Show HN: Heroku Alternative for Python/Django apps

https://appliku.com/

by appliku • 5 years ago

183 113 5 years ago

appliku.com

wartijn_• 5 years ago

What are the benefits over using this instead of DO's app platform?

https://www.digitalocean.com/products/app-platform/

appliku30• 5 years ago

DO Apps platform in terms of pricing is as bad as Heroku's offering. They charge per instance of the process and it becomes pretty expensive. Appliku helps to reduce costs by putting processes on a single server.

With Heroku Config Vars sync feature one of the customers managed to save around $7k/mo on fat Dynos that are insanely overpriced in Heroku.

So while DO Apps platform will definitely have their target audience, Appliku allows to save a lot of cash.

Hope I was able to answer your question :)

RussianCow4• 5 years ago

This looks sleek, but I’ll ask the obvious question: Why use this over Heroku? I couldn’t find a good answer to that question from a quick look at the website, aside from maybe the fact that it uses AWS and Digital Ocean.

capableweb4• 5 years ago

Heroku is a general apps platform. This seems to be tailored specifically to Django/Python (with the option of using your own Dockerfile so could deploy anything). One could easily imagine that the performance and stability should be a lot higher than with Heroku. If you're a Python-only shop, it might make more sense.

vldo2• 5 years ago

having something that specific, tailored for dynamic language, seems like overkill i'd undestand if it was for something highly performant and hard to deploy

RussianCow4• 5 years ago

One could easily imagine that the performance and stability should be a lot higher than with Heroku.

No, I can’t imagine that. Why would performance be any different? I imagine most of these kinds of solutions use Docker behind the hood anyway, so they’re likely to be identical.

vldo2• 5 years ago

actually i'll ask something similar, why this over dokku?

appliku30• 5 years ago

You can do Dokku, you can setup dokku and deploy apps with dokku. no problem.

But I wanted a solution where I don't need to remember anything DevOps while writing/shipping my apps.

I also added a generous free plan that allows all features. Then AWS has free credits so one can start their next big thing without expenses and not learning a single thing about deployment at all

appliku30• 5 years ago

Price.

It is easy to start on Heroku. With one app, one process.

When you have multiple apps and several processes there is a way to reduce costs and not loose in convenience.

$10/mo droplet can hold plenty of apps and it is still $10/mo. If you don't need a production grade Database – Appliku has them at 0 cost.

Back in a day I moved several of my side projects to Heroku. I was happy until i received a $90+ invoice by the end of the month. Now a $10/mo droplet holds even more projects for me.

eirki• 5 years ago

This is my experience as well. $10 for each running process (server, worker, database) adds up very fast.

RussianCow4• 5 years ago

Thanks for the response. My two cents: price is not the thing that I would compete on. For any "real" business, the cost of Heroku is negligible compared to its benefits; a few hundred dollars per month in savings is just not enough to convince most companies to migrate to a completely new service that isn't as battle tested and has fewer features. At the same time, I'm not convinced you could make any significant amount of money tailoring your service to side projects.

With that said, I think you have a great product and could probably make some decent money by offering some combination of niche features. Ideas off the top of my head:

* Integrated metrics. Since you're primarily targeting Django apps, it should be feasible to collect health/performance stats from the apps and display them in a simple dashboard. You don't need to offer very much here; most companies would be more than happy with basic stats related to response times per route, although SQL query times would be really neat to see.

* Automatic scaling for your Python projects. If you could apply the same ease of deployment to horizontal scaling, that would be really valuable.

* Easy integration with AWS services like S3, SES, and SNS. You could do this in a number of ways. One idea is to provide a set of Django libraries that, for instance, makes sending SMS messages super simple, with no configuration needed when used via Appliku. Or you could integrate with existing libraries and just remove the configuration step for the developer.

With at least one of the above (or some other differentiator), I could see Appliku taking off. In any case, you have a great product, and I wish you the best of luck!

caymanjim• 5 years ago

Heroku is AWS.

rcarmo• 5 years ago

If you want to host your own, check out https://github.com/piku :)

appliku30• 5 years ago

I wanted to host nothing. I wanted click click and deployed. But I've heard about piku many times seems like a great thing!

alexanderisora• 5 years ago

I am long time paid customer of Appliku. I've built a SaaS (https://unicornplatform.com) and before was hosted on Heroku. Migrating to Appliku saved me $400/mo in cloud costs.

My app is React & Django and it works like a charm on Appliku.

Good luck!

howolduis2• 5 years ago

to all web developers: no one, absolutely no one, likes huge popups on their screen that covers the website.

xu3u322• 5 years ago

How are you serving react?

appliku30• 5 years ago

Built during the project build and uploaded to s3 and served via CDN.

pbronez• 5 years ago

Can you talk a bit about the security model? Appliku requires an AWS user with:

AmazonEC2FullAccess

AmazonEC2ContainerRegistryFullAccess

AmazonEC2ContainerServiceFullAccess

AmazonS3FullAccess

That's a lot of permissions into my AWS account. What are some easy ways to contain the damage that could be done if Appliku has a bug or the creditials are compromised?

appliku30• 5 years ago

Hey! Thanks for question. I guess there is an article that needs updating. Appliku only needs AmazonEC2FullAccess.

Well, if you feel that something is off you just revoke credentials.

I will update the article now. Thanks again

mikepurvis• 5 years ago

The point of a rich authorization model is not to have to rely on feelings.

deberon• 5 years ago

I would recommend dedicating an entire AWS account to this. Or, if you have a solid tagging strategy[0], you can craft your IAM policies to only allow Appliku access to resources tagged with a particular tag.

0 - https://docs.aws.amazon.com/IAM/latest/UserGuide/access_tags...

appliku30• 5 years ago

Separate account will be the best strategy. I prefer having separate accounts for every project. Hustle to login between them, but the best isolation that can be between projects.

onphonenow• 5 years ago

Google got this right w project focused permissions- accounts work aws side but

slig2• 5 years ago

Congrats on shipping! I could see myself using a service like yours, and bringing my own server is perfect as I can adjust and scale it up/down as needed.

I'm thankful that Heroku prices are that extreme because it made me learn how to deploy and run everything by myself back in the day.

appliku30• 5 years ago

Thanks for kind words.

While I know how to deploy myself I am fed up with that. Especially when it comes to a new project. There are so many places where you can screw up with a typo or stuff like that.

So while I know how to do it by myself, I don't enjoy doing that and that's how the project got started.

By the way if curious i wrote a post about that: https://dev.to/kostjapalovic/tired-of-deployments-built-my-o...

georgeleon• 5 years ago

We tried Heroku, and that was expensive. We tried deploying manually on AWS but it took a lot of time with a devops freelancer.

Got sold on Appliku and haven't had to think about infrastructure and deployment at all. We also survived for a long time on the free plan, until we decided to have a separate server for staging environment.

Works pretty well. Never had to learn anything about servers and SSH.

rvanlaar• 5 years ago

Hey Congrats on launching this. I really hope it'll grow.

Here are my 2 cts.

I've used dokku for this, running Django, for years and recently I moved a customer over to use the digital ocean app platform.

There are a couple of things I find important when evaluating these platforms that I didn't see on the site: - is there database fail over with the multi server strong and powerful plans? - does appliku maintain the underlying servers and database? - is there monitoring?

appliku30• 5 years ago

Hey, thanks for kind words!

At the moment databases in Appliku are best fit for non-production environments. So while you can enjoy easy and great deployments of your apps, I am not ready yet to compete on the production databases front. So no, we don't offer fail over or even backups at the moment. Backups are in plans, but more advanced features for databases is not even in backlog.

derefr• 5 years ago

Re: production-quality DBs, it's its whole own ball-game.

Rather than getting into all of that, your time here might be better spent here finding DBaaS services that host on the same clouds Appliku deploys to, and partnering Appliku with them to guarantee predictable network-transit peering to the clouds your users are launching on; probably by setting up the install-time UX flow so that that DBaaS choice is made early in the setup flow, and constrains further choices (i.e. user chooses DBaaS X; Appliku knows what AZs it exists in in each cloud, and restricts user to deploying the app to those same AZs in order to ensure free transit.)

In other words, do the backend work Heroku does to add a new DBaaS "add-on" partner, but without reselling/wrapping the resulting service, instead just giving a UX to bind to it.

danjac• 5 years ago

As a long-time Dokku user, have you done any multi-server deployments or just stayed to a single server? I'm happy with Dokku for side projects but would be interested in what Dokku users use when they need to move up to a multi-server setup.

futhey• 5 years ago

Not OP but very happy with Dokku for multi-server clusters, with some light load balancing or failover at the DNS level.

Admittedly, this works great for clusters of 1-10 machines. There's definitely some missing stuff that's hard to add for larger deployments.

But, I'd venture to say that most of Dokku's target audience doesn't need to worry about scaling past a couple of servers.

thih9• 5 years ago

Congrats on the launch!

Create as many instances of Postgres, PostGIS, Mysql, Redis and RabbitMQ as you want. They are hosted on your servers and we don't charge extra for them.

I'd love to learn more about this, I couldn't find any details. Is there a page with more information? Specifically, I'd like to know more about backups and upgrades.

appliku30• 5 years ago

At this moment we are not fighting for the niche of Production grade databases with failovers and all these valuable things.

The feature to back up at least postgres is planned, fail overs , replication, etc is not even planned yet. There are companies that have whole departments working on managed DB offerings, sadly – we don't. yet :)

_tardigrade• 5 years ago

recently started working on something very similar for Python/Django apps! I'll have more competition I guess

appliku30• 5 years ago

It only proves there is market for that.

The more solutions the better!

Wish you best of luck!

conradbez2• 5 years ago

Looks very interesting, will have to give it a shot!

I made an open source “dashboard” for dokku that tries to give you Heroku ease of use with the cost of a single server.

Basically you run one script on the server and it deploys a dokku app which manages the deployment of additional dokku apps. Gives you GUI access to deploying new apps, changing env variables etc.

Would love feedback from anyone looking for an easy way to deploy dokku apps regularly.

https://github.com/conradbez/dokku-dashboard

throwaway77384• 5 years ago

Long-time dokku user here. This seems interesting. How nicely does this play with more complicated things, like configuring ports for SSL, or using additional Dokku plugins? How about things like configuring the container network and things like upload size variables, or the wait time when deploying, etc.?

conradbez2• 5 years ago

Haven't worked on this in a while so can't exactly remember but focuses more on the MVP functionality. Should be easy enough to add anything you could traditionally do through SSHing into the box though.

cabalamat3• 5 years ago

The existence of Heroku/Appliku etc (and my personal experience) suggests that setting up web apps isn't hassle free.

Maybe the fix for this would be to have a language/library combination designed from the ground up to make it as easy as possible?

So for example, the language would come as standard with:

- a web server for production use - a web server for development use - a built-in SQL database - a built-in NoSQL database - a web server library

Then, as all the components for the system would part of the language's standard library/environment, the difficulty of configuring/running a server (such as a web server) on another machine would be limited.

ezekg3• 5 years ago

It's not that setting up a server is hard. The reason Heroku exists is because they are your devops team -as-a-service.

appliku30• 5 years ago

I would correct the last part. Appliku is an automated devops as a service. Heroku is selling you a very much overpriced complete service. And that's where Appliku comes in as a way to fight insane costs.

But yes, setting up a server is not super hard. Doing it often and with convenience that's where improvement is needed compared to doing it manually.

cabalamat3• 5 years ago

If I understand you correctly, you say that setting up a server isn't hard, but then you seem to imply that it's hard enough that you might want to employ a team of people to do it, which seems pretty hard to me.

So I'm not sure that I follow you.

zshift• 5 years ago

Dark has exactly that, https://www.darklang.com

metalliqaz• 5 years ago

I think you're missing a big part... getting it hosted on the internet, stable, and scalable. Can't do that from your laptop no matter what the language environment comes with.

appliku30• 5 years ago

Also every provider offers different things, at different costs, etc. So it is up to providers to build solutions that are easy with a given language or framework.

We aspire to build a convenient service for Python/Django and there is a long road ahead.

cabalamat3• 5 years ago

getting it hosted on the internet,

This just needs a VPS, running a popular OS such as Ubuntu.

stable

This is important, I agree.

and scalable

The scalable part doesn't matter, since it's premature optimisation, which is the root of all evil.

Once the project is used by enough people that it cant run just on one dedicated server, then you'll hopefully have enough revenue coming in from it to make it scalable.

Can't do that from your laptop

A VPS would typically have less power than a laptop.

john-radio• 5 years ago

We should get this added as as backend option for cookiecutter Django.

appliku30• 5 years ago

I completely agree :)

howolduis2• 5 years ago

So with Heorku, if an app has one dyno and that dyno doesn't receive any traffic in 1 hour, the dyno goes to sleep. Does Appliku have a similar thing or does it stay online longer?

appliku30• 5 years ago

It happens for a free dyno. For paid dynos they are always up.

Appiku doesn’t turn off your servers.

Scaling and spinning up/down additional servers is in plans.

agustif• 5 years ago

I just have to say I'm very happy with Dokku/Ledokku for my Node/React apps!

axelthegerman• 5 years ago

If anyone is looking for a similar service to deploy Ruby/Rails apps, check out https://www.hatchbox.io from Chris Oliver. Unfortunately doesn't come with a free tier but worth every penny!

dayvough23• 5 years ago

Seconding Chris' work. I love having not to worry about DevOps for my Rails apps.

excid3• 5 years ago

Thanks for the support! Glad you've been enjoying Hatchbox. We're wrapping up v2 and can't wait to share it. Upgrading to Caddy for the web server has been wonderful.

appliku30• 5 years ago

I would like to say that existence of Chris Oliver’s Hatchbox was initial inspiration and validation after finding which i decided to build Appliku. So, Thanks, Chris!!!

pelagicAustral• 5 years ago

Hatchbox its an absolute lifesaver for my deployments... I cannot stress how helpful and well crafted it is... But every single day of my life I worry about what is going to happen to all my infrastructure if something were to happen to Chris/HB...

saevarom2• 5 years ago

This is very interesting to me. I'm essentially a one man devOps team at a small web agency hosting multiple client websites mostly based on Django.

One question; what do you do about compiling and transpiling Javascript? Right now it's done via webpack in the local environment and then pushed out to S3/CDN.

appliku30• 5 years ago

hey!

I have a question. Are you deploying it to your servers/cloud accounts or clients’ accounts?

Regarding your questions: it is responsibility of the app to build and upload the static assets where needed.

If you want recommendation what to do, I’d say you’ll need a custom dockerfile, install node, run webpack in there and collect static.

If you are not using collectstatic in that process then given the lack of details I’d say why are you doing it in the same repo at all. But again – you provided very little details.

So if it is a website(server rendered pages, SEO is important,etc) - you should have node and do optimisations before pushing to s3.

If it is an app (RIA,SPA) then I’d say don’t mix frontend and backend. Decouple it and ship frontend separately.

Appliku Interface is built and served with Netlify. I still remember those dark times when I had frontend inside the main repo. It was largely inconvenient.

Either way happy to chat about your issues in our discord server. I am more than happy to help you figuring this out.

saevarom2• 5 years ago

Yes well separation of frontend/backend is of course a good idea, but most of the projects are mostly django templates with some React sprinkled on top to make interaction and interfaces nicer. It's also a good idea if you have just a single project or a few of them.

I'm talking about maybe 30-40 projects with django as base so it would make my job so much more complicated if I would split them all up in repos.

The frontend code is mostly isolated but is shipped in the same repo to be built and distributed for django to find.

So your answer about a custom dockerfile is probably what would be needed.

samirsd• 5 years ago

very cool. does this work with celery/redis?

appliku30• 5 years ago

of course it does. Appliku out of the box provides a way to provision redis and rabbmitmq.

I have yet to write a tutorial about celery.

To specify processes to run you use Procfile. Specify your celery commands and enable them in Process tab in Appliku interface.

In order to have celery beat working you should use redbeat: https://github.com/sibson/redbeat

Other than that – no specific requirements. Drop me a line in contacts on our site if you need any help. Or in our Discord Community: https://appliku.com/discord

air7• 5 years ago

I must have been living under a rock but I don't fully understand the appeal of these types of services if I have to run my own server anyway.

What I'm thinking is that it only saves me the initial setup of a web server and a git hook and perhaps a DB (which is one tutorial away for anyone with basic technical skills) after which deployment would just mean a git push. What am I missing?

tamersalama• 5 years ago

It's the difference between a managed service (getting the 3:00AM phonecall) vs doing it all yourself.

appliku30• 5 years ago

In a nutshell it is delegating all this manual work to a service.

I was happy with manual deployments for a while too, until i got fed up with this activity.

It is just a question of quality of life, automation.

Also, yes - there are tutorials, but what if you are not willing to spend time learning it even if you have tutorial?

Most of developers have a very high pain tolerance for manual tasks and search for yet another tutorial how to do X by themselves instead of delegating a task to some app or service.

Not everyone is like that.

TekMol2• 5 years ago

The readme of the example app just says "R":

https://github.com/appliku/appliku_start

Is there a demo of this app running somewhere?

appliku30• 5 years ago

Please refer to more up to date Djangitos project template.

https://github.com/appliku/djangitos

I will rewrite ec2 deployment tutorial as soon as possible. Thanks for reminding me about it.

TekMol2• 5 years ago

Thanks.

Woops, that is a pretty big beast.

2172 lines of code in 98 files.

I would not feel comfortable by starting from a base that is already this complex.

kcb• 5 years ago

Is there any service that I can just upload a py file and a requirements.txt and it will just run? No bundling, packaging, git, cli, etc. Not even for a web app but main use case is to host a Discord bot.

slig2• 5 years ago

GCF might be what you're looking for https://cloud.google.com/functions/docs/quickstart-python

pcardoso• 5 years ago

I have been using CapRover for this purpose (https://caprover.com)

debarshri3• 5 years ago

I have been following this space alot. Heroku like deployment spaces have exploded recently partly because people miss that experience, partly because buildpack is opensource[1], partly because we have gone through a techshift where it is pretty easy to emulate that. There are two broad categories - 1. Dokku's of the world, one VM (very recently tried adding multi node) and then more recently getporter.dev[2] and okteto[3] of the world that is trying to replicate heroku on kubernetes.

One of things, I noticed is that, It looks really cool at first look but every organisation has their own complexity in deploying stuff. It is an integration hell, you have to provide white glove treatment to all customers and eventually you have a hard time scaling. We tried it too, and what we noticed if you have to go an enterprise and sell, you start doing leaky abstraction. It works really well for early stage startups but once they have the money you prefer something more customizable and robust solution.

This project looks cool. I do not want to discourage anyone but again, it is a red ocean out there.

[1] https://buildpacks.io/

[2] https://www.getporter.dev/

[3] https://okteto.com/

zerkten• 5 years ago

The problem is the layering of the abstractions. Having PaaS on top of Kubernetes in a way that you move down to a more powerful primitive is going to be the most scalable.

What happened in the public cloud space was a disparate set of services which made the choices really costly. Azure went in heavy on PaaS while AWS was focused on VMs. The easy adoption and migration was on AWS. K8s seems like a reasonable abstraction that reduces the cost of these decisions because people seem to agree that K8s is a reasonable base.

Being able to slide on a compatible PaaS layer shouldn't negate that K8s investment, and make it easier to adopt for some organizations, or parts of those organizations. But, I wouldn't argue that we are the point where that layer is mature.

debarshri3• 5 years ago

I do not agree with you. PaaS abstraction becomes super leaky on top kubernetes as you start solving real world problems.

That is one the first mistakes newly formed platform teams in a company makes, abstracting infrastructure. Happy flow of PaaS on kubernetes is great. It is magical to certain extent. But negative flows is a really mess. The customer no clue why certain things do not work and you as a engineer had no clue that this would have happened.

Secondly, the amount breaking changes you have deal with as a result of abstraction is crazy. People pushing code does not care. It is basically moving complexity from one place to another.

westurner• 5 years ago

dokku-scheduler-kubernetes https://github.com/dokku/dokku-scheduler-kubernetes#function...

The following functionality has been implemented: Deployment and Service annotations, Domain proxy support via the Nginx Ingress Controller, Environment variables, Letsencrypt SSL Certificate integration via CertManager, Pod Disruption Budgets, Resource limits and reservations (reservations == kubernetes requests), Zero-downtime deploys via Deployment healthchecks, Traffic to non-web containers (via a configurable list)

nkotov• 5 years ago

We're[1] in a similar space and our winning strategy has been to provide white-glove onboarding to get our customers environment up and running. It's part of doing something that doesn't scale (easily) but it also allows us to figure out what else we can automate away to increase pace on these onboarding.

[1]https://atomizedhq.com

debarshri3• 5 years ago

The product looks great. I don't want to discourage you guys, I am failing to see a moat as compared to you guys and lets say getporter or others in the spaces. Funny enough you guys are also YC company.

Product with a high touchpoint I think does not scale this early on as a company.

For reference, Porter as a product is doing great because I think they have invested a lot in building a community. I think that works to certain extent as at scale community helps each other.

But, just beware of the fact that market cap is actually pretty small. You have enterprise competition from VMWare Tanzu and others. On the cloud space, you have digitalocean's app deployment thing, AWS has app runner. I have at least seen over 20 companies doing pretty much the same thing. Just a thought.

DarthNebo• 5 years ago

Does anyone know of a FOSS app to help setup something similar to managed databases w/ Postgres/Mongo, but with ease of use just like AWS/DO have? Handling backups, scaling with minimal user intervention yet self-hostable?

reducesuffering3• 5 years ago

I'm learning to run a Django app and have been toying with deploying to DigitalOcean. Decided on this to learn atleast some generic DevOps things as opposed to too-proprietary (Heroku) and too-expensive (AWS). There's a decent amount of Nginx, Gunicorn, and Postgres things that seem to need to be scripted, and I'm still not sure how to quickly reproduce the server automatically (scripts?) and replicate the server environment on my Mac without adding Docker/Podman to the mix (running Django app on my Mac and deploying to Ubuntu server env could cause issues unknown locally).

How does Appliku help address these issues?

Edit: Also, is Appliku itself deployed with Appliku? If so, if Appliku experiences issues, do you have a quick method of deploying the fix outside your usual deployment?

heurisko2• 5 years ago

I'm still not sure how to quickly reproduce the server automatically (scripts?)

I use Ansible. I'm not a DevOps person and found it very easy to get working. It just requires SSH.

I also use Docker locally, because it's convenient, even if I don't containerise my application.

I've tested Digital Ocean's managed Postgres and it seems to work well.

Welcome to hear what Appliku offers more than this, however.

reducesuffering3• 5 years ago

Thanks. When people say they use Docker, there seems to be several different ways. Are you using Docker Desktop (Mac/Linux?), docker-compose, Podman, or something else?

hnarayanan• 5 years ago

Use Ansible. Here is an example of one of my Django apps’ setup scripts: https://github.com/scancer-org/setup

appliku30• 5 years ago

As a developer you only pick your repo and pick a server size and region.

If you need customization you can make your own dockerfile that will be used to build your image.

If you need to move to another server - you provision another server through appliku interface and change deployment to happen on that server.

Appliku itself is deployed with help of GitLab CI and can be redeployed to another location pretty fast.

Hope i was able to answer your questions.

stavros2• 5 years ago

Here's my template: https://github.com/skorokithakis/django-project-template

I use Dokku for production and Docker Compose for local development. This template is basically clone-and-go.

reducesuffering3• 5 years ago

Ah I've read your posts on Dokku and Docker. Double thanks!

stephanreynolds• 5 years ago

Interestin idea.

Show HN: Heroku Alternative for Python/Django apps

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