

Ask HN: Will  you or anyone use this service?  - europa

One liner  :  Build Linux servers on  cloud platforms(aws,racxkspacecloud/slicehost etc.) to your specification.<p>Workflow :<p>1. You provide your specifications(linux distro, web server, app server, database server, other software) for your Linux server and the cloud platform you want it be build on.<p>2. Receive a quote of price and expected delivery time for you specific build.<p>3. You agree on price / delivery date/time<p>4.  Build server for your specification<p>5.  You verify<p>6.  You pay.<p>Idea is to help  potential customers to save time at least on the following but not limited to<p>1. Installing required software and its dependencies
2.  Hardening for security
3 .. etc...<p><i></i><i></i> I still need to figure out how to deliver the custom machine image after building it on racksapcecloud/slicehost. On AWS it is straight forward
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patio11
_I still need to figure out how to deliver the custom machine image after
building it on racksapcecloud/slicehost._

"Pick this option in your slicehost setup. SCP this file into your home
directory. _sudo go-get-a-coffee.sh_ and come back in twenty minutes."

Alternatively, the same thing delivered as a Chef script or what have you.
Capistrano and Deprec used to be a fairly good option for getting a generic
Rails stack ready on Ubuntu, for example.

As to whether I would pay for this: heck yes, but there is a fairly narrow
window for it. When I'm doing green field development, like where I am for a
very small window now for Appointment Reminder, I can make extensive changes
to my infrastructure without paying ginormous switching costs. After that site
goes live for the first time, though, I can't use your service until the next
time I launch a product, because I can't trust that you understand my needs
intimately enough to handle a migration.

Why would I pay for this? Fairly straightforward: I am not a professional
sysadmin -- I am a developer who knows a few things about a few things because
he has to. I know I'm going to burn two or three days tweaking my
configuration prior to launching AR, even with productivity enhancers like
Deprec to use. I will probably make at least a few consequential errors which
will lurk until they bring the site down some weeks later, and create
technical debt against later upgrades. I do not enjoy configuring servers.
Blocking off three days to tweak an Ubuntu install prevents me from writing a
two line email to a satisfied client and booking a consulting engagement worth
several thousand dollars.

Incidentally: you're going to hear a lot of feedback from developers about how
you're gouging them if you charge reasonable prices for this. They are not
your customers.

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ryanwaggoner
YES. I'm a developer, not a sysadmin, and there's always that little voice in
the back of my mind wondering if I've missed some obvious security hardening
thing, etc. I know I should just get better at this, but the list of things I
should get better at is about 10x as long as I have time for.

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A1kmm
It would depend what the scalability of your service was - if your service set
up one server, and 3 days later I need 40 more identical ones up in the next
half-hour, without having to manually re-enter all the settings, would your
service be able to handle that? I think that would probably need to be in the
minimum viable feature set.

Even with that said, I think that I would normally prefer to vertically
integrate that type of work into a startup (incremental adjustments to the
deploy script during dev, technical founder uses the deploy script during
early days, when the business grows, a dedicated sysadmin will be required
anyway) - but that does depend on the price and exactly what is offered.

If you pitched it as: * Our core business is to license common deployment
scripts (i.e. the scripts are commercial software, and you sell a license to
use them). * For a small fee, you can use our web interface to help you
generate a customised version of our script - or you can edit the script
yourself. * For a small fee, we can also keep track of all your deployments
and deployment scripts, and run your deployment scripts for you on demand via
a web interface.

then the value proposition might make it worthwhile if the price was right.

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tsycho
Yes, if the price is right, and the specification interface is easy.

The interface needs to be significantly less effort than writing/modifying a
Stackscript (<http://blog.linode.com/2010/02/09/introducing-stackscripts/>)

~~~
europa
Thanks for sharing the link tsycho

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csouth
Well a couple of interesting points here.

1\. Either you have to host the server on your account, or I have to give you
my username and password to my hosting account. This might put people off so
just keep that in mind.

2\. Also I don't see a reason to limit yourself to cloud platforms. Hosts like
linode/dreamhost/etc are pretty popular these days and service like this would
help a startup with limited/no knowledge in server platforms.

3\. I also wouldn't limit yourself to just Linux. If your familiar with
windows systems you might make a little more money on setting up MSSQL,
Exchange, and IIS (And if I recall correctly Rackspace now offers Windows in
the cloud).

4\. Also think about upkeep of the servers as well. If someone is going to pay
you to set it up, they will likely pay you to maintain it.

~~~
frederickcook
I believe Rackspace has affiliate/reseller programs that might take care of
the user/pass issues. You could also just hand over the keys to the server,
not the hosting account.

~~~
europa
I did signup for affiliate program with Racksapce. I had a brief chat with a
customer support agent but he is not aware of anything to deliver my custom
build machine image to other customers. May be I have to talk to someone else
at Rackspace.

------
fragmede
I'd argue that the idea has merit - because that's one of the problems heroku
and google app engine solve. The fact that it's complete straight forwards on
EC2, for both sales and imaging is another testament to the idea's merits. One
thing/angle you might go for is the scaling aspect - I can run apt-get all day
to setup a single machine, but as a developer, and not a sysadmin, some of the
finer details to setting up a more complex, multi-machine setup with a coule
mysql instances, an apache box or two, may be lost on me.

Hypothetically, I would pay for a way to easily grow my single VPS into a
multi-machine config.

~~~
tsycho
Heroku (and others that I haven't tried) solve this well, but they are
expensive if you run a large site.

If I know that I want an obvious setup such as a reverse proxy + load balancer
+ multiple rails (or other) servers + a master/slave db setup on
linode/slicehost/MT to save server costs, but do not want to do the sysadmin
work, and maybe do not know enough about security etc......then OP's tool
seems quite useful for me.

Ideally, I would like an interface that takes in parameters like the above,
and generates scripts (such as stackscripts, or some similar alternative),
that would just run and configure the systems.

Or in other words, give me a Heroku like interface to configure
Linode/MT/slicehost :)

I would be willing to pay a reasonable upfront fee for it, though the price
should obviously depend on the complexity of the configuration. I would also
be willing to pay for monthly support. From a developer's perspective, I think
this is basically outsourcing the sysadmin work which most people don't seem
to want to do/learn, even though they realize how important it is for their
site.

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pierrefar
If you're "just" installing server-side software, then maybe if the price is
right.

If you are also offering to get a working uncustomized copy of popular
software installed (e.g. Wordpress) then that's more interesting. Some bits of
software need a few manual tweaks/config changes to get working. This is
especially true for when you move away from Apache and to nginx. Nothing
rocket sciency, but still time consuming and so could be outsourced.

~~~
europa
Of course the installation /setup of software/application like
Wordpress,Joomla,Drupal etc. are in my list

------
frederickcook
I think that abstracting away as much as possible and providing "everything as
a service" is definitely the direction the cloud companies are all going
(Rackspace included) so you're on the right track there.

Not knowing anything about the market, there might be opportunity in building
large custom clusters instead of just single servers, and use Open Stack as a
base. Might make it look like a juicy acquisition for someone.

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jarsj
NO.

Your target audience are developers. And it's already super easy to do what
you want done with pre-built images, yum etc. Then there is a trust issue with
someone who's new.

If you want to go ahead and provide a service to setup distributed
architectures using Nutch/Hadoop etc, you have an audience, but it's a lot of
work and there are people already doing it.

~~~
cridal
YES. Not every developer (or a technical startup founder) is a sys admin or
wants to get deep into server provisioning/software installation issues. This
is orthogonal to what they are trying to build (at least in the beginning). I
believe your idea has legs. Pursue it.

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ZeroMinx
I don't know about the providers you list, but Linode has something called
StackScripts, which gives you the possibility to easily build a new machine
with all the software etc you want installed. They've got ready StackScripts
for a lot of the common setups.

I'm not sure why I'd pay another service for this. What would the added value
be?

~~~
theDoug
Ditto'd regarding Linode, with some notes on why we'd hesitate: While we as an
enterprise love moving things to Linode, or just generally "out," I don't know
if many in your planned market would be okay with someone else setting up
their systems.

If you're going for bigger group (which will mean larger deploys with far
larger payments), make sure you're bonded, can prove security, that you're not
running virtualization on top of our systems, etc etc etc. Your primary
benefit as I see it is currently convenience, but trust is just as valuable.

~~~
uxp
> I don't know if many in your planned market would be okay with someone else
> setting up their systems.

This is what I'd be concerned about. I imagine there is a very small market in
between the types of server users that have no idea what a kernel is and that
it is configurable and the types of users in the 'enterprise' that either
already have these automation scripts built themselves, or have strict enough
security practices that prevents them from going outside their department for
this.

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mmatey
I think it's a great idea. As aitoehigie said, there's a lot of less technical
developers out there that don't want to handle that stuff, but want something
more custom and/or powerful than a base vps or managed hosting service.

Just find a way to whitelabel it yourself.

~~~
europa
Thanks.

Sorry for my ignorance, can you or someone tell me what you mean by
'whitelabel'

~~~
europa
Got it: Thanks to wikipedia

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White-label_product>

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gurraman
You're the human Fabric (<http://docs.fabfile.org/0.9.2/>)!

I'd use your service if it was reasonably priced (and I hadn't invested a lot
of time into automating this myself).

The fact that I have taken the time to automate this workflow totally gives
your idea merit though.

Make a nice interface where I can select the most common options and allow me
to save it for future use. Also make me add a public key, and send me a
confirmation email containing an entry for .ssh/config when it's all up and
running.

------
aitoehigie
I definately would pay for that. I am a web dev first and foremost, I usually
dont like sys admin tasks, so I would gladly outsource that aspect to more
professional handlers

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albahk
Yes, I would pay an upfront cost but not a recurring monthly thing.

For example, I have a LAMP project I want to run on a VPS and will only access
the server over SSH. You could go in and rip out all the crap like FTP
servers, mail servers, close unneeded ports and tune it for Apache+PHP and
MySQL and I will pay $20-$40 for that.

In 6 months, if my app has taken off I ask if you can update/patch/harden the
machine again for $40-60.

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thibaut_barrere
I would not use that currently, because I know how to use chef either for me
or my customers; so basically this is almost free to configure a new machine
now.

But this is not for everyone neither I think, so I definitely think there is
room for your service somewhere in between!

Small point: I would definitely expect such as service to provide passwords in
an encrypted manner (as you need to communicate them at the end I guess).

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slantyyz
If the price was right, I'd very much consider it. Server setup, hardening,
etc. is just something I don't want to think about or spend time on. I'd
rather spend the money for 3 hours of someone else's time than spend 2 days
trying to figure it out myself.

Caveat: you'd have to have ballpark figures on your site. I have this thing
about consultants/firms not saying what their rate/price is up front.

------
subbu
There are 2 things involved in this. 1. Setting up the initial server involves
quite a bit of labor. 2. It involves skill. If your customer is trying to
avoid the labor but has enough skill to maintain it later then this makes
sense. If he doesn't have enough skill to maintain the server after the
initial setup then this is useless. He can let you manage the server as well.

------
TimH
I'm on the fence. If I hadn't of gone through the process of learning how to
set up servers myself, I definitely would have used your services. Now I know
how to do it, though perhaps not efficiently, and perhaps not in the most
secure, optimized way, you'd have to do a good sales job to get me interested.
I'd at least take a look at your website's home page though. :-)

~~~
europa
I promise I'll have my web site up this weekend. Hope I can push you over the
fence with that.

------
kgrin
I've literally just now been looking for a freelancer to do this for me...
precisely because I'm a developer who knows some things about systems, rather
than an actual sysadmin. So yeah, I muddle through, but it takes 3x as long
and is probably only 75% as good as someone who does it all the time.

------
bobf
Sounds like dotCloud - or at least their "end goal", as I heard it pitched at
SUS2010.

------
almost
Maybe. It would really depend. I'm definitely up for not having to bother with
server configuration issues. But I can imagine this not helping that much or
introducing extra hassle unless you managed to do it really really well.

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ericflo
Sorry, no. This is what Puppet and Chef do, and they do it very very well. In
addition, with companies like devstructure, it has become very easy to
automatically generate a Puppet/Chef manifest.

~~~
cschneid
Puppet and chef help with the doing, but not with the knowing what to do.

I'm a developer who only knows enough about sys-admin to mess around in /etc
when needed. Knowing the sys-admin specific knowledge is beyond me, that's
what you'd be paying for here.

Even to the point that what's delivered is a set of Chef recipes that are easy
to run.

------
abrudtkuhl
I like it ... Could have used this service a couple weeks ago.

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sabat
You're pretty close to something I've been hankering for -- a cloud service
similar to EC2, except with a different set of strengths. Amazon's strong
point is being able to scale up and down easily. A lot of businesses don't
need that; they just want to be able to move some or all of their operation to
a cloud. And they don't necessarily want to host their own private cloud. They
want to rent one, like you do with EC2, but without the "you can scale fast"
premium that Amazon charges.

There are other services (Grid-something, etc.) but last I looked, they were
still expensive and had other drawbacks. This needs to be _simple_ , and
simpler than most of what I've seen. You need to be able to get onto the boxes
if you need, but also manage them with a webapp.

Bonus points: implement security features like virtual networks in my private
cloud, so that I can keep my DB servers off of the internet (even though
they're technically on the internet). I want to do this easily and without
hand-configuring the boxes. Amazon has something like this, but the last time
I looked, they were the only ones.

