

How I deployed my Django app onto DotCloud - KenCochrane
http://kencochrane.net/blog/2011/04/deploying-my-django-application-to-dotcloud/

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chopsueyar
That sucks about not knowing what was causing the errors. Too many variables.

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kaerast
That has been my issue with Dotcloud too, when it works its fine - when it
breaks its really difficult to debug. It feels more restricted than the Heroku
environment too, so even if I do know what's wrong it can't be fixed.

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jjm
In that respect Dotcloud would need some more abstraction, almost fire and
forget for some of this to be Heroku like.

But, I love competition and these guys are living the dream. Hope they
continue to kick ass and add features.

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beck5
Out of ignorance & interest, if I'm familiar with the technologies I want is
DotCloud worth it compared to say AWS etc?

Im guessing the main bonus for me would be having someone else worry about
securing the server.

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randall
I've been experimenting with DotCloud (about to push my first site live soon)
and I've found it's pretty freaking awesome. It runs on AWS, so basically it's
outsourced sysadmin-ing. Give the guys some time and I think DotCloud will be
the best platform. Given they just raised some funding, if they get their
feature set right, it should work out pretty well.

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beck5
thanks, it will be interesting to see what the prices are and if its worth it
(probably). The lack of control can be a bit scary.

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jpetazzo
Hi, DotCloud'er here - so take my comment with a bit of salt :-)

Regarding "lack of control", we do our best to address that, in multiple ways.

1\. We don't require DotCloud-specific changes to your apps; if you install
your Python dependencies with pip or easy_install, dropping a requirements.txt
file at the top of you app will be enough to get them installed automatically
when you push your code to DotCloud. Of course, if you are used to install
Python stuff with other ways (apt-get install, or funky PYTHONPATH tricks),
you will have to change that. But moving your dependencies to requirements.txt
is not DotCloud-specific, and if you take the time to do it, your app will
certainly run better, not only on DotCloud, but on other environments as well.
Same thing for the wsgi.py wrapper: once you have done that, you app will run
like a charm on any other WSGI-compliant hosting. We think it's a big win, but
we won't fight to the death to convince you otherwise ;-)

2\. We give a "fair amount" of control on your DotCloud services: SSH,
crontabs... But you don't get root access. Why? Well, what if you deploy a
Python+WSGI service, and then "sudo apt-get install redis mysql-server
irb1.8"? If we want the scaling/monitoring/etc. to be working, we need to set
some rules. However, if you need custom stuff, we will always do our best so
you can get them.

3\. There's the famous "I'm too scary to put my data in the Cloud" (especially
after last week's EC2 outage); we address that by giving you many ways to
setup automatic backups of your data. For instance, we have a tutorial
explaining how to setup MySQL/PostgreSQL backups and ship them to a 3rd party
server using FTP/SCP.

We are perfectly aware that many of you out there can do what we do with
Puppet/Chef/#{my_fav_devops_tool}, but there are even more people who would
rather get straight to the code, and we want them to be as happy and
productive as possible!

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bobx11
That sure is a lot of steps when compared to Heroku... that's why Rails is
gaining so fast on Python.

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grokcode
To be fair, DotCloud offers much more flexibility than Heroku. With DotCloud
you can mix and match different stack components. Currently in beta: Java,
PHP, PostgreSQL, Python, Redis, Ruby, and SMTP. Plus there are tons of others
in alpha, including more esoteric stuff like Erlang. DotCloud also supports
any type of version control.

Heroku does Rails apps using Git, and thats it.

The tradeoff is flexibility vs. complexity.

