

StackRocket: Build and share virtualized dev stacks, start coding in minutes - keven
http://stackrocket.com

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PabloOsinaga
I wonder - has anyone ever tried the approach of the entire VM binary image
being the repo and doing smart bindiffs as changes? The trick would be to
identify what is "code/config/program code" vs random/temp files.

In code tracking you do it manually by saying don't track. Here you'd need a
bit more intelligence, but seems like doable.

And you could create then like a git for machines.

I may be too simplistic / not fully understand the
stackrocket/blueprint/vagrant approach - but why not doing something radically
simpler???

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sayhello
You are right, having a binary diffing mechanism would make it simpler to
implement, but that diffing mechanism would be hard to implement!

We've thought about going pure diff at the beginning and decided that to
implement that method will give us less flexibility in the short term.

I speculate that do so, we would need to implement our own virtual machine (we
are using virtualbox) and/or disk image format.

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PabloOsinaga
mmm I take your point - what ideas are out there to do that thought? I agree
it is hard ...

Good news is that for the "known/commont stuff" you can always have a central
database of the random/temp stuff they generate.

E.g., mysql generetes tmp files here and there, and so and so - so you could
profile all that common stuff in that way.

Then the uncommon stuff or your custom things, you declaratively say "do not
track" as you do with code today.

Moreover you can do it in a way that is crowdsourced - ie: if its a cloud
service when people declare such and such in mongodb is random/temp then you
learn for all users.

At the end of the day there is a limited number of things people use and for
the long tail it is OK for people to be declarative I guess.

But on the flip side I can see how that could end up being a nightmare.

But wouldn't it be nice to do something as simple as pull/commit/push for
general purpose computers?

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PabloOsinaga
that piece is the less difficult i think - you could always use existing VM
infrastructure and do (1) restore (2) apply changes and (3) save back - I
wouldn't mess with disk formats and so on - no need

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toisanji
is this just vagrant (<http://vagrantup.com>) as a service? How is this
different/better than vagrant? Looks interesting.

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keven
In addition to Olivier's comment, we will also have deployment option to
popular cloud providers such as Heroku, PHPFog and EC2

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themgt
How will this work? It sounded like a user could just build a custom VM image
and send it to you. There wouldn't be a way to deploy that to heroku, right?

Are you doing sort of a blended app hosting/cloud offering?

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sayhello
With what we have today, code on our pre-configured RoR stack will work on
heroku.

What we have in the works is detecting if you have e.g. Redis and subscribing
to that "addon" for you.

~~~
themgt
Have you seen the dotcloud "build files" for specifying services? I wonder if
trying to encourage standardization among cloud/app hosts on a service
specification file like this would be beneficial, similar to
Gemfile/Procfile/etc.

service 'redis', '~> 2.2.2'

<http://docs.dotcloud.com/guides/build-file/>

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shykes
dotCloud team here. If there's interest, we'll happily contribute our specs
and code to get things started.

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sayhello
I'd love to. I'll email you soon.

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amirhhz
I smiled reading this exchange, very good-spirited. Hope you can successfully
work together!

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giberson
Any support for the new Win 8 developer preview? I'd love to have a
development environment to start playing with new Metro App development..

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sayhello
Olivier here, a stackrocket co-founder.

We only support Mac os x at the moment as a client, and Linux as the dev
environment.

That said, we will be looking to expand at some point. At this stage, we want
to make sure we nail down the correct way of solving this problem.

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joelhaasnoot
Mac only really is a bummer. I realize that there's a large and vocal crowd of
developers doing that, but there's also a big Windows/.NET crowd you could
easily be targeting with this. Seeing this on Windows would be great, if you
use the open source VirtualBox you can easily make cross platform images.

~~~
sayhello
You are right. Windows is on the roadmap. We wish we had it today!

We don't have windows right now, but I'm sure that will be a major driver for
user acquisition.

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mtogo
Current features:

    
    
      * Landing page
    
      * Sign up form

~~~
sayhello
We do have a product and a couple of companies as users. That said, we're in
private beta.

If you're interested, sign up and shoot me an email. I'd like to learn more
about what you're interested in.

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danellis
No information about pricing, though?

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sayhello
Free for now to our private beta users. But we plan to have something similar
to github when we begin to charge.

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mountaineer
When I saw StackParts this week I was reminded about how much pain is involved
in getting a particular "stack part" up and running. Nice to see a potential
solution.

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sayhello
Thank you for your comment. It was a problem for us. After a few hardware
failures we had had enough!

If you want an account, please sign up at stackrocket.com and sent me an
email. I'd love to chat more and see how we can make your life easier

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gojomo
Love the concept. Casual use of VMs-as-if-they-were-documents is a great trend
that still has a lot of potential. (StackRocket/Blueprint/Vagrant/etc could
possibly benefit from a Ninite-like visual interface for bootstrapping
dev/server VMs.)

A couple landing page nits:

• it'd be helpful to have some extra details/screenshots for people without
flash to play the demo video

• lots of things on the landing page seem like they should be clickable to get
started, but aren't. For example, 'Create a dev stack' and 'Make a stack,
customize it' button-like areas. I bet using a click-analytics heatmap you'd
see a lot of stray clicks on those.

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dpritchett
That's a great idea! I'll bet chef and some elbow grease on the part of the
service provider would make the ninite ideal possible for some limited subset
of popular tools. This is where Turnkey Linux should be heading, too.

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lacker
Minor spelling nitpick: cnapshots -> snapshots

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sayhello
Thanks! Fix coming right up

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carols10cents
I have been having so many problems getting vagrant + chef-solo to do what I
want to duplicate my rails dev env... Something simpler and more abstracted
would be great. I want to spend my time coding, not configuring my
environment.

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pokezat
Just had a look at the screencast. Looks really cool! Can't wait to start
using that.

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dsl
Was anyone else annoyed that they can't pronounce "Rocket"?

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pokezat
As in?

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KMEthridge
It may just be me, but I tried clicking some emphasized text because it looks
just like the links. E.g. I tried to click "or make your own..." in "Use our
stacks, or make your own..."

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sayhello
We will fix that. It's confusing, I agree

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joeyespo
This looks awesome. As a Python/Flask enthusiast, I have to ask. Know anything
like this targeted at Python?

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sayhello
We are python devs and we do have a django stack =)

If you want an account, please sign up and send me an email with your HN
username. I could also make you a flask stack.

My email is in another thread or in my profile.

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jroll
Flask support would be amazing.

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denisk
Awesome! Looking forward to using StackRocket in new projects!

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aaronblohowiak
How does this compare with OpenStack?

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sayhello
Openstack and cloudfoundry are attempts to standardize server infrastructures.
They aim to make it easy to have your own private AWS.

A possible future for us would be to have easy deployment in your private
"cloud", similar to vmware's cloudfoundry product.

That said, where we differ from cloudfoundry is that we aim to provide a great
user experience and give everything to get started coding right away.

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zager
Inspiring design of the homepage!

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iusable
Looks like a winner to me.

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skeptical
Looks practical, but I would like to see support for java, including building
tools and such. The deployment is only part of the problem.

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sayhello
Java is definitely on the roadmap. We have been out of touch with the java
universe for a few years, but we'd like to provide a great experience.

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dsl
It looks like a crappy clone of DevStructure Blueprints.
<http://devstructure.com/>

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sayhello
Why do you think it's crappy?

We might use blueprint in the future and contribute to the project. I think
Matt and Richard are great guys.

That said, we offer more than blueprint, so it's not a clone.

