132 comments

[ 27.0 ms ] story [ 5606 ms ] thread
Very cool, and I was waiting for something like this to be built out. Are you planning on having a command line tool to control your deployments?
This is pretty awesome. An api to automate deployments/management/monitoring would completely rock too.
Nice. Looking forward to seeing how this and all the other Docker based PAAS ecosystems like Flynn, Deis, Tsuru, Shipbuilder, CoreOS etc pan out.
I agree this looks very cool. As far as http://deis.io/ is concerned, we're focused more on the "operate your own PaaS" capability, whereas this seems to be a pure hosted service -- which is great for lots of use cases.

Best of luck guys!

"Docker-as-a-Service", simple, easy-to-understand pricing. Love it.

This is my favourite Docker offer so far. I've been looking for something to replace dotCloud's deprecated sandbox tier for just playing around, and it looks like this fits the bill.

The big point of Docker for me is that I can build the container on my machine, run automated tests on it, play with it and then ship it to the production machines when I'm confident that it is working.

If you build the container on a service like this testing it is hard or in some cases even impossible. For example acceptance tests with Selenium.

Gemfile.lock and similar version binding tools help, but prebuild containers bring the deployment stability to whole new level and is the reason why I'm exited about Docker and containers in general.

Do they support prebuild containers?

"You can create a Docker file with some easy steps we’ve created, or you can upload your own Docker file and create an instance from that."

Sounds like a yes.

Well, no. A Dockerfile is the build instructions, not the build artifact.
you can commit at any point and ship that via private registry
Sounds like you took the best parts of digital ocean and are trying to push it as a platform with docker baked in. I like. It seems like you're also trying to simplify using docker. I like even more.
Hey - thanks a million - that's the plan!
Speaking of digitalocean, are you guys affiliated at all? Because I get a digitalocean vibe from your pricing/terminology/etc. for some reason.
Is the pricing for 1 dockerfile or unlimited dockerfiles?
It's per instance - so you can have unlimited docker files; you only pay when you create an instance from one.
Clicking on alpha/deploy leads to 404 :(
I love the fact that you keep trying to define your own vocubulary 'Deck' etc, but always have to explain it. Best to stick with the more eaily understood term, rather than invent your own, I think.

Unless you're going to try and trademark them all.

Thanks - we discussed that a lot - we were trying to make a simple 3 steps process. If we get a lot of feedback that it's confusing we'll ditch it.
I think you need to define your own language if it's better. 'Deck' is clearly better than 'Dockerfile'.

Feel free to innovate - you're a startup, and it's what we love about you.

Wouldn't "Container" fit the analogy best?
I think that even if [deck drop instance] is clearer than [dockerfile image container] it would be better to use [dockerfile image container] it's the standard set forth from docker, sticking to the standard makes interoperating easier for everyone.
I agree with this, though I'm biased because I personally find [dockerfile image container] clearer than [deck drop instance]. Explicit > flashy.
I'd have to agree that the standard Docker terminology would be much preferred. Your business covers what is a pretty cutting edge, advanced concept right now. Your customers are likely to be at least somewhat understanding of the standard terminology. Your custom terminology tripped me up as well, despite having a reasonable grasp of the higher level Docker terminology.

Other than that, this looks great! I'm excited for you guys.

I'm in a similar problem space to you. After a year of defining my own 'simpler' terminology, decided to abandon it in favour of being consistent with the more popular albeit complex terminology.

I hope that saves you some time.

I agree with this. I recently wrote a bunch of new Dockerfiles. The Dockerfile name is sort of meh, but "Deck" is not really telling me what its for.
Yeah, these are my only problem with the service; I did not get the metaphors at all, and their descriptions only added to the confusion.

The simplicity of the service is an opportunity to attract people without a lot of webdev chops, so why not make it super simple?

Heroku created almost as many new terms as Tolkien, and they seem to have made out just fine.
While I agree with your comment, I hope it isn't used as a measure or justification for doing so. I've had the same cognitive problem with Heroku as the parent describes.
God this drives my absolutely insane. Elvish marketing speak is such a stupid waste of time. Why can't we stick to commonly accepted terms instead of trying to bake up new "Cloud"esque replacement terms.
Looked at Heruko once, but all the custom lingo really put me off it.. But, of course your point about them being successful stands
It's worth a shot if they fit your use case. Once you get past the ninja-speak of choosing size and database, it's really simple.

For rake/rails apps at least, you just run `heroku run 'command'` and you're done.

This looks awesome! I currently have an AWS box for the same purpose, running a few of my docker containers. Will this support the ADD directive, or the ability to add custom files (config files) into containers?
Great initiative! One thing to be aware is that Docker is using LXC for containers and LXC relies on kernel isolation and cgroup limits. The concern is about the vulnerabilities.

It is comforting that Heroku is also using LXC for dynos. Would be interesting to know how much in-house adjustments to the kernel and LXC has been made to ensure the hardening.

I work at ActiveState on Stackato, which is a private Platform as a service. Similar to Heroku, only for private hosting (e.g. you host it on your own hardware or hypervisor). We use Docker as of our v3 beta release today (http://beta.stackato.com/). Our use of docker in 3.0+ means that we bring their tuned security along with us (they integrate with apparmor really well, in fact they require it to start up a container). Here's a really good overview of LXC (and docker) security in general: http://blog.docker.io/2013/08/containers-docker-how-secure-a...
Can I use a docker image I have already created?
What would be even better is to decouple the idea of a drop from the containers running it. What I like about container approaches is having "machines" I can run them on. So let's say I make a "www" drop or several. I should then be able to fire up my containers into particular types of drops and have them started on those without having to think about the specifics. The benefit of this I'd that I only care about my container running and having some basic resource requirements and not so much the specific machine instance it is running on. I could even co-mingle different containers on types of "machines". Also separating out disk resources from CPU and ram would be good. Maybe you do this already buy it wasn't clear to me.
IMO Labels/tooltips should be added to the icons for the cards. Some of them, including the leaf (nodejs?) and the tree (nfi what that is) aren't especially obvious.

Otherwise, cool!

And when I click on one, the checkmark doesn't disappear until I unhover the mouse.
> We’re using dedicated because running virtual containers on virtual instances seems nuts to us.

but a traceroute points to AWS…

A traceroute of their blog, or a server you just spun up? They don't necessarily have to eat their own dogfood.
If you offer infrastructure services and don't eat your own dogfood you can't be serious.

If you offer infrastructure services and don't tell people where and how you provide it, you can't be serious, too.

But if you host your site on your infrastructure, and it goes down, you can't post status updates to tell people what's going on/ when you will be back online. Its quite reasonable to not host your own homepage or mechanism of updating your customers IMO.
I disagree. Your website should run on your own infrastructure and a separate status page, under a different (sub)-domain should be operated from another AS (autonomous system) e.g. statuspage.io or whatever you like/prefer.
building a virtualization infrastructure on top of another, black box virtualization infrastructure…

What could possibly go wrong?

Hey, it worked for Heroku.
It kind of works for Heroku. Every few months I see the Hacker News post "Why/how we moved away from Heroku."
Those are still virtual, just no one else is on your box.
Blog and lots of Copper tools hosted on AWS. Stackdock on dedicated (not AWS or other IaaS) hardware.
I'm not sure about the pricing yet as I can run like 5 or 10 docker instances in one DigitalOcean VM costing 5 dollars per month.
Probably the differences are your Docker instances run on dedicated server instead, and you have all the setup and preparation and maintaince made for you.
This is truly awesome, nice work!

I configured and launched a machine with redis and node in less than 5 minutes. Very cool.

How will you isolate instances from each other? My instance appears to have 24 GB of RAM and 12 cores, and it looks like I can use all of it in my instance.

You can limit Docker to have CPU weight shares, and also a memory limit. The file storage limits are due to Docker 0.7, and for now you can ulimit them.
Docker uses LXC which supports memory and CPU limits
I don't see node as an option. What am I missing?
I started the default instance with sinatra running, but where do you see the IP address to visit it via a web browser?
I love this idea, and want to try it but I have no experience with Docker (on the todo list).

I wanted to spin up an instance of Sphinx Search but no idea how to go about doing it.

Maybe creating a set of tutorials will help with this. I can think of two advantages. The first being customers like myself will love it. Second, similar to Linode and their tutorials it will drives a lot of traffic and establishes your reputation as docker experts. Will probably build a lot of back-links too as people link to your tutorials.

Absolutely. Along similar lines, DigitalOcean has done a great job of encouraging the community to write tutorial and articles, and as a result there are tons of resources to get you started with all kinds of ways to use a VPS. Doing the same would be tremendously beneficial for Stackdock.
Just signed up but the site now appears to be down, receiving "We're sorry, but something went wrong."
Hackernews traffic spike! You can signup and create a Dockerfile - we've just paused instance deployment for a couple of hours as we add more servers. Sorry for the inconvenience.
I get a 500 error when logging in, am I the only one ?
Looks cool. Here's what I'd love to see: built-in git deployment (ie. take a Dockerfile, build an image from it, and then after a push add the latest source code to /app and start new instances), and some kind of orchestration so you could run a number of app containers behind a load balancer container.
This looks like an awesome service. And the image on the site reminds me of Season 2 of The Wire - even better!