Show HN: InstaDocker – Run any Docker container on the cloud instantly

by tahaozket • 11 years ago

54 48 11 years ago

joshstrange2• 11 years ago

Would be neat to pair this service or one like it with the "Deploy on Heroku"-type buttons/badges I've seen on github before. A "Run this container now" type thing.

tahaozket5• 11 years ago

Sounds great! It could make things even way faster.

joshstrange2• 11 years ago

Right, and/or a way to test something just to see it in action for <1hr or so.

nickstinemates5• 11 years ago

There was a YC proposal by a couple of cofounders who wanted to start a business around this premise and had a working prototype, including WEB IDE integration for quick PR submissions.

I met with them about a year ago, thanks for reminding me to check in!

tahaozket5• 11 years ago

We also would like to meet with them! If you reach them, could you also introduce us? You can reach me from tahaozket[at]gmail.com

kordless4• 11 years ago

How about doing that with cryptocurrencies? ;)

tarikozket14• 11 years ago

Haha sounds like a great idea! I think only concern would be publishing your crypto-currency private key publicly :/

masta• 11 years ago

This sounds like a REALLY bad idea. Docker is not really meant to run untrusted images.

gtirloni• 11 years ago

That was my first reaction as well. It seems that with all the downvotes, that's not something we should be really worried about.

nickstinemates5• 11 years ago

I created something like this a long time ago (about 2 years, in fact) in the now defunct tryrethink.info[1]

I worked on it some more after doing a few try* sites, and open sourced a version [2] which could take any docker image name and do the same.

1: https://blog.docker.com/2013/07/try-rethinkdb-in-the-cloud-w...

2: http://github.com/keeb/any-saas

tarikozket14• 11 years ago

What kept you from continuing?

nickstinemates5• 11 years ago

My day job :)

lyschoening3• 11 years ago

Would love to use this for on-demand IPython parallel computing.

tarikozket14• 11 years ago

Interesting idea. Do you have any Docker configs currently for that?

lyschoening3• 11 years ago

Sorry, no. This here is somewhat related though: A dockerized web service that launches a new IPython notebook instance for each user who connects.

https://github.com/jupyter/tmpnb

toddkazakov• 11 years ago

You can try https://www.dominodatalab.com/

monatron• 11 years ago

PiCloud did something like this, but they were bought by Dropbox. Haven't heard much about them since.

lyschoening3• 11 years ago

The company that was supposed to take over never did.

keedot• 11 years ago

On mobile, nothing is readable in what I'm guessing is the Q&A section at the bottom.

tahaozket5• 11 years ago

Thank you very much for heads up! We fixed it.

kordless4• 11 years ago

I just did a continuously integrated container post that achives the same thing with Wercker and Giant Swarm: https://github.com/giantswarm/swarm-wercker

tarikozket14• 11 years ago

Interesting, I'll check it later. Are there any services using it currently?

kordless4• 11 years ago

If you are referring to Giant Swarm, yes, we have a few private deployments in production in Europe. If you are referring to the CI project, nah, it's just an example of what you can do! :)

Procrastes2• 11 years ago

Cool idea. Will you have support for passing environment variables?

tahaozket5• 11 years ago

Yes, you will be able to easily pass env variables when you start a container. What is your opinion about passing variables as JSON or web based form?

Procrastes2• 11 years ago

I'm torn. Your UX is about convenience, so probably expose a form for the MVP, so I can set an initial user and DB credentials for WordPress, for instance. I would probably implement it as JSON from the start though, then make it available when the REST API is ready.

joshmn2• 11 years ago

Interesting choice in building this atop DigitalOcean. Not that it's wrong by any means, but I'd be interested in hearing what process you took in choosing them. (just curiosity)

tarikozket14• 11 years ago

Wow, you are the first person who noticed that! :) We already had a couple of DigitalOcean servers running and wanted to add this one next to them. Do you have any recommendations? Why are you curious about it?

joshmn2• 11 years ago

Makes sense!

I've said this before and time and time again, but I LOVE what they're doing over at RunAbove (OVH incubated). I'm not affiliated by any means, just a very, very very very very happy customer. The performance is unmatched and the price is so competitive!

xur173• 11 years ago

Really great implementation. I was delighted to see that clicking on the 'Run Now' button immediately launched a container - no sign in, etc required.

I've been working on a similar idea for running docker containers on a cron schedule. I use them for data processing, and web crawling, but don't have a good way to manage their schedules / logs. Right now I run everything off a single box with a cron schedule for each one.

tarikozket14• 11 years ago

Thank you very much! Scheduling could be an interesting feature. Why do you schedule your containers? Have you tried another approach?

xur173• 11 years ago

I schedule them so I can run a recurring task every day.

Examples:

1. Crawl a website, and store the data to a database - update every few hours.

2. Check a website for changes.

3. Process log data, and save it to another location.

Docker may be overkill for some of these, but it provides a simple way to launch a new task in a container with all dependencies installed. The overhead seems to be relatively small for starting a new container, so it's worth the overhead vs. configuring a machine to run the container.

mayli• 11 years ago

"This container will be alive for next 15 minutes. If you would like to keep it running more than 15 minutes please contact us on Twitter." - Changing 12 hours to 15 minutes, is the server overloaded?

tarikozket14• 11 years ago

We already receive a lot of interest but we just wanted to have more engagement on Twitter too :) We hit 300Mbps on our traffic and 30% on our CPU load. So, we still have more resources to serve. Also, our clusters are waiting to be spinned. Do you have any other recommendations to handle those requests and processes?

xur173• 11 years ago

15 minutes seems reasonable to me. I thought the original 12 hours was too long - I was done with the container I spun up a few minutes after I started it.

kiernan• 11 years ago

What are people planning on using this for? Testing their own containers, or more testing things that rely on the services provided by existing published containers?

ilaksh• 11 years ago

I made a couple of things sort of like this, one I spent several months on. Another was simpler. Neither was finished since I needed to work eventually for money.

Here is the simpler one which is a backend for a barely started mobile front end.

https://github.com/runvnc/oicapp

I basically came to the conclusion that for scale simplicity and security I needed a new Digital Ocean VPS for each container so that's what I did. To make it faster you could sort of pool them ahead of time.

Show HN: InstaDocker – Run any Docker container on the cloud instantly

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