
Search Engine Yandex Launches "Cocaine" To Compete With Google App Engine - brentm
http://techcrunch.com/2013/10/16/search-engine-giant-yandex-launches-cocaine-a-cloud-service-to-compete-with-google-app-engine/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Techcrunch+%28TechCrunch%29
======
kristopher

      "Regardless of the name, these cocaine clouds represent a new force in the cloud services market and show the trending acceptance for Linux containers."
    

Ah, yes, "cocaine clouds."

~~~
vanderZwan
I wonder if the Yandex guys are fans of Woody Allen.

~~~
znowi
More like Eric Clapton's fans

[https://github.com/cocaine/cocaine-
core#readme](https://github.com/cocaine/cocaine-core#readme)

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alan_cx
Regarding the name...

If lots of people started emailing each other, talking on social networks, etc
about it, would that cause a corresponding extra amount of filtering work for
the likes of the NSA?

If so, wouldn't it rather screw things up if we got loads of these like, Linux
Bomb, Android Plot, OSX Semtex, Windows Terror and so forth?

~~~
dalore
Do you think people who actually use/sell/buy it call it be the medical name?

~~~
chrischen
They probably call it coke, but that already conflicts with coca cola, and
some other things.

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dariusm5
I'm curious why they chose 'Cocaine' as the name of the project. Naming a
project after a substance illegal in most of the world is pretty bold. I'm
looking forward to how they market this outside of Russia.

~~~
MarkHarmon
I wonder if it will become a trend to name technologies after taboo items?
Imagine if a product called Dildo comes out and it is the best, most easy to
use piece of software that ever existed. People would just have to use Dildo
and get over the name. It could start a revolution.

~~~
SideburnsOfDoom
There's a javascript testing tool that was known as "testacular". Well, cool
pun bro, but the name was changed to "Karma" when it grew up.

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V-2
[http://www.economist.com/blogs/dailychart/2010/11/drugs_caus...](http://www.economist.com/blogs/dailychart/2010/11/drugs_cause_most_harm)
\- alcohol is more harmful than cocaine, and yet you've got www.alcohol-
soft.com and noone makes a big deal out of it.

Illegal? Sure, but so is killing. And yet you've got
[http://www.killermobile.com/](http://www.killermobile.com/) for example.

~~~
eli
I kinda think both Alcohol Soft and Killer Mobile are pretty bad names too.

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Geee
Hmm, no. It's open-source system to create your own PaaS like Heroku or Google
App Engine. Right? See here: [https://github.com/cocaine/cocaine-
core](https://github.com/cocaine/cocaine-core)

------
netvarun
Other than the fact that they are using docker, what I found most interesting
was that they are developing support for Racket!

~~~
dottedmag
Quite a number of Jet Infosystems (a company with a lot of products utilising
Lisp) ex-employees ended up in Yandex.

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dschiptsov
The degree of reality distortion of the management who chose this brand name
is very telling. Moscow, Russia.)

So what, FreeBSD jails based hostings are cool again? But, of course, Docker
is much more cool and "innovative".

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patrickg_zill
In my experience, although I know only a few Russians, they are not very
politically correct. So calling it "Cocaine" is not that surprising.

~~~
znowi
Compared to the US, any other country can be deemed politically incorrect :)

~~~
kalleboo
I'd say Scandinavia and the UK are on par at least

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fleitz
It's odd, they don't mention if it's possible to do rails.

Maybe with a couple dollar bills they can make rails happen, doesn't seem to
work so far.

~~~
mtdewcmu
This kind of talk is probably going to send more than a few recovering addicts
reeling back to rehab if not careful. ;)

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heijmans
The documentation is scattered, but the best information can be found at:

[https://github.com/cocaine/cocaine-docs-
en/wiki](https://github.com/cocaine/cocaine-docs-en/wiki)

[https://github.com/cocaine/cocaine-
core#readme](https://github.com/cocaine/cocaine-core#readme)

[https://github.com/cocaine/cocaine-
core/wiki](https://github.com/cocaine/cocaine-core/wiki)

The docs state that they refer to the 0.9 version, while development is going
on in the 0.11 branch, so the docs might be more of less out of date.

It seems that they have already implemented a large part of the Heroku
infrastructure, including service discovery, auto balancing, cross-language
events (using ZeroMQ) and that they are using it in production. All in all, an
impressive feat!

It would be interesting to hear if anyone has experience running/using this
outside of Yandex. The source code seems well written, though comments are
quite sparse.

As Lazare remarked, it seems to directly compete with flynn.io. It is good to
see that different high-level platforms are created based on docker. But it
would be nice if these platforms would consist of modules (for example service
discovery or messaging) that can be used without using the whole kitchen-sink.
I am not sure if this is possible with cocaine.

BTW, the repo cocaine-core is quite a bit older (since 2011) than docker
(since early 2013?). The docker-core readme states that docker support is "on
it's way" so it is not clear how mature this is.

P.S. As adults and hackers, can we look beyond the name at the technology
presented here?

~~~
jpetazzo
I work for dotCloud (the company which started Docker), and I was at YaC
(Yandex tech conference; the equivalent of Google I/O in Eastern Europe, if
you will), and had the opportunity to discuss this with the Yandex team. Here
are some extra info (that can easily be found on the web, so nothing sensitive
here)

\- They released the Docker plugin shortly before the conference [1] \- Yandex
uses a distributed storage system called Elliptics [2] in many places, and
they implemented an Elliptics backend for the Docker registry (the code is out
there somewhere. They contributed the Elliptics backend to the Docker registry
repo a couple of days ago [3]. \- Cocaine is used to power various things
inside Yandex, like the Yandex.Browser backend. This backend can sustain very
high loads (10-100k req/s). I discussed with their Ops team, since they had
specific questions about how to identify (and remove) potential performance
bottlenecks in Docker networking stack. (Good news: you can achieve native
network performance within containers with zero overhead!)

I'm considering writing Dockerfiles for Elliptics and Cocaine (as soon as I
can find some spare time to do so...) but I would also be happy to help if
other people want to do that (I'm actively monitoring the docker-user mailing
list [4] so don't hesitate to get in touch through here).

[1] [https://github.com/cocaine/cocaine-
plugins/tree/master/docke...](https://github.com/cocaine/cocaine-
plugins/tree/master/docker) [2]
[https://github.com/reverbrain/elliptics](https://github.com/reverbrain/elliptics)
[3] [https://github.com/dotcloud/docker-
registry/pull/101](https://github.com/dotcloud/docker-registry/pull/101) [4]
[https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/docker-
user](https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/docker-user)

------
Demiurge
Haha, I wonder if the name is just a clever way to get the word out, since
yandex is fairly unknown in the west.

------
ksikka
After trying for minutes to come up with an apt comment, I think I will just
pack my stuff and move to Russia.

------
Lazare
Does anyone have any comments other than the name?

Seems like it competes directly against the soon-to-be-released Flynn[1] and
Deis[2]. I'm tempted to poke at it a bit, but the documentation seems pretty
scant. In theory an open source roll-your-own PaaS is pretty cool, right?
Certainly Flynn got tons of attention and funding with a similar value
proposition.

[1]: [https://flynn.io/](https://flynn.io/) [2]:
[http://deis.io/](http://deis.io/)

~~~
gabrtv
I find the name pretty funny myself...

Speaking on behalf the the Deis team, it's nice to see another public PaaS
getting an open source implementation. We're obviously bigger fans of the
Heroku model than the GAE model, but that's the beauty of the new Docker PaaS
world. Choice.

I just hope their Docker containers/images end up being portable. Some better
docs wouldn't hurt either.

------
ninetax
Couldn't tell by looking around but do you think this could be used to host
multi-tenanted environments? How about untrusted code execution?

~~~
ksikka
Yes that's the crux of it

------
loceng
Feels like some decision makers are doing cocaine and making them feel perhaps
more confident than they should.

~~~
girvo
This theory is probably correct...

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d0m
It's me or that beta.yandex.com search engine (that I've never heard before)
is a complete ripped-off of google? I mean, I know it's a search engine. But
in term of UI and design choices, the beta looks _very_ similar.

~~~
xentronium
It's a teaser for their "Islands" project. In its core, it's something
actually new (letting you interact with other sites without leaving search
pages). However, in terms of presentation, it is indeed quite similar to
google.

~~~
jawr
I actually really disagree. Google is incredibly simple, it's essentially a
header, footer, an input field, three buttons and an image.. It's designed to
be as simple (and thus attractive to a larger/broader base) as possible. Maybe
I'm not being very insightful here, but it's like comparing two sports cars
that are white and saying they're the same.

~~~
guard-of-terra
Actually, Google search results are more and more cryptic with each year pass.
Now you don't get organic web results too often, instead you are awash with
images and captions with weird padding.

~~~
jawr
Very true. A lot of effort goes in to that cryptic design though.

------
oinksoft
Supporting C++ is pretty interesting. Are there comparable hosts providing C++
hosting?

~~~
murz
There are heroku buildpacks for C: [https://github.com/atris/heroku-
buildpack-C](https://github.com/atris/heroku-buildpack-C)

------
aluhut
I'm pretty sure my companys filter will block this only because of the name.

------
V-2
It would be nice naming versions after drug names, like Android with their
sweets. But it should go from weakest to strongest - whoever starts with
cocaine straight away, does not leave themselves a lot of space

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lavametender
This will be bad for cooperation between NSA and DEA.

~~~
hayksaakian
I'd say quite the opposite, now they can detain more developers for 'using
cocaine' and then blame it on misunderstanding after the fact.

------
sumoward
If we leave aside the name.

Do people see potential for this?

I saw a short presentation on it at the weekend at PyCon Ireland, It was above
my pay grade but it was intrigueing.

------
auggierose
"We are running on Cocaine." Seriously? They don't even have the excuse of
being French (do you like Coq?).

~~~
Mikeb85
Hey, makes sense now.

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applecore
Love the name!

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robot
Its an unfortunate name

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podviaznikov
wow, they use docker

