I have some questions and, please, don't get me wrong, I'm not being sarcastic. I am really interested in your services.
I got a cheap server on DO I use to deploy some apps just for testing purpose and, sometimes, I think I waste too many time configuring, breaking stuff and fine-tunning my servers (I do like it but it's not very productive). The languages I play with are Python (Django and Flask), PHP (Symfony2 and Wordpress) and Javascript (Node.js/Express).
My questions are: Why would I choose Stackful.io over Digital Ocean? Will it help me with that?
I'm all for server tweaking and I do it all the time, but sometimes it gets boring. I could probably do something better than configure php5-fpm for the thousandth time.
Right now, Stackful.io takes the pain from that when it comes to Node.js development. You just pick a server size and hit a button. 2 minutes later your machine is ready to rock and you can deploy your app with a simple Git push.
We are planning on doing the same for the other major web technologies. We have some pretty good progress with a Python stack and a PHP one is in our queue.
I'm amazed something that works like stackful.io or heroku for your own servers has not been written yet. Like you, many tinkerers have a cheap server to use as a lab. It would be great if one could install on it some piece of software that provided heroku-like zero-friction deploy for new apps. Just do "app create", push a git repo and, bam, the app is deployed, with sensible defaults. The defaults are not supposed to make everyone happy, but, like a default heroku deployment, to allow you to start new apps with zero friction, thus encouraging experimentation and hacking.
You should check out Cloud66.com they are _almost_ there with what you are describing. I'm really hoping to be using them in a month or two.
They'll read in your Github repo and then based on that configure VPS's for you according to your specs (shared db server, standalone, etc.), it's very slick.
Right now, they're lacking in documentation and don't handle some aspects of admin (most notably server security updates) very well.
Our Chef-based stack(s) are open source and hosted on github. We are thinking of packaging them in a form that is convenient to run in a local Vagrant box or something of that sort, so that you can easily test your app without wrecking your production environment first.
As a Chef user, what are the honest selling points of cuisine vs. something like Chef Solo? I'm definitely up for moving to something that isn't as heavy as Chef but so far nothing has really clicked. Is it just that you preferred python? Looking at the sample code it doesn't seem more compact or sraight forward than the ruby equivalents. The excellent knife cloud bootstrap plugins, good hypervisor metadata coverage and active community makes it hard to say goodbye.
I'm sure you're not looking to go head to head with opscode or plabs, but what's the elevator pitch? I'd really love something that ended up being much more concise for the 90% of the deploys that are dead simple.
Regarding cuisine vs. Chef Solo... I think it mostly depends on what your scripts do. In my opinion, Fabric/Cuisine make it absurdly easy to execute commands against a remote server and most of the time that's enough for a decent deployment. Chef's execution API is, to put it mildly, clumsy. I cringe every time I have to type something like:
execute "#{virtualenv_dir}/bin/pip install -r #{requirements_file}" do
user deploy_user
group deploy_user
end
IMO Chef shines when you have to move a lot of config files and generate node- and role-specific configs. I feel it's a lot simpler to just have recipe-specific files and templates packaged with the recipe and move them over with commands like cookbook_file and template.
Right now we are using both the technologies. Our stacks are Chef-based since we want people to be comfortable with reading (and possibly modifying) its code. We also reuse a lot of the Opscode recipes which simply do not exist for Fabric/Cuisine. Fabric and Cuisine have their place when we bootstrap a server and prepare the Chef environment and at several odd places where they keep things running together.
With regards to Digital Ocean. My server there which I installed about a month ago (Amsterdam location), with 2GB of RAM is not responding for several hours now. Including not possible to reboot. Support says they're aware of the issue. But it's been several hours like this now. Never had with with Linode in my 3 years with them. Guess I'll be moving this server back.
Unfortunately, the problem with freemium is that at the end paying customers have to sponsor the free accounts.
And in most cases providers do as much as possible to lock you in, so you don't switch to a cheaper option when you reach certain size.
On the other hand, we want customers to know that they can leave us whenever they need to. Your apps are completely portable, so there is no reason not to give it a try.
I got a cheap server on DO I use to deploy some apps just for testing purpose and, sometimes, I think I waste too many time configuring, breaking stuff and fine-tunning my servers (I do like it but it's not very productive). The languages I play with are Python (Django and Flask), PHP (Symfony2 and Wordpress) and Javascript (Node.js/Express).
My questions are: Why would I choose Stackful.io over Digital Ocean? Will it help me with that?