Thinking about building a Heroku like PaaS that works on your VPS
I am considering creating a product that allows you to git push your projects to your VPS (Be that the server can be bare metal as well from any cloud). I personally find having to pay for each app on Heroku a bit on the expensive end especially for devs who crank out multiple projects per year and want the Heroku like experience to deploy.
My thoughts are a product that allows git push, uses the open source Heroku buildpacks to build the project and then starts the project in a docker container. A proxy infront that routes traffic to the individual projects and also creates and renews SSL certificates. Sort of like forge in the laravel world but this time it works with buildpacks and dockerfiles allowing you to deploy just about anything.
Fellow hackers, thoughts on this idea and also how much will you personally be willing to pay for such a product?
This sounds a lot like Dokku, how would it be different?
Dokku appears to be a DIY solution and might work for those savvy enough to log into the server and get things going.
What I am thinking about is a fully managed service similar to Heroku. Basically a Heroku compatible runtime but runs on your own servers. In many cases, the user wouldn't even have to touch any servers if they do not wish to. I guess the answer to your question then is, What is the difference between Heroku and Dokku?
You could provision a server from Digital Ocean, Vultr or AWS lightsail via the dashboard, or buy a dirt cheap server from Scaleway and just add it. Once added, it is like using Heroku, simply select your repository hosted at GitHub, BitBucket or GitLab and that should be it. You can setup Git push as well.
I'd pay for something like that.
I use Runcloud to manage a couple of WordPress servers but it's mostly for PHP stuff. Unlike Heroku which supports many more stacks.
Thanks for the update. Just learnt of Runcloud from your reply. Nice product.
Forge is really successful for Laravel so I would try and find out if there’s a different programming language or framework community that is really hungry for this. It’ll be easier to get a great developer experience if you focus on one first.
HatchBox is an equivalent in the rails community but I’m not sure how much traction it has gotten.
Yeah familiar with HatchBox. Infact, the main player in the Rails community is actually Cloud66. I am not sure the traction both platforms are getting but I am assuming not much really.
It seems Forge is the most successful of all these platforms and could be owing to the fact it is marketed sort of together with the framework itself.
Would this be self-hosted and pay-for-a-license based or a hosted SaaS? Because if it already runs on our own VPSes, might as well not run your own infrastructure and just sell people the option to have a way to setup their own app-infrastructure that just works.
Really, I'd be in the market for something like this. What you'd be selling is less the infrastructure / the software, but more the option to outsource sensible configuration for common use cases.
Not having to think about how to make nginx, php-fpm, the underlying operating system, OpenSSL, etc. work together and stay secure would be worth a bit of money to anyone running a web app / SaaS, especially if paid upgrade plans give you access to timely updated configs & security advisories / auto-updates on your machines.
This will be a hosted SaaS. There are two components here, the master servers which run on the SaaS provider servers. The master server does container orchestration, provides dashbaord features and also instrument the servers on which the application runs. From the end users point of view, you really do not install anything really. Infact if you do not want to touch any servers, you could provision a server at DigitalOcean, Vultr or AWS lightsail from the SaaS dashbaord and just go ahead and deploy after setup is complete.
"Not having to think about how to make nginx, php-fpm, the underlying operating system, OpenSSL, etc. work together and stay secure would be worth a bit of money to anyone running a web app / SaaS, especially if paid upgrade plans give you access to timely updated configs & security advisories / auto-updates on your machines."
-- This is exactly the value been proposed here.
you will need 24 x 7 tech support for it and that can be costly to maintain
The plan is to have paid support tiers. Free users and regular users can simply use a community forum.
I like also the idea, but It would be more like a PaaS. I'm also thinking to build a PaaS or IaaS(like aws, but smaller obv). The problem with this projects is the complexity and the time you need to put in
Agreed, it is very involving. Having to commit to it without a viable market when the product is ready will be a massive waste of time.
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Yeah correct, that is the plan, for the user to bring their own nodes.
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Genius No!
I am for the most part familiar with all the alternatives on the market and if the service has a free tier, I can almost bet I have created an account and attempted to use it. I wonder how well hosted OpenShift by RH is doing.
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Sorry to hear your build were failing on Render. Would love to help if you're open to giving us another shot.
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Sounds good!
I have been going back and forth myself on focusing on a single stack but the product I initially proposed and one that I have in mind is a Heroku compatible runtime and also the ability to deploy with Dockerfiles. Typically people do not just have just a Node.js app or Ruby app, they might have a need to run other things as well and I believe for the platform to be most useful, it has to be able to run anything.
In regards to builds failing, obviously the goal is to build a Heroku compatible runtime that actually works and not just marked as such.
Thanks for your response, one of the things I wanted to measure was, if there exist platform X as an alternative and it just works as the incumbent and can dramatically save cost as one is not paying for containers, will the developer be willing to move? That is the main question I seek to answer with this post.
Render seems interesting but I wonder how the pricing scales if I require multiple containers and custom memory config for my container. Say I want 2 containers each with 2 gb ram for my spring boot Java app, one running in New Jersey and the other in Chicago for cross data center replication. Can Render do this?
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