Ask HN: Is a Heroku like SaaS that works on your VPS a product you will use
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?
8 comments
Sounds interesting. I'd checkout Dokku[0] and Flynn[1] if I were you and see what you could offer differently. I use a single Dokku instance on 5 dollar droplet that hosts all my side projects ect under my domain. I then would extract one out if it ever got meaningful traffic. Another thing to consider is that it seems like the industry as a whole is moving passed the application level abstraction and onto the function level, eg "serverless". Maybe you could jump on that angle somehow.
[0] http://dokku.viewdocs.io/dokku/
[1] https://flynn.io/
[0] http://dokku.viewdocs.io/dokku/
[1] https://flynn.io/
Agree, I am actually aware of both services. Personally, I am not sold on functions yet mainly due to the high startup time. I cannot see myself building a project that leverages a functions framework specific to cloud provider X. I however could be wrong on functions and its adoption in the general Dev community.
Alright, but why would I pay for your service over a VPS with one of those tools or Heroku? What part of the process do you take over or automate?
The plan is to automate from server provisioning to deployment but of course I cannot build integrations with all the cloud providers out there. In that case, you could buy the server, provide the IP address and credentials to log in and then the service does everything.
Once the server is provisioned or added, you create an application from the dashboard and then git push to it.
Will come with monitoring tools and alerts if you choose to set any.
For those who can work Dokku and Flynn by themselves perhaps, it could be enough. But as compared to Heroku, you could save lots of money when you not paying for each app.
Of course I need to mention the service itself could even be free and find other ways to make money.
I have a bunch of side-projects that I've been working on for a while.
To be honest, I prefer sticking with major cloud vendors (currently on GCP) because:
1. They already have reasonably straightforward ways to publish apps, e.g. I use GCP App Engine + managed Postgres DB + storage buckets.
2. If my project grows or pivots, I like having an option to use other cloud provider services like queues, BigQuery, VPC networking, etc.
To be honest, I prefer sticking with major cloud vendors (currently on GCP) because:
1. They already have reasonably straightforward ways to publish apps, e.g. I use GCP App Engine + managed Postgres DB + storage buckets.
2. If my project grows or pivots, I like having an option to use other cloud provider services like queues, BigQuery, VPC networking, etc.
Right, makes sense, wanted to point out the service will also be usable on GCP as well as you can leverage any cloud host. You could buy a VPS from GCP compute, connect it and deploy apps like you are using Heroku.
I personally will forget it. There really isn't a market out there. Most developers do not have any Apps or if they do are just simple static websites for which they can easily host in so many places at no cost. Maybe 6 years ago this would have been a good idea.
an open source heroku would be appealing, open shift I believe is along these lines