HN Explorer

Ask HN: Will you use (pay) a Dockerized hosting service?

6 points by scprodigy ↗ HN
Imagine a "Dockerized DigitalOcean", where you launch instances with Docker images, not VM images. The differences are:

- super fast to deploy, less than a second

- native docker workflow (build/push/pull, etc.)

- immutable instance

- minimal instance size, e.g. 32MB RAM

- cheaper, $1/mon for 128MB instance

Would this kind of service be interesting? for personal VPS? Dev/Test bed? Or Web hosting?

10 comments

[ 126 ms ] story [ 583 ms ] thread
vincent_s
Yes, I definitely would pay for that. There already are some docker hosting companies. However, they seem kind of complicated to use (at least more complicated than it has to be):

https://www.dotcloud.com/ (was originally built by Docker creators, then sold)

https://www.tutum.co/ (bought by Docker a few months ago)

https://quay.io/

http://sloppy.io/

vincent_s
P.S.: I think tutum comes closest to what you describe. They act as a middle man and support Microsoft Azure, Digital Ocean, Amazon Web Services, Packet and SoftLayer as hosting providers. However, I'm not sure if it's a good thing that they have been bought by Docker at this early stage ..
scprodigy
Not really, what I'm saying is more like DO, atop of secured container.

Also, it is more of a VPS or IaaS, not have to be CaaS or Microservices.

KickingTheTV
Disclosure: I've been working with Tutum since the initial team.

Tutum was actually a container hosting service at first but we found there were a ton of technical challenges in multi-tenancy with hundreds/thousands of containers and it's hard to build a level of trust that larger IaaS providers have like AWS.

Hosting puts you in direct competition with IaaS providers, while being a middle-man can provide more value-add and you get to work with the other providers to strengthen your solution.

scprodigy
The multenancy challenge comes from the lack of isolation in container. Therefore, people nest containers in VM and put a scheduler atop.

But if there is secured, isolated container, we won't need the VM nor the scheduler, the container becomes the hosting platform, aka EC2, DO.

kevinsimper
I am working on something like that, but it is very difficult to make something that is production ready. You can see it here https://blackbeard.io

The whole idea is that we managed the infrastucure and you can launch any docker container that you want.

But we have since changed our idea to be more of a prototype hosting platform where you can easily host and get started really quickly.

I would really like to dicuss the idea with you, you can catch me on social media with username @kevinsimper also on Skype.

scprodigy
Right, guess what I'm proposing is more of VPS and Iaas, not containers nested in VM.
michael_fine
What would be the benefit of this over using something like dokku (https://github.com/progrium/dokku) with Digital Ocean?
scprodigy
The difference is not nesting your container in VM. Instead, the container is secure, isolated as VM. Then container becomes the foundation for hosting platform, e.g. EC2, not just app deployment atop IaaS.