

Integration over Invention - bgentry
http://blog.convox.com/integration-over-invention

======
bgentry
At Opendoor, we've been running an important piece of our data science
infrastructure on Convox. Their philosophy of relying on battle-tested AWS
primitives has made Convox more stable than any non-Heroku PaaS I've ever
encountered.

We wrote a post on this last week: [https://labs.opendoor.com/moving-
opendoors-data-science-stac...](https://labs.opendoor.com/moving-opendoors-
data-science-stack-from-heroku-to-convox/)

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nzoschke
So the main question I have is... Obviously someone has to do the invention.
How will this pan out after all these container tools settle?

What if Kubernetes is it? The primary solid implementation of the hardest
parts of distributed state management. Google uses this to power GCE, Amazon
supports plugging this into ECS, and anyone building their own data center
uses it for a control plane.

Is this the dream? Or is this a bad outcome for lack of technology diversity?

~~~
bradgessler
I've used both Kubernetes and ECS. In my opinion, both of those are still
pretty raw for developers. There's a lot of generating configuration files
(which need to be understood) and configuration that's best left to a DevOps
team. Want to setup an ECS cluster? You have to understand VPC, EC2, IAM,
CloudFormation etc. Google's situation is a little better, but there's still a
lot to understand and some weirdness around connecting that cluster to a cloud
MySQL database.

If you look at what Convox is shooting for, its sensible defaults. Developers
should be able to put together a docker-compose.yml file that describes their
infrastructure services and deploy that into some stack that can figure it
out. They just need to know a few convox commands without having to understand
the bajillion pieces in the AWS stack that would have to be put together
manually.

At the very least, convox will force all of these other clustering tools to
simplify and think more about the developer experience, which is a net win for
the entire ecosystem.

------
nzoschke
Author of the post and core member of Convox here. Happy to answer any
questions about this engineering strategy and all things Convox and ECS.

~~~
finnh
I really appreciate the thinking behind the post & convox itself. What's the
business model for you guys? Just commercial support?

~~~
nzoschke
For starters, the news just broke that we're backed by YCombinator for our
first phase of the business:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10050481](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10050481)

First we're focusing on making the open-source foundation awesome. Take a look
at our GitHub for our current work making the installation easy, builds fast,
and supporting all the AWS services and regions that everyone wants:

[https://github.com/convox/](https://github.com/convox/)

The next phase will be commercial support and managed hosting. Reach out to
support@convox.com if this is something you or your team are interested in.

Past that, we are carefully studying other successful open-source technology
companies. Something like the nginx "open core" could work great for
"enterprise" features like role based access control or auditing.

~~~
arikfr
As I'm interested in this myself, what companies are you studying?

~~~
nzoschke
Cloudera, MongoDB, nginx and GitLab.

------
beambot
I'm intrigued by Convox... and since the founders / engineers are lurking,
allow me to ask a few questions that might help convince someone like myself:

\- How do you handle updates? Heroku was on the early deployment for Postgres
security patches. Will Convox deployments auto-upgrade, or do they require sys
admin-style intervention on docker specifications to track security issues?

\- What about other popular addons: Postgres, Mailgun, NewRelic, etc? Are
there equivalents?

\- Is it easy to setup automated backups and recovery for the database (eg.
Heroku's pgbackups are amazing!).

\- And perhaps most importantly: I don't see any mention of pricing on your
homepage...?

~~~
mwmanning
Hey, Convox cofounder Matt here. Great questions!

1) You can update your Convox rack and cli using the cli. `convox update &&
convox system update`. [http://docs.convox.com/docs/updating-
convox/](http://docs.convox.com/docs/updating-convox/)

2) We're working on an RDS provisioning service today and hope to release
something this weekend. We're also in early talks with other addon (we call
them "services") providers. For now if you want to use one of these services
you can connect to them using environment variables.
[http://docs.convox.com/docs/environment-
variables/](http://docs.convox.com/docs/environment-variables/)

3) Our RDS service will eventually handle backups and recovery, but those
features aren't implemented yet. We're also exploring partnering with other
hosted database services that already have these features.

4) Convox is open source
[https://github.com/convox](https://github.com/convox) and totally free. You
can use it however you want and you only have to pay for the AWS expenses.
We're also experimenting with managed hosting, which we'll charge a small
premium for, so please let me know if you're interested in that.

------
Animats
_" In 10 minutes Convox installs a system that takes over the management of
your AWS servers, networking, and data and lets you deploy applications to the
Internet with a single command."_

Sounds like an ad for an botnet exploit.

~~~
jacobevelyn
I find Convox incredibly exciting and compelling, and yet I too read the first
half of that sentence and thought it was a description of some terrible piece
of malware that's been found out in the wild.

