Comments on: A new way to deploy web applications

By: Cloud computing

Cloud computing — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 11:00:42 +0000

Thanks for this, there some interesting insights here. I agree with your view of cloud computing, it is a pretty simple concept that many business owners and the the populous at large still fail to grasp. As soon as cloud gaming and media sharing via cloud technologies becomes more popular though… I’m sure the majority of people will begin to understand. In reference to your mention of billing by the hour, I saw a Red Cross case study which spoke of their use of the cloud to scale-up their IT resources to help them deal with hurricane Katrina. It just goes to show that despite the simple concept, there are still a multitude of new uses for this technology waiting to be discovered.

Keep up the good work! John.

By: Ian Bicking

Ian Bicking — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 05:10:10 +0000

As I mention in the design docs this targets only bare Ubuntu systems configured by and for toppcloud. It doesn’t have to be in the cloud, but it definitely won’t support arbitrary setups.

By: LE

LE — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 23:33:31 +0000

I’d be very interested in seeing a system that works on any Linux-ish operating system that makes the deployment & update cycle easy — not specifically anything in the cloud.

For example, I have a host of applications I’d love to be able to update on foreign hosts via a simple foo update .. I think the problem is that Python people handle deployment in as many different ways as there are Python programmers, so you can’t really make many assumptions.

Hm, hm.

By: yml

yml — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 22:46:17 +0000

This is very interesting project it might replace or complement my fabric script that I use to script my deployment/update/clean/backup on cloud servers.

Regarding the limitation of mod_wsgi you have been mentioning you might want to checkout uwsgi. It comes with some very nice options, among others there is an harakiri mode for self-healing. It is very well integrated with virtualenv. Regards, –yml

By: Skylar Saveland

Skylar Saveland — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 16:11:26 +0000

If you want to use toppcloud, then toppcloud is not for you. Still chuckling about that one :-) I like the frank and open approach there.

By: Brandon Craig Rhodes

Brandon Craig Rhodes — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 14:46:55 +0000

This looks like so much fun that I am likely to go hunting soon for a project that provides with an excuse to try it out. :-)

By: Jorge Vargas

Jorge Vargas — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 08:14:04 +0000

> I’ve built a solution with Fabric that does that (can transparently deploy to VPS or Webfaction in one step, uses Webfaction API to do the web server config).

I also have something like that going on, if you are interested in open sourcing it. Lets talk to get that rolling. I got several TurboGears installers for fabric. A common api for deploying stuff will be awesome. Then it could be integrated into toppcloud in some way.

By: Jorge Vargas

Jorge Vargas — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 08:07:32 +0000

I just want to say I’m totally in love with this idea. I started working on something similar but backward running in a virtual machine and building the server, as Carl also something build on fabric. And then hoping I could push that somehow to the cloud/server. Your approach is better and I really like the implementation, specially because you solve the complexity of running remote stuff with fabric. It can look a bit wacky but I totally enjoy the approach of services as things all apps have vrs apps as just a bunch of files. I have started playing around with this and patches are already going your way (hint check BB :)

I really think a set of default services should be grown with many things ranging not only from tools to use in your app (dbs, monitoring, etc.) but all the way up to firewall configurations and all “sysadmin” stuff we don’t really care about as developers.

By: Carl Meyer

Carl Meyer — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 22:28:13 +0000

> toppcloud can host multiple isolated applications on a single server

Oh, that does make a big difference.

By: Ian Bicking

Ian Bicking — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 22:14:48 +0000

toppcloud can host multiple isolated applications on a single server, so it should be entirely workable for you. Ben Bangert has noticed some memory issues that might lead to a constraint; if mod_wsgi, for instance, was able to allocate processes dynamically that would help a lot. But it does not. mod_wsgi does do some other stuff I want, though, like kill processes that aren’t responsive, and not much else does that. So… the solution isn’t quite right, and memory can get tight fast, but eh. It’ll take some hard work to fix that (but I really hope someone fixes it).

Though the smallest Rackspace server is $10/mo, so it’s pretty darn cheap (Rackspace is about half the price of EC2 from what I can tell).