I still don’t get PAAS

(written by lawrence krubner, however indented passages are often quotes). You can contact lawrence at: lawrence@krubner.com, or follow me on Twitter.

This is the problem for me:

In my ideal world, deploying my apps wouldn’t require any platform-specific code, or if it did, that code would be portable between platforms.

If I have to be aware of my servers, at all, then I’m still doing sysadmin, and if I have to do sysadmin, I want all the tools of sysadmin. I don’t want to do sysadmin on a crippled account that limits my options. Maybe someday there will be a real PAAS such that we no longer need to think about the server. We are clearly not there yet, and till we are there, I am not interested in this strategy. However, I seem to be alone in this. Lots of smart people that I know and respect are fans of places like Heroku and Beanstalk.

All the same, Stefan Wrobel has an interesting write up of his experience with OpsWork:

Overall, I’m happy I made the move. On the positive side:

App response times have dropped by ~40% (based on NewRelic reporting)
It’s nice to be able to SSH in and troubleshoot performance issues by digging into system load, process cpu & memory usage, etc.
I can use any type of instance I want. We’re currently using the new SSD-backed c3.large instances which run ~$110/month (cheaper if reserved) and can happily run 6 unicorns with plenty of memory to spare.
We can host our app in the AWS Oregon region instead of the dreaded US-East that Heroku forces us into (or Europe … not helpful). We can also geographically loadbalance by launching instances in other regions when the time comes.
We can autoscale based on time & load!
While I’d love to say I’m completely pleased with the move, I knew that wouldn’t be the case when I started. In my ideal world, deploying my apps wouldn’t require any platform-specific code, or if it did, that code would be portable between platforms. OpsWorks is a somewhat open-source platform, but since the architecture configuration is closed-source, it’s likely that moving to another PaaS would be another involved process. OpenStack holds a lot of promise when it comes to making ops-related code portable between platforms, but it’s still a work-in-progress.

Post external references

  1. 1
    http://www.stefanwrobel.com/heroku-to-opsworks
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