Help: I'm looking for DevOps as a Service options (or, where is Engine Yard?)
Hey everyone!
I'm a self-funded solopreneur who's on the homestretch with development. I'm starting to think about how to deploy. I do not have Devops experience and I'm looking for options well matched to my needs.
I have been seriously looking at Engine Yard (https://www.engineyard.com) but have been stymied at the first step: getting in touch. So far I've contacted them twice and have yet to hear back.
Have they shut down?
I'm having a difficult time finding comparable alternatives. Perhaps you've been in this situation before and have found a path forward?
I'd like:
- A service that's easy to deploy to
- Monitoring and Support: if anything goes wrong on the server that's not app related, I can trust they're on it and will make it right.
- Backups. That I can restore from.
- Doesn't require warming up after a period of inactivity
- Comfortable with Rails, Node.js and PostgreSQL
I appreciate any help you can offer!
Hey Robert,
You could take a look at the followings:
super useful links! Thank you!
Just putting it out there, but have you looked at
I know these aren't 100% managed services, but there won't be "servers" to deal with if that makes sense. The cloud vendors handle the underlying infrastructure, and you just need to manage your app.
The warmups were more a reaction to Heroku's free tier, where containers go to sleep after 30m of inactivity. I recall hearing some AWS containers also go to sleep but I don't recall the context around that.
At the moment Heroku seems to be the next leading contender - if I can figure out how to deploy with the library versions I need rather than the ones they have.
But I have not looked at AWS Beanstalk or GAE because they didn't seem to offer the level of service EY did. But I can definitely take a closer look! Thank you!
Anytime. Let me know how it goes, or if you run into hiccups with the deployment.
Hi Robert, I'm a founder here on IH and I'm starting my DevOps product - Reliza Hub (https://relizahub.com).
That said, I'm looking to provide my DevOps expertise for free for a short term to few founders (2 max at this time) here given that they agree to subscribe to Reliza Hub. What you're asking seems to be relevant to what I'm offering, that's why I wanted to respond.
In a nutshell, what I can do for you - prepare full CI/CD pipeline so you get push-button deployment capability powered by Reliza Hub. You can have a say in what CI/CD tool(s) you want to use (so far did integrations for GitHub Actions and CircleCI but any other integration with a modern tool is fine). There is no real lock-in to Reliza Hub as it's more a project management tool - your pipeline may generally work without it with slight modifications.
My expertise - 7+ years of DevOps experience, previously running production infrastructure for enterprises for 30M+ users.
So what you get from this - a modern DevOps solution for your product with no cost at this point.
What I get from this - first customers, outside of dogfooding I'm currently doing with Reliza Hub for couple of my projects. For sure I would be interested in any feedback you may give me as we go.
Some more conditions - I spend max 1 week of time on your project under this arrangement - which should be enough for most projects, and would further try to provide support in anything related to Reliza Hub on a best effort basis. I'll give you guidelines on Monitoring and other related things you may ask - which are a bit out of scope for my product.
If this is something that may interest you - please pm me here or contact me via my LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/pshukhman/
What a generous offer, thank you so much!
I'm using Heroku. It still doesn't take away 100% of the need for management, but has been working pretty well. There are sometimes difficulties that arise that are unique to Heroku, but definitely one of the top names in "Easy to deploy to", and meeting your requirements. It's downsides are expense and having some expertise to do the most you can performance/scaling wise on the lower cost tiers.
I think EngineYard is probably slow to get back just due to their size, they are a very large company.
I did work with iron.io a while back and they were great. But nowadays I would recommend any new startup to look at serverless. There are many offerings including from Google ( Google Cloud Functions), Amazon (Lambda functions) and IBM (Cloud Functions). I have a lot of experience with Google GCP and absolutely love them.
Please also consider Jelastic PaaS. We offer simple but yet powerful deployment flow for Node.js https://jelastic.com/blog/nodejs-hosting-paas/. There are also PostgreSQL, Rails, and many other software stack runtimes https://jelastic.com/paas-cloud-hosting/. You can choose data location and services from a wide network of independent cloud hosting providers located around the world https://jelastic.cloud/.
On top of it, the pricing model is based on real "pay-per-use": you set scaling limits for each instance as much as you want, but only consumed resources are charged. More specific details are at the link https://docs.jelastic.com/pricing-model.
I'm co-founder of the project. If you face any difficulties just let me know. Also your feedback about your experience will be valuable for me.
If you push containers to k8s cluster in say aws this is easy setup. Been doing that for a while now in my projects. DB is backedup to S3 bucket. Code is backed up in docker containers, can be rolled back to any version that is still in container registry, if not can be made from the code again as it has same tags as docker conttainers.
Works like a charm...
Take a look at https://www.hatchbox.io/ for Rails.
This comment was deleted 6 years ago
This comment was deleted 6 years ago
I will look at Heroku again - the last time I looked at it to deploy a RoR app, the deployment failed because the libraries I required hadn't been updated yet - and using the libraries they had resulted in a buggy app. There must be a way to make this work better!
You can create buildpacks to install custom packages versions. But then you also have to secure and update them yourself.
Heroku solves the very specific pain point of: I want someone to restart the server if it crashes while I sleep. Anything else, you're on your own.
For example, we had an enterprise deployment on Heroku and the website went offline because the database was overloading due to a configuration mistake. Not only did they neither inform us, nor do anything about it, but they were also completely unhelpful in solving the issue.
We're now using Amazon RDS for the database, and it's faster and more reliable, but kinda the same. They provide the infrastructure and make sure that the underlying hardware will keep running. But any application-specific configuration, meaning the stuff that you would hire DevOps staff for, you're still on your own.
In my opinion, there's a world of difference between a managed server and the cloud, and I would be happy to pay 2x the price for true managed.
Oddly enough, though, hetzner.de, the German service that I use, is usually much cheaper than any cloud offering.
This is excellent feedback and really underscores the importance of my Monitoring and Support criteria.
Thinking about your story - one of the services I'm building into my app is honeycomb.io - this is an observability platform designed to help you understand what is really going on in production by logging events and context to their systems. I suggest you look into using it; it is super easy to add to your codebase, and I imagine it'll help you identify issues like that very quickly.