
Show HN: Paz – A Simple Docker PaaS Written in Node.js - orliesaurus
https://github.com/yldio/paz
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aimless
So is this a PaaS or an orchestrator? Those terms have some very specific
meanings to people, and being a PaaS to me means supporting a huge pile of
things like taking deep control of the user's application language stack and
architecture, while hiding all the orchestation details as much as possible.

There is mention of CD, which is often taken to mean some sort of plugin
architecture with other services that automates the whole deployment pipeline,
but I don't see that in the documentation.

There is also mention of "No special code required in your services" as well
as "service discovery", but Docker doesn't really have a way to specify
service discovery (the closest thing might be Compose). Wouldn't that mean
there's "special code required" for our services, or is there some magic under
the hood?

Finally, "Zero-downtime deployments" sounds like a killer feature that I don't
feel anyone else has gotten right. I'd love to learn more about the tech
strategy, especially with regard to bringing hosts up and down and migrating
services.

Neat stuff.

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lukebond
paz documentation, presentations and (now out of date) website mention CD and
environments a lot because it has always been a design goal of Paz to enable a
CD workflow and give you quick and easy developer environments.

as it currently stands it's far from having achieved that. i ripped out the
environments stuff before open-sourcing it because it was half-baked and
hacky. expect these things to start coming back into paz in the coming months.
what remains that's related to CD is really just that it can receive webhooks
from the docker hub / quay.io so you can have a pipeline like git push ->
webhook to CI server -> run tests -> docker build -> docker push -> webhook to
paz for deployment.

as for orchestration and traditional PaaS functionality, i tend to agree with
you and it's arguable whether or not Paz is actually a PaaS in the sense most
people use that term. Paz is a platform that can run your services with a
PaaS-like workflow. that's probably a more accurate way of putting it.

re "no special code", there is a little magic. paz creates a sidekick unit for
your services that will announce them in Etcd. it uses Confd to watch for
changes to announcements and reconfigures HAProxy under the hood. i need to
document this :)

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dlandis
OK, so what does it do exactly? I'm sure it's an interesting project and the
beautiful UI was mentioned several times, but seriously what does it do? This
reminds me of reading corporate software marketing material -- they never want
to say exactly what a system does because that would pigeonhole their sales
approach. Just add a couple paragraphs -- what does it do, how does it do it,
and what are the use-cases...

~~~
lukebond
hi dlandis. yes i must admit that the documentation is currently very poor.
doing what you suggest is going to be my weekend :)

it has been released despite not having these things in place because it's
forcing me to sort it out. the project sat untouched for a few months late
last year and i didn't want that to continue.

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cies
How does this compare to solutions like Dokku and Dokku-alt?

[https://github.com/progrium/dokku](https://github.com/progrium/dokku)

[https://github.com/dokku-alt/dokku-alt](https://github.com/dokku-alt/dokku-
alt)

~~~
josegonzalez
Core developer of Dokku here:

Dokku is very much a single-server solution. Though I have played with actual
implementations (that work!), there are no plans to make the core support
multi-hosts. Dokku also currently has no admin dashboard (there hasn't been a
need, though this is something I'd like to address) and doesn't need as many
requirements (you can install it via a deb package). It's written in bash,
which can be a turnoff for whatever reason.

paz looks like it depends upon multiple services, which may be difficult to
setup or maintain, but is solution to a completely different problem. I will
say, Paz looks quite nice.

~~~
lukebond
thanks Jose :) it's in super early stages compared something as solid as Dokku
but glad people find it interesting!

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druiid
Looks like an interesting project. Will you guys be releasing it on a
different or more public repo than Quay though? I feel it'll be difficult to
get much traction (if that is your intent) behind trying it out if there's no
easy way to give it a shot.

~~~
lukebond
quay.io offered a free 6 month trial for private repos once upon a time.
that's why it's there :) now that it's public it could go anywhere really, and
it would simplify installation for people to not have to set up quay.io
credentials when they're not actually using it for anything private. i plan to
fix this soon.

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errordeveloper
Luke, congrats for releasing it!

