

Introducing the new dotCloud dashboard - ARothfusz
http://blog.dotcloud.com/introducing-the-new-dotcloud-dashboard

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lux
I've been playing with the new dashboard beta for a while and it's really
nice. It'll be nice to see some basic CLI functions (resizing/mem management)
make their way into the dashboard too.

One thing I'd really like to see with DotCloud is a way to more accurately
replicate their environment locally for development. If I'm setting up a new
site, I want my local environment to match the live one as much as possible,
so a local VM that matches DotCloud's service settings would be pretty killer.
Since each service is independent, that may be tricky, but it would be awesome
if it could be done.

~~~
shykes
Thanks for the feedback!

On adding CLI functions to the dashboard: this is the most common request, and
as we hinted in the announcement: "going forward, you will see more command-
line features making their way to the web dashboard, and vice-versa. It also
means the CLI and dashboard experience will converge over time and feel more
consistent"

On local dev environment: you are definitely not the only one asking for this.
We're not quite ready to communicate on the topic, but you should definitely
keep an eye out for future progress.

Feel free to hang out on freenode/#dotcloud, we'd love to get more feedback
from you!

~~~
lux
Thanks for the reply! Glad to hear these are on your radar :)

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kmfrk
Have you considered using docopt[1] for your CLI? I find it to be incredibly
difficult to make sense of what commands are available, even with 0.9.

[1]: <https://github.com/docopt/docopt>

~~~
josegonzalez
This seems like a terrible idea. I would rather have my help text generated
programmatically - and fix the generated output to be more helpful when it is
not - then have something attempt to parse things that may seem non-
deterministic because I flubbed a character.

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Goopplesoft
I am genuinely curious how you guys come up with pricing for the stacks. I
understand the convenience premium with the webhost/scaling services like
heroku and dotcloud, I buy into that too. But I fall off where say a 1Gb
mongodb comes out to $134 monthly, especially considering its almost
effortless to set such a db up (fire up ec2 instance, download, ./mongod).

Essentially I am asking: If you were trying to sell me your product how would
you justify the $132 for 1Gb mongodb when I can get a 1.7Gb instance at amazon
for a fraction of the price ($46, on demand).

~~~
yannisp
The thing with PaaS vs EC2 is that you're hiring a whole 24/7 Ops team and
have a whole layer of software on top of the infrastructure you would have
used to ease scalability, failover, load balancing, etc. All these things go
into keeping your application live. Sure it's not a _nightmare_ to figure out
how to setup your own mongo on a VPS, but as you grow and need that high
availability and uptime, your sleep will decrease dramatically (nightly alerts
at 2, 3, and 4am? Yeah they hurt..) or need to hire sysadmin(s) to take care
of that for you, you realize the difference in monthly cost versus the $100k+
engineers becomes much, much sweeter.

~~~
Goopplesoft
Yeah but none of this is really advertised on the main site. The only thing
mentioned in the docs thats different from just ./mongod is the easy scaling:
<http://docs.dotcloud.com/0.9/services/mongodb/>

As I said I totally understand the whole sysadminless thing, and I definitely
see it's usefulness. However, none of what you're saying is even
advertised/mentioned by them (at least based on my quick search)...

~~~
bmelton
From the dotcloud.com home page:

 _We keep your app running 24/7 with built-in load-balancing, monitoring and
failover. Scale in seconds to handle surges in traffic - and only pay for what
you need._

It is admittedly below the fold, and they should probably replace its position
on the page with their customer success stories, but they at least do try to
tell you what they do.

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matt2000
Can anyone give me some advantages of dotcloud over Heroku? Having trouble
specifics from just the homepage. Thanks!

~~~
kmfrk
I find their availability to be incredibly irregular, but the ease of setting
up a project on their platform can't be beat.

Well short of a one-click installation, of course. :)

A novice could probably set up a GitHub project on dotCloud, whereas there is
no chance in hell said person could do it on Heroku, last I checked their
guide.

Their support team is also pretty great. Of course, the ideal scenario is
never having to deal with support. ;)

~~~
ollysb
Really?! I've used heroku and dotcloud for a while, I'd say that heroku wins
on ease of setup. Dotcloud on the other hand allows you far greater
flexibility in your setup. I'm aware that heroku's usability has decreased a
smidge since they moved to the cedar stack but I'm curious to know what you
would find difficult about getting set up on heroku?

~~~
kmfrk
I just haven't found Heroku to compare favourably to dotCloud's deployment:

    
    
        1. Sign up, install CLI, enter username/password
        2. git clone foo
        3. cd foo
        4. dotcloud create bar
        5. dotcloud push -A bar --git
    

And from a developer perspective we're just talking about setting up the DB,
wsgi, postinstall, and dotcloud.yml.

I didn't manage to find something in Heroku's guide that made it sound as easy
for setting up Django on their PaaS. If I did, I'd probably have some services
set up on Heroku at the moment. Maybe someone else just needs to write a
better guide for them.

~~~
ollysb
Hmm, I started using heroku a long time ago so I'm not sure what their on ramp
is like now. Their docs have definitely become more complicated than they used
to be though. Looking at your dotcloud steps though, heroku would be.

    
    
        1. Sign up, install CLI, enter username/password
        2. git clone foo
        3. cd foo
        4. heroku create bar
        5. git push heroku master
    

So basically the same. Worth noting that this sets up a database for you as
well, your project is configured to use it when you push. From memory you have
to set up the DB yourself with dotcloud, it's been a while though.

~~~
kmfrk
Cool. I'll give Heroku's guides another look this weekend. Thanks for the
write-up.

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jnwng
Just moved our app live on dotCloud, dashboard made things super easy to
manage. Its nice that the CLI and the Dashboard share an API, sometimes it
good to be able to get things done via the command line, and sometimes better
to visualize graphs and sort through logs via the web. Keep up the good work!

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shykes
As usual, several dotCloud team members are lurking here, so please throw
criticism, questions and suggestions our way!

~~~
modernerd
How do you recommend that people estimate running costs for an app hosted with
dotCloud before they've launched an app with you?

I can see that your new dashboard would be useful for scaling up and down once
an app's running on dotCloud, but I'd prefer to be able to estimate running
costs before committing to your platform.

Do you have any guidelines to estimate RAM/instance requirements? I'm new to
PaaS-style hosting, so forgive me if this is simple stuff, but if I was
running a basic Sinatra app with MongoDB and static file hosting, for example,
how could I gauge my approximate running costs under dotCloud?

~~~
ARothfusz
One way would be to actually set all of that up on a free sandbox application
and put it under a similar load to what you expect to start with. Then you can
use the same graphs to see your memory usage and calculate the monthly cost
from there.

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ForFreedom
I read what doctloud does. So who uses them.

Went here <https://www.dotcloud.com/pricing.html> Selected mysql and php its
$17.28. That's costly, with a little more one could take a linode server.

~~~
shykes
Hi there, we like to say that dotCloud is cheaper than regular hosting _at
equivalent level of best practice_.

For example, compared to AWS (pulled from
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4694689>):

* For a clean architecture you want to isolate each Mongo and node process in its own system. So you need 6 instances, not 3.

* You'll need load-balancers in front of these node instances. That costs extra on AWS, and is included on dotCloud.

* Did you include the cost of bandwidth and disk IO in your estimate? Those are extra on AWS, but included on dotCloud.

* Monitoring is extra on AWS. It's included on dotCloud.

* I love to have a sandbox version of my entire stack, with the exact same setup but separate from production. That's an extra 2 instances on AWS (+io +bandwidth +load-balancing +monitoring). It's free on dotCloud, and I can create unlimited numbers of sandboxes which is killer for team development: 1 sandbox per developer!

* We only charge for ram usable by your application and database. AWS charges for server memory - including the overhead of the system and the various daemons you'll need to run.

* For small apps specifically, you can allocate memory in much smaller increments on dotCloud, which means you can start at a lower price-point: the smallest increment is 32MB.

I didn't even get into the real value-add of dotCloud: all the work you won't
have to do, including security upgrades, centralized log collection, waking up
at 4am to check on broken EBS volumes, dealing with AWS support (which is
truly the most horrible support in the World, and we pay them a lot of money).

\+ Our support team is awesome and might even fix a bug in your own code if
you're lucky :)

