Show HN: Hosted Docker-as-a-Service on SSDs for $5

http://blog.copper.io/stackdock-blazing-fast-docker-as-a-service-with-ssds-for-5/#more-1187

by edbyrne • 13 years ago

387 132 13 years ago

blog.copper.io

dylanz• 13 years ago

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?

zmitri• 13 years ago

I use a similar service called Orchard that has a "heroku-like" command line wrapper around the docker client. It's quite nice https://github.com/orchardup/orchard-client

jaegerpicker• 13 years ago

This is pretty awesome. An api to automate deployments/management/monitoring would completely rock too.

knotty66• 13 years ago

Nice. Looking forward to seeing how this and all the other Docker based PAAS ecosystems like Flynn, Deis, Tsuru, Shipbuilder, CoreOS etc pan out.

gabrtv• 13 years ago

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!

susi22• 13 years ago

Q: Do people have root on the containers?

joevandyk• 13 years ago

Yes.

kmfrk2• 13 years ago

"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.

esamatti• 13 years ago

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?

lhc-• 13 years ago

"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.

lotyrin• 13 years ago

Well, no. A Dockerfile is the build instructions, not the build artifact.

_lex2• 13 years ago

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.

edbyrne8• 13 years ago

Hey - thanks a million - that's the plan!

thepicard• 13 years ago

Speaking of digitalocean, are you guys affiliated at all? Because I get a digitalocean vibe from your pricing/terminology/etc. for some reason.

Touche• 13 years ago

Is the pricing for 1 dockerfile or unlimited dockerfiles?

edbyrne8• 13 years ago

It's per instance - so you can have unlimited docker files; you only pay when you create an instance from one.

madisp• 13 years ago

Clicking on alpha/deploy leads to 404 :(

Angostura• 13 years ago

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.

edbyrne8• 13 years ago

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.

_lex2• 13 years ago

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.

htilford• 13 years ago

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.

gtaylor• 13 years ago

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.

nailer• 13 years ago

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.

pplante• 13 years ago

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.

kmfrk2• 13 years ago

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?

peteforde• 13 years ago

Heroku created almost as many new terms as Tolkien, and they seem to have made out just fine.

clebio• 13 years ago

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.

shiftpgdn• 13 years ago

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.

gizzlon• 13 years ago

Looked at Heruko once, but all the custom lingo really put me off it.. But, of course your point about them being successful stands

conradev• 13 years ago

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?

AhtiK• 13 years ago

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.

bacongobbler2• 13 years ago

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...

shtylman2• 13 years ago

Can I use a docker image I have already created?

shtylman2• 13 years ago

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.

kbar13• 13 years ago

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!

jonny_eh• 13 years ago

And when I click on one, the checkmark doesn't disappear until I unhover the mouse.

cvburgess2• 13 years ago

This is fantastic!

Does anyone know where DO servers are located?

sandhillcount• 13 years ago

DigitalOcean currently has data centers in San Francisco, New York City, and Amsterdam.

From here: http://www.enterprisenetworkingplanet.com/datacenter/digital...

cvburgess2• 13 years ago

Thanks! This is just what I was looking for.

rmoriz4• 13 years ago

We’re using dedicated because running virtual containers on virtual instances seems nuts to us.

but a traceroute points to AWS…

cmaggard• 13 years ago

A traceroute of their blog, or a server you just spun up? They don't necessarily have to eat their own dogfood.

rmoriz4• 13 years ago

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.

ojbyrne• 13 years ago

Perhaps http://aws.amazon.com/dedicated-instances/

rmoriz4• 13 years ago

building a virtualization infrastructure on top of another, black box virtualization infrastructure…

What could possibly go wrong?

justincormack• 13 years ago

Those are still virtual, just no one else is on your box.

edbyrne8• 13 years ago

Blog and lots of Copper tools hosted on AWS. Stackdock on dedicated (not AWS or other IaaS) hardware.

guido4000• 13 years ago

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.

sntran• 13 years ago

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.

panarky• 13 years ago

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.

CSDude• 13 years ago

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.

aroch• 13 years ago

Docker uses LXC which supports memory and CPU limits

sprice• 13 years ago

I don't see node as an option. What am I missing?

theunixbeard• 13 years ago

I started the default instance with sinatra running, but where do you see the IP address to visit it via a web browser?

boyter• 13 years ago

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.

frakkingcylons• 13 years ago

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.

j-b• 13 years ago

Just signed up but the site now appears to be down, receiving "We're sorry, but something went wrong."

edbyrne8• 13 years ago

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.

aurels• 13 years ago

I get a 500 error when logging in, am I the only one ?

nfm• 13 years ago

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.

kohanz• 13 years ago

This looks like an awesome service. And the image on the site reminds me of Season 2 of The Wire - even better!

samtp• 13 years ago

Cool service but your branding makes it look like you are affiliated with Canonical/Ubuntu.

secure• 13 years ago

Excellent! Will play around with it soon. Thanks for offering this, and best wishes.

lnanek2• 13 years ago

Wonder if they have an idle/spin up time. Only their one instance plan is $5, but I know I have to buy more than one on heroku to get no idle/spin up time - that or use hacks like constant pingers, etc.. This is important for when I'm doing experiments/UI tests/alpha tests/submitting apps for reviews before they have any consistent traffic, but I don't want them to occasionally get stuck on 15 second spin up times on requests.

habosa• 13 years ago

There are some websites that will ping your heroku instance every few minutes for free. Works great for me.

bfirsh• 13 years ago

We're doing a similar thing called Orchard:

https://orchardup.com

We give you a standard Docker instance in the cloud - all the tools work exactly the same as they do locally. You can even instantly open a remote bash shell, like the now-famous Docker demo!

MilesTeg• 13 years ago

The issue with linux containers is (or at least it used to be) that it is possible for a malicious user to 'break out' of the container. Has this problem been solved?

chubot3• 13 years ago

Just curious, how are people building Docker images these days? Doesn't it only run on 64-bit Linux? I have a 32 bit Linux desktop and a Mac and haven't gotten around to installing Docker. At work I have a 64 bit Linux desktop and it seemed to be extremely picky about the kernel version so I gave up.

Are people running Linux VMs on their Macs to build containers?

I like the idea of this service. But both the client side and the server side have to be easy. Unless I'm missing something it seems like they made the server side really easy, but the client side is still annoying.

dekz• 13 years ago

I'm building docker images on 64-bit linux (ubuntu) and maintaining a repo of Dockerfiles, instead of uploading to the docker repository.

You need a recent version of the linux kernel that supports Linux Containers. It's best if you can run Ubuntu 13 somewhere.

Are people running Linux VMs on their Macs to build containers?

FreeBSD supports jails which are similar to linux containers in a way, but OSX does not. So unfortunately you're going to have to run a VM, checkout vagrant and docker though. [1]

[1] http://docs.docker.io/en/latest/installation/vagrant/

TheMakeA2• 13 years ago

OSX has seatbelts[1], which is similar to jails. They are just clunky and not documented. Chrome uses them for sandboxing browser processes[2].

[1] https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/Darwin...

[2] http://www.chromium.org/developers/design-documents/sandbox/...

Lazare4• 13 years ago

Yes. Emerging best practices seems to be to use Vagrant to create a great development environment, then use docker containers inside that for isolation. The two work together quite well. There's a comment from the Vagrant creator here about that: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6291549

In short, yes, just run a VM.

chubot3• 13 years ago

So I already use Linux almost exclusively for development, and VMs are not in my workflow at all. It seems bizarre to build a VM to build a container! Like too many levels of yak shaving.

cryptolect• 13 years ago

I don't get the need for Vagrant? Are you suggesting to use Vagrant solely for those not developing on a host capable of running Docker? If my host _can_ run Docker, what value do I get from running it inside Vagrant instead?

shykes10• 13 years ago

Hi everyone, Docker maintainer here. Here's my list of docker hosting services. Please correct me if I forgot one! I expect this list to get much, much longer in the next couple months.

* http://baremetal.io

* http://digitalocean.com (not docker-specific but they have a great docker image)

* http://orchardup.com

* http://rackspace.com (not docker-specific but they have a great docker image)

* http://stackdock.com

EDIT: sorted alphabetically to keep everyone happy :)

sillysaurus2• 13 years ago

The rise of Docker is fascinating. How did you get people to care about it initially? Did everyone immediately see it as a good idea? Congrats.

shykes10• 13 years ago

We spent 3 months going door to door, making demos to people I knew were working on similar projects or looking for one. We had a good reputation in the ops and systems engineering community because of our work on dotCloud over the last 6 years. Then we bootstrapped the open-source community with that initial group of 30-50 people willing to federate efforts. By the time the project was leaked on hacker news, the github repo and mailing list were already very active.

Early members of that "seed" community included engineers from Twilio, Heroku, Soundcloud, Koding, Google, Meteor, RethinkDB, Mailgun, as well as the current members of the Flynn project.

atomaka• 13 years ago

The real question is why Sun didn't succeed in leveraging this technology with their implementation of zones.

kcen• 13 years ago

I learned about it from creack (lead contributor according to github) @ a startup meetup in SF.

Things that impressed me:

1. super passionate

2. he was very receptive and quick at squashing bugs I reported (real or not)

3. docker was super portable (the same across all linux distros)

4. they (the docker team) had real solutions for the long application deployment times that were plaguing me

Everyone seemed to know it would succeed, which is rare around here.

MadeInSyria• 13 years ago

When you are an ops and spend time finding the perfect way to make "redeploying easier than fixing", docker became the answer.

I got to meet the docker team (a lot of french dudes in the team!). Very passionate, technically super sharp, and really fun ! They were interested in my point of view and opinion. Plus, there lead dev knows how to party from what i have seen during a meetup !

bacongobbler2• 13 years ago

I found this one a couple weeks ago! https://stackmachine.com/

shykes10• 13 years ago

This is a different kind of service, they don't do hosting. They sell an alternative to the docker index https://index.docker.io

jrmcauliffe• 13 years ago

http://www.enginedock.com/

tekknik• 13 years ago

So I just checked the docker website (http://www.docker.io/learn_more/) and there is still a flag up stating it's not yet ready for production use. Does this mean you guys/gals are gaining enough confidence in it now?

dsissitka• 13 years ago

AppFog's CTL-C: http://ctl-c.io/

arianvanp• 13 years ago

I Love the idea! really. I just don't like all the UX yet. Some things feel ... off. It might be something personal. I'm not sure. But I guess it's interesting to discuss. "Drops are distilled Decks" The words feel semantically mismatched for some reason. If I think "Deck"I don't think "Config". If I think "Drop" I don'think "Deployable stuff" and I don't see how a "Distilled deck" is a "drop". Also it feels odd that I can create a "New deck" in the "instances" section.

though adding "cards" to a "deck" sounds intuitive.

I'm trying to come up with better terminology. something with ships and containers...

cobrabyte• 13 years ago

One thing that surprised me...

When I created a Deck (default Sinatra Hello World) and converted it to a Drop, it did just that: it removed the Deck and created a Drop.

I guess I thought it would keep the Deck so that I could see the configuration that I had chosen to create it. Is this a Docker thing where, once you've created it, you don't see the config any longer? I don't think it is but I've not honestly played with Docker yet. $5 a month is a low ask for me to try it out.

Also, when it comes time to pay for a Deck/Drop and you don't have credit card info saved, it forwards you to that page... but, after entering the info, you're not put back into the process. You're dumped back into the Deck page. That seemed odd to me... wasn't sure if it had been converted or not.

I wish the word 'manifest' wasn't used in so many contexts because, if you're going to stick with the container shipping analog, it would have made more sense to have Manifests, Containers and Ships. That's just me though... who knows. ;)

All in all, cool service. Look forward to playing around with it this weekend.

EDIT: I see that you can create a copy of the Deck that created a Drop... still seems odd that the default behavior is to blow it away upon creation of a Drop.

edbyrne8• 13 years ago

Appreciate the feedback - thanks - point taken and we'll fix this.

terhechte• 13 years ago

I like the idea. Really cool. I've been researching docker a lot lately, and did most of my recent development on Core OS. I do have a question that wasn't immediately obvious: Docker maintains that one should make a container out of every application so that instead of having to install apache + mysql + php in one Ubuntu environment, you'd create three docker containers (apache, mysql, memcache) and run them together and define the share settings, etc. Now here's my question: It seems as if on Stardock, every container would be a seperate (at least) $5 instance? So if I want to run apache + mysql + memcached I'd need to cram them all into one docker container in order to have them on one machine? Or is it possible to use a $5 stardock system and run multiple containers on them, like on Core OS?

Thanks!

tokenizerrr• 13 years ago

It is common to include dependencies like MySQL and Apache in the container of your application. Usually people use supervisord with a configuration file to start all the different daemons needed.

nickstinemates• 13 years ago

It may be common outside of the Docker world, but definitely an anti-pattern within the community.

shykes10• 13 years ago

There is a new feature of Docker called Links which allows you to organize your stack in multiple containers and "link" them together so they can discover and connect to each other.

There's a great explanation here: http://blog.docker.io/2013/10/docker-0-6-5-links-container-n...

StavrosK• 13 years ago

I tried to deploy a Django application with Docker a few weeks ago (using a single image with supervisord), only to discover that, during "docker build", I needed the database already running (so Django could create its database), which was pretty much impossible using a single Docker image and a Dockerfile.

With the new Links functionality, this is much easier, but are you planning to ever have the ability to use a single Dockerfile to deploy an application which may contain multiple images (with links between them)? I want to be able to do "docker build ." and have my application up and running when it finishes.

Matsta• 13 years ago

Hmm StackDock.com is hosted on a server at Hetzner in Germany.

I don't 100% know if the containers themselves are hosted by Hetzner or not, but Hetzner is more of a budget provider than something you host production sites on.

I've heard many mixed review about their network and mostly their support which isn't up to scratch. We'll see what happens but from what I see, if someone decides to abuse the service, Hetzner might just take down the whole server without warning just like OVH do.

http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produkte_rootserver/px120ss... (I'm guessing they are using something similar to this).It's a pretty powerful and cheap server but if you search hard enough you can find something equivalent in the States for around the same price.

killerpopiller• 13 years ago

I'd actually prefer Germany, since data privacy is a law there and not spying.

gexla• 13 years ago

Of course, with the prices these guys are charging, they are certainly going with a budget host.

Since Docker is still in beta, it's not production ready yet anyways. Docker could still go through a lot of changes between now and 1.0.

ETA: Whoops, I got the pricing wrong. It's $5 per instance. I was thinking you would get 1GB of RAM and 20GB of space to run as many containers as you like. That makes it not as cheap as I was originally thinking.

thomaslutz• 13 years ago

Hetzner surely has gone downhill over the years (quality and pricewise), and support was better 8 years ago, but to say you would not host a production site there is a pretty bold statement.

If you need real HA you should perhaps use more than one provider anyway. Or what are your recommendations?

pbhjpbhj• 13 years ago

Not being familiar with the subject basically it seems that:

Docker is a simple description of an internet server including the various services required (mysql, httpd, sshd, etc. - the bundle being call a deck).

It seems then you can create a server elsewhere (eg on your localhost), generate the docker description of that and use that description to fire up a server (either a VM or dedicated) using the service in the OP.

Am I close?

Could I use this to do general web hosting?

Edit: and looking at digitalocean.com it appears I can activate and deactivate the "server" at will, so I can have it online for an hour for testing and pay < 1¢?

gregf• 13 years ago

Like the idea, but would like to see hourly billing.

edbyrne8• 13 years ago

Thanks for the suggestion - we are looking at more usage based billing - including per CPU cycle / RAM usage to be a 'true' utility.

jongleberry• 13 years ago

where are the servers hosted? AWS? US or EU?

Geee• 13 years ago

Is this production-ready and trusted? Who are these guys? I don't want my apps to be hosted on a quick hack.

antihero2• 13 years ago

One thing that confuses me with Docker is that how do you configure your containers to communicate with each other.

So say I have a fancy Django image, and a fancy Postgres image.

How do I then have the Django one learn of the Postgres one's IP, and then auths (somehow), and then communicates seperately.

Also, the recommended advice for "production" is to mount host directories for the PostgreSQL data directory. Doesn't this rather defeat the point of a container (in that it's self contained), and how does that even work with a DaaS like this? I'm pretty confused. Is there an idiomatic way in which to do this?

Do service registration/discovery things for Docker already exist?

shykes10• 13 years ago

One thing that confuses me with Docker is that how do you configure your containers to communicate with each other.

Docker now supports linking containers together:

http://blog.docker.io/2013/10/docker-0-6-5-links-container-n...

Also, the recommended advice for "production" is to mount host directories for the PostgreSQL data directory. Doesn't this rather defeat the point of a container (in that it's self contained)

The recommended advice for production is to create a persistent volume with 'docker run -v', and to re-use volumes across containers with 'docker run -volumes-from'.

Mounting directories from the host is supported, but it is a workaround for people who already have production data outside of docker and want to use it as-is. It is not recommended it you can avoid it.

Either way, you're right, it is an exception to the self-contained property of containers. But it is limited to certain directories, and docker guarantees that outside of those directories the changes are isolated. This is similar to the "deny by default" pattern in security. It's more reliable to maintain a whitelist than a blacklist.

erichocean• 13 years ago

How is private networking handled between Docker containers?

UPDATE: I'd also be interested to hear about Digital Ocean-style "shared" (but non-private) networking—basically, any network adaptor with a non-Internet routable IP address. ;)

bionsuba• 13 years ago

You should do some A/B tests to confirm, but I but the pricing table at the bottom was a little confusing because the price was not highlighted in any way, and the call to action was round when it is typically a rectangle.

tehwebguy• 13 years ago

Looks awesome! Anyone know if there are bandwidth / throughput / transfer charges?

Also, forgive my ignorance, but what would it take to be able to "add containers" in the same way that you can add dynos on Heroku?

matiasb• 13 years ago

Sounds great!

Show HN: Hosted Docker-as-a-Service on SSDs for $5

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