you've been enjoying Hatchbox.
           | We're wrapping up v2 and can't wait to share it. Upgrading to
           | Caddy for the web server has been wonderful.
        
             | appliku wrote:
             | Tell me more about Caddy vs Nginx. What are the biggest
             | benefits? I honestly not exactly happy with nginx in some
             | corner cases.
        
               | BilalBudhani wrote:
               | Bilal here, I'm working with Chris on v2.
               | 
               | Caddy providers benefits compared to Nginx, like
               | 
               | - Out of the box SSL certificates
               | 
               | - REST api for providing configuration
               | 
               | - A vibrant plugin ecosystem to extend traditional web
               | server functionality
               | 
               | - Easier setup for load balancer
               | 
               | We are quite happy with the results so far.
        
               | appliku wrote:
               | Yes, I can def-ly see it is way better. Question here, as
               | far as i understand Caddy is a paid product, how its
               | licensing works while deploying on customers servers?
        
         | appliku wrote:
         | I would like to say that existence of Chris Oliver's Hatchbox
         | was initial inspiration and validation after finding which i
         | decided to build Appliku. So, Thanks, Chris!!!
        
         | pelagicAustral wrote:
         | Hatchbox its an absolute lifesaver for my deployments... I
         | cannot stress how helpful and well crafted it is... But every
         | single day of my life I worry about what is going to happen to
         | all my infrastructure if something were to happen to
         | Chris/HB...
        
       | _tardigrade wrote:
       | recently started working on something very similar for
       | Python/Django apps! I'll have more competition I guess
        
         | appliku wrote:
         | It only proves there is market for that.
         | 
         | The more solutions the better!
         | 
         | Wish you best of luck!
        
       | saevarom wrote:
       | This is very interesting to me. I'm essentially a one man devOps
       | team at a small web agency hosting multiple client websites
       | mostly based on Django.
       | 
       | One question; what do you do about compiling and transpiling
       | Javascript? Right now it's done via webpack in the local
       | environment and then pushed out to S3/CDN.
        
         | appliku wrote:
         | hey!
         | 
         | I have a question. Are you deploying it to your servers/cloud
         | accounts or clients' accounts?
         | 
         | Regarding your questions: it is responsibility of the app to
         | build and upload the static assets where needed.
         | 
         | If you want recommendation what to do, I'd say you'll need a
         | custom dockerfile, install node, run webpack in there and
         | collect static.
         | 
         | If you are not using collectstatic in that process then given
         | the lack of details I'd say why are you doing it in the same
         | repo at all. But again - you provided very little details.
         | 
         | So if it is a website(server rendered pages, SEO is
         | important,etc) - you should have node and do optimisations
         | before pushing to s3.
         | 
         | If it is an app (RIA,SPA) then I'd say don't mix frontend and
         | backend. Decouple it and ship frontend separately.
         | 
         | Appliku Interface is built and served with Netlify. I still
         | remember those dark times when I had frontend inside the main
         | repo. It was largely inconvenient.
         | 
         | Either way happy to chat about your issues in our discord
         | server. I am more than happy to help you figuring this out.
        
           | saevarom wrote:
           | Yes well separation of frontend/backend is of course a good
           | idea, but most of the projects are mostly django templates
           | with some React sprinkled on top to make interaction and
           | interfaces nicer. It's also a good idea if you have just a
           | single project or a few of them.
           | 
           | I'm talking about maybe 30-40 projects with django as base so
           | it would make my job so much more complicated if I would
           | split them all up in repos.
           | 
           | The frontend code is mostly isolated but is shipped in the
           | same repo to be built and distributed for django to find.
           | 
           | So your answer about a custom dockerfile is probably what
           | would be needed.
        
             | appliku wrote:
             | Oh yeah i totally understand what it means having so much
             | projects - every minute spent on manual task becomes an
             | hour if done on all projects.
             | 
             | Let me know if you need another set of eyes or discuss it
             | options. https://twitter.com/KostjaPalovic or in our
             | discord https://appliku.com/discord
        
       | john-radio wrote:
       | We should get this added as as backend option for cookiecutter
       | Django.
        
         | appliku wrote:
         | I completely agree :)
        
       | georgeleon wrote:
       | We tried Heroku, and that was expensive. We tried deploying
       | manually on AWS but it took a lot of time with a devops
       | freelancer.
       | 
       | Got sold on Appliku and haven't had to think about infrastructure
       | and deployment at all. We also survived for a long time on the
       | free plan, until we decided to have a separate server for staging
       | environment.
       | 
       | Works pretty well. Never had to learn anything about servers and
       | SSH.
        
       | air7 wrote:
       | I must have been living under a rock but I don't fully understand
       | the appeal of these types of services if I have to run my own
       | server anyway.
       | 
       | What I'm thinking is that it only saves me the initial setup of a
       | web server and a git hook and perhaps a DB (which is one tutorial
       | away for anyone with basic technical skills) after which
       | deployment would just mean a git push. What am I missing?
        
         | tamersalama wrote:
         | It's the difference between a managed service (getting the
         | 3:00AM phonecall) vs doing it all yourself.
        
         | appliku wrote:
         | In a nutshell it is delegating all this manual work to a
         | service.
         | 
         | I was happy with manual deployments for a while too, until i
         | got fed up with this activity.
         | 
         | It is just a question of quality of life, automation.
         | 
         | Also, yes - there are tutorials, but what if you are not
         | willing to spend time learning it even if you have tutorial?
         | 
         | Most of developers have a very high pain tolerance for manual
         | tasks and search for yet another tutorial how to do X by
         | themselves instead of delegating a task to some app or service.
         | 
         | Not everyone is like that.
        
       | [deleted]
        
       | agustif wrote:
       | I just have to say I'm very happy with Dokku/Ledokku for my
       | Node/React apps!
        
       | debarshri wrote:
       | I have been following this space alot. Heroku like deployment
       | spaces have exploded recently partly because people miss that
       | experience, partly because buildpack is opensource[1], partly
       | because we have gone through a techshift where it is pretty easy
       | to emulate that. There are two broad categories - 1. Dokku's of
       | the world, one VM (very recently tried adding multi node) and
       | then more recently getporter.dev[2] and okteto[3] of the world
       | that is trying to replicate heroku on kubernetes.
       | 
       | One of things, I noticed is that, It looks really cool at first
       | look but every organisation has their own complexity in deploying
       | stuff. It is an integration hell, you have to provide white glove
       | treatment to all customers and eventually you have a hard time
       | scaling. We tried it too, and what we noticed if you have to go
       | an enterprise and sell, you start doing leaky abstraction. It
       | works really well for early stage startups but once they have the
       | money you prefer something more customizable and robust solution.
       | 
       | This project looks cool. I do not want to discourage anyone but
       | again, it is a red ocean out there.
       | 
       | [1] https://buildpacks.io/
       | 
       | [2] https://www.getporter.dev/
       | 
       | [3] https://okteto.com/
        
         | nkotov wrote:
         | We're[1] in a similar space and our winning strategy has been
         | to provide white-glove onboarding to get our customers
         | environment up and running. It's part of doing something that
         | doesn't scale (easily) but it also allows us to figure out what
         | else we can automate away to increase pace on these onboarding.
         | 
         | [1]https://atomizedhq.com
        
           | debarshri wrote:
           | The product looks great. I don't want to discourage you guys,
           | I am failing to see a moat as compared to you guys and lets
           | say getporter or others in the spaces. Funny enough you guys
           | are also YC company.
           | 
           | Product with a high touchpoint I think does not scale this
           | early on as a company.
           | 
           | For reference, Porter as a product is doing great because I
           | think they have invested a lot in building a community. I
           | think that works to certain extent as at scale community
           | helps each other.
           | 
           | But, just beware of the fact that market cap is actually
           | pretty small. You have enterprise competition from VMWare
           | Tanzu and others. On the cloud space, you have digitalocean's
           | app deployment thing, AWS has app runner. I have at least
           | seen over 20 companies doing pretty much the same thing. Just
           | a thought.
        
         | zerkten wrote:
         | The problem is the layering of the abstractions. Having PaaS on
         | top of Kubernetes in a way that you move down to a more
         | powerful primitive is going to be the most scalable.
         | 
         | What happened in the public cloud space was a disparate set of
         | services which made the choices really costly. Azure went in
         | heavy on PaaS while AWS was focused on VMs. The easy adoption
         | and migration was on AWS. K8s seems like a reasonable
         | abstraction that reduces the cost of these decisions because
         | people seem to agree that K8s is a reasonable base.
         | 
         | Being able to slide on a compatible PaaS layer shouldn't negate
         | that K8s investment, and make it easier to adopt for some
         | organizations, or parts of those organizations. But, I wouldn't
         | argue that we are the point where that layer is mature.
        
           | debarshri wrote:
           | I do not agree with you. PaaS abstraction becomes super leaky
           | on top kubernetes as you start solving real world problems.
           | 
           | That is one the first mistakes newly formed platform teams in
           | a company makes, abstracting infrastructure. Happy flow of
           | PaaS on kubernetes is great. It is magical to certain extent.
           | But negative flows is a really mess. The customer no clue why
           | certain things do not work and you as a engineer had no clue
           | that this would have happened.
           | 
           | Secondly, the amount breaking changes you have deal with as a
           | result of abstraction is crazy. People pushing code does not
           | care. It is basically moving complexity from one place to
           | another.
        
           | westurner wrote:
           | dokku-scheduler-kubernetes https://github.com/dokku/dokku-
           | scheduler-kubernetes#function...
           | 
           | > _The following functionality has been implemented:
           | Deployment and Service annotations, Domain proxy support via
           | the Nginx Ingress Controller, Environment variables,
           | Letsencrypt SSL Certificate integration via CertManager, Pod
           | Disruption Budgets, Resource limits and reservations
           | (reservations == kubernetes requests), Zero-downtime deploys
           | via Deployment healthchecks, Traffic to non-web containers
           | (via a configurable list)_
        
       | rcarmo wrote:
       | If you want to host your own, check out https://github.com/piku
       | :)
        
         | appliku wrote:
         | I wanted to host nothing. I wanted click click and deployed.
         | But I've heard about piku many times seems like a great thing!
        
       | conradbez wrote:
       | Looks very interesting, will have to give it a shot!
       | 
       | I made an open source "dashboard" for dokku that tries to give
       | you Heroku ease of use with the cost of a single server.
       | 
       | Basically you run one script on the server and it deploys a dokku
       | app which manages the deployment of additional dokku apps. Gives
       | you GUI access to deploying new apps, changing env variables etc.
       | 
       | Would love feedback from anyone looking for an easy way to deploy
       | dokku apps regularly.
       | 
       | https://github.com/conradbez/dokku-dashboard
        
         | throwaway77384 wrote:
         | Long-time dokku user here. This seems interesting. How nicely
         | does this play with more complicated things, like configuring
         | ports for SSL, or using additional Dokku plugins? How about
         | things like configuring the container network and things like
         | upload size variables, or the wait time when deploying, etc.?
        
       | cabalamat wrote:
       | The existence of Heroku/Appliku etc (and my personal experience)
       | suggests that setting up web apps isn't hassle free.
       | 
       | Maybe the fix for this would be to have a language/library
       | combination designed from the ground up to make it as easy as
       | possible?
       | 
       | So for example, the language would come as standard with:
       | 
       | - a web server for production use - a web server for development
       | use - a built-in SQL database - a built-in NoSQL database - a web
       | server library
       | 
       | Then, as all the components for the system would part of the
       | language's standard library/environment, the difficulty of
       | configuring/running a server (such as a web server) on another
       | machine would be limited.
        
         | ezekg wrote:
         | It's not that setting up a server is hard. The reason Heroku
         | exists is because they are your devops team -as-a-service.
        
           | cabalamat wrote:
           | If I understand you correctly, you say that setting up a
           | server isn't hard, but then you seem to imply that it's hard
           | enough that you might want to employ a team of people to do
           | it, which seems pretty hard to me.
           | 
           | So I'm not sure that I follow you.
        
             | ezekg wrote:
             | Setting up a server and database is not hard. Maintaining
             | and scaling it is. I don't want to use my valuable time on
             | these things, so Heroku is worth the cost. People who say
             | Heroku is expensive are not in their target market --
             | businesses who want to avoid their team unnecessarily
             | spending time on infrastructure instead of product.
             | 
             | Heroku is much, much cheaper than 1) me spending my time on
             | these things, or 2) hiring a capable engineer to do it for
             | me. It's build vs buy. I'd rather buy.
             | 
             | But that's not to say I'm not interested in a Heroku
             | alternative. But it needs to be a *real* alternative. :)
        
           | appliku wrote:
           | I would correct the last part. Appliku is an automated devops
           | as a service. Heroku is selling you a very much overpriced
           | complete service. And that's where Appliku comes in as a way
           | to fight insane costs.
           | 
           | But yes, setting up a server is not super hard. Doing it
           | often and with convenience that's where improvement is needed
           | compared to doing it manually.
        
             | ezekg wrote:
             | I think your project is cool, but deploying an application
             | to a server on `git push` is not devops. Heroku is selling
             | managed servers and databases with easy deployment, you're
             | selling easy deployment to unmanaged servers and databases.
        
         | zshift wrote:
         | Dark has exactly that, https://www.darklang.com
        
         | metalliqaz wrote:
         | I think you're missing a big part... getting it hosted on the
         | internet, stable, and scalable. Can't do that from your laptop
         | no matter what the language environment comes with.
        
           | cabalamat wrote:
           | > getting it hosted on the internet,
           | 
           | This just needs a VPS, running a popular OS such as Ubuntu.
           | 
           | > stable
           | 
           | This is important, I agree.
           | 
           | > and scalable
           | 
           | The scalable part doesn't matter, since it's premature
           | optimisation, which is the root of all evil.
           | 
           | Once the project is used by enough people that it cant run
           | just on one dedicated server, then you'll hopefully have
           | enough revenue coming in from it to make it scalable.
           | 
           | > Can't do that from your laptop
           | 
           | A VPS would typically have less power than a laptop.
        
             | nkmnz wrote:
             | Scalability does not only refer to the setup being able to
             | serve a lot of users, but also to the development processes
             | being scalable. Setting up and maintaining dev and demo
             | environments needs a scalable process for example from the
             | day you have a junior person on the team that cannot handle
             | all the complexities by herself. Or, if you start to have
             | multiple internal dev environments to evaluate different
             | technology choices that might impact long term development.
             | We're mostly JS based, and even though everything is
             | dockerized, it still sucks to onboard people and manage
             | multiple deployed branches on AWS EC2.
        
           | appliku wrote:
           | Also every provider offers different things, at different
           | costs, etc. So it is up to providers to build solutions that
           | are easy with a given language or framework.
           | 
           | We aspire to build a convenient service for Python/Django and
           | there is a long road ahead.
        
       | TekMol wrote:
       | The readme of the example app just says "R":
       | 
       | https://github.com/appliku/appliku_start
       | 
       | Is there a demo of this app running somewhere?
        
         | appliku wrote:
         | Please refer to more up to date Djangitos project template.
         | 
         | https://github.com/appliku/djangitos
         | 
         | I will rewrite ec2 deployment tutorial as soon as possible.
         | Thanks for reminding me about it.
        
           | TekMol wrote:
           | Thanks.
           | 
           | Woops, that is a pretty big beast.
           | 
           | 2172 lines of code in 98 files.
           | 
           | I would not feel comfortable by starting from a base that is
           | already this complex.
        
       | samirsd wrote:
       | very cool. does this work with celery/redis?
        
         | appliku wrote:
         | of course it does. Appliku out of the box provides a way to
         | provision redis and rabbmitmq.
         | 
         | I have yet to write a tutorial about celery.
         | 
         | To specify processes to run you use Procfile. Specify your
         | celery commands and enable them in Process tab in Appliku
         | interface.
         | 
         | In order to have celery beat working you should use redbeat:
         | https://github.com/sibson/redbeat
         | 
         | Other than that - no specific requirements. Drop me a line in
         | contacts on our site if you need any help. Or in our Discord
         | Community: https://appliku.com/discord
        
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