I have some simple Ruby scripts to run as a background job. They are in an infinite while loop to monitor external database changes. Can someone recommend a hosting provider that can do it for free to start?
I looked at AWS and the EC2 micro instance is actually a good fit for the first year. Anything equivalent beyond the first year?
Then I looked at Heroku. It seems a hack and overkill to use Delayed Job in the Rails framework.
Google App Engine is also a good fit as long as I am willing to rewrite my Ruby scripts to Python.
More background on my project. I am using CouchDB + CouchApp. It requires some external scripts to monitor new users sign up and send out forget password emails.
I don't know about free, but there is SimpleWorker, which lets you offload processes (and apparently schedule them too!) to their cloud infrastructure.
Try using http://callmyapp.com
Are you able to set up an always on machine at your house? It's probably going to be just as reliable as hosting it with a free tier provider.
Related
The answer to this no doubt lies in answering exactly what I need. The thing is... I don't really know.
The criteria for my choice will be price. Whatever is cheapest, unless both are so closely similar and the every so slightly more expensive one is a much better service.
I'm creating an iOS application, and have a Rails backend JSON API that serves my app.
I have a Post/Comment style app. I don't store any images, just text throughout various tables, etc. I shouldn't need much data with no images, and the fact that I will be purging old data (old posts / comments that are no longer relevant are just deleted).
I need a scheduler, likely daily, but guaranteed no more frequent (hourly etc not needed). So I need to run cron tasks daily.
My application does have a user sign-in. Sign-up and you can post and comment, otherwise you can only view. Does that mean I'm going to need an SSL endpoint, or is that not necessary?
Other than that I'm just serving GETting/POSTing data. I don't need anything else that I can think of. As a beginner, am I possibly overlooking anything?
Which service should I go with given the above. This is my first iOS app, and Rails backend (first time working with either), and first time deploying anything to either service, so I'm looking for some advice in this area.
Thanks!
Short googling gave me these:
HEROKU VS. AMAZON WEB SERVICES
Ruby hosting in the cloud – Elastic Beanstalk vs Heroku vs EngineYard
Both Marathon and Aurora are built on Mesos and supposedly are engineered for running long running services. My questions are:
What are their differences? I have struggled in finding any good explanations regarding their key differences
Do these frameworks run anything that runs on Linux? For Marathon they state that it can run anything that "is executable in a shell" but this is sort of vague :)
Thanks!
Disclaimer: I am the VP of Apache Aurora, and have been the tech lead of the Aurora team at Twitter for ~5 years. My likely-biased opinions are my own and do not necessarily represent those of Twitter or the ASF.
Do these frameworks run anything that runs on Linux? For Marathon they
state that it can run anything that "is executable in a shell" but
this is sort of vague :)
Essentially, yes. Ultimately these systems are sophisticated machinery to execute shell code somewhere in a cluster :-)
What are their differences? I have struggled in finding any good
explanations regarding their key differences
Aurora and Marathon do indeed offer similar feature sets, both being classified as "service schedulers". In other words, you hand us instructions for how to run your application servers, and we do our best to keep them up.
I'll offer some differences in broad strokes. When it comes to shortcomings mentioned in each, I think it's safe to say that the communities are aware and intend to fix them.
Ease of use
Aurora is not easy to install. It will likely feel like you are trailblazing while setting it up. It exposes a thrift API, which means you'll need a thrift client to interact with it programmatically (a REST-like API is coming, but is vaporware at the moment), or use our command line client. Aurora has a DSL for configuration which can be daunting, but allows you to easily share templates and common patterns as you use the system more.
Marathon, on the other hand, helps you to run 'Hello World' as quickly as possible. It has great docs to do this in many environments and there's little overhead to get going. It has a REST API, making it easier to adapt to custom tools. It uses JSON for configuration, which is easy to start with but more prone to cargo culting.
Targeted use cases
Aurora has always been designed to handle a large engineering organization. The clusters at Twitter have tens of thousands of machines and hundreds of engineers using them. It is critical to Twitter's business. As a result, we take our requirements of scale, stability, and security very seriously. We make sure to only condone features that we believe are trustworthy at scale in production (for example, we have our Docker support labeled as beta because of known issues with Docker itself and the Mesos-Docker integration). We also have features like preemption that make our clusters suitable for mixing business-critical services with prototypes and experiments.
I can't make any claim for or against Marathon's scalability. On the feature front, Marathon has build out features quickly, but this can feel bleeding edge in practice (Docker support is a good example). This is not always due to Marathon itself, but also layers down the stack. Marathon does not provide preemption.
Ownership
To some, ownership and governance of a project is important. It feel that in practice it does not define the openness of a project, but for some people/companies the legal fine print can be a deal-breaker.
Marathon is owned by a company (Mesosphere)
To some, this is beneficial, to others is is not. It means that you can pay for support and features. It also means that there is something to be sold, and the project direction is ultimately decided by Mesosphere's interests.
Aurora is owned by the Apache Software Foundation
This means it is subject to the governance model of the ASF, driven by the community. Aurora does not have paying customers, and there is not currently a software shop that you can pay for development.
tl;dr If you are just getting your feet wet with running services on Mesos, I would suggest Marathon as your first port of call. It will be easier for you to get running and poke around the ecosystem. If you are forming the 'private cloud strategy' for a company, I suggest seriously considering Aurora, as it is proven and specifically designed for that.
So I've been evaluating both and this is my summary.
Aurora
[+] also handles recurring jobs
[+] finer grained, extensive file-based configuration
[+] has namespaces so multiple environments can co-exist
[-] read-only UI, no official API
[~] file based configuration and cli based execution brings overhead (which can be justified with more extensive feature set)
Marathon
[+] very easy to setup and use
[+] UI that provides control and extensive API (even with features missing from UI at the moment)
[+] event bus to listen in on api calls
[-] handles only long-running jobs
[-] does not have separate deployment-run-cleanup steps, these if necessary need to be combined in a script of one-liner
Even though Aurora has better capabilities, I prefer Marathon due to Auroras complexity/overhead and lack of UI (for control) & API
I have more experience with Marathon.
Ideological:
Marathon is a relatively tested product that is used in production at AirBnB. Aurora is an early Apache project (so YMMV).
Both are open source and active. Feel free to contribute pull requests or file issues!
Technical:
Marathon doesn't schedule batch tasks or cron jobs
Marathon has a friendly UI and better health indicators (in 0.8.x)
In regards to your second question, you can run any command or docker container, and Mesos will do the resource isolation for you. If you have 50% CentOS nodes and 50% Ubuntu nodes and you run a task that executes apt-get, the task will have a 50% chance of failure. Mesos and Marathon have no awareness of the actual machines.
Disclaimer: I don't have hands-on experience with Aurora, only with Marathon.
ad Q1: In a nutshell Apache Aurora is capable of doing what Marathon + Chronos can provide, that is, schedule both long-running services and recurring (batch) jobs; see also Aurora user guide.
ad Q2: Yes, anything. Currently based on cgroups and Docker but hey, you can roll your own.
Background :
I have built an app that runs well on an EC2 micro instance.
I want my friends to use this app too, but they aren't quite good with computers.
Question :
How do I make it easy for everyone to install and use it?
a. They wouldn't use it if they have to learn what is an instance, AMI and all.
b. Every individual should be able to have his own credit card billed for the AWS.
c. I can provide .rpm so that the app installs comfortably in silent mode :)
If I decide to sell my product sometime later, how do I do that?
I'm not sure of the nature of your app but you could consider doing more work on it so it could be used in a SaaS (Software as a Service) model, perhaps build in some white-labeling so it could be re-branded completely.
How you could charge for it one day would depend - perhaps you can charge them in a recurring fashion - monthly/yearly/etc or by the level of functionality (free version gets you X, Silver edition gets you X+Y and Gold gets you X+Y+Z).
This is the sort of thing you would need to think before building the app - but if you think someone else would find your app useful enough to pay for it one day then it might well be worth your time rewrite what you have.
Auto-signup: I don't think Amazon will let you automatically sign up for its service.
Automatic management: Automatic instance management is actually very tricky -- more complicated than running a server by itself. Having an instance managed in the background for an end user might end up being very error-prone. I have certainly never heard of anyone even attempting this.
So as Jahufar alluded to, the best way to do what you are trying to do is to roll your own server (which you might run on Amazon or anywhere else), and have all the clients connect to it.
I've been using DreamHost for a long time - mostly for blogs and such.
But now that I'm developing web apps, I think it's time to switch. One reason is that DreamHost limits the number of emails I can send per hour/day. But I also don't see any startups using DreamHost, which is another sign.
What should I switch to? I haven no server experience at all besides my time with dreamhost.
I'd recommend you get a VPS with a decent hosting company.
Pay the extra for a control panel (CPanel or Plesk are the main ones usually) so you have an easy way to add services, create virtual hosts and configure dns.. will save you some time.
You'll also get root access to it so you can do anything you want after that - including breaking it.
EC2 is a good option, depending on your budget. You can get the equivalent of a dreamhost shared account, but with root, the price depending on the services you select. You can also go much, much better if you have the money. A lot of startups are starting to use it, it does make many things much easier.
There is some server work though. There are "point and click" server AMI's out there, but you will have to learn some server tasks a little beyond FTP (or SSH if you used it on dreamhost).
Good luck! I am in the process of switching from dreamhost to EC2 for most of my development. I'll still use dreamhost for a couple of things here and there, just no actual applications.
Recently I stumbled across mongoDB, couchDB etc.
I am hoping to have a play with this type of database and was wondering how much access to the hosting server one needs to get it running.
If anyone has any knowledge of this, I would love to know whether it can be set up to work when your app is hosted via a 'normal' hosting company.
I use Mongo, and so I'm really only speaking for Mongo, but your typical web hosting environment wouldn't allow you to set up your own database. You'd want root-level (admin) access to the server to set up Mongo. To get that, you'd want something like a VPS or a dedicated server.
However, to just play around with Mongo, I'd recommend downloading the binary for your OS and giving it a run. Their JavaScript shell interface is very easy to use.
Hope that helps!
Tim
Various ways:-
1) There are many free mongodb hosting available. Try DotCloud.com. Many others here http://www.cloudhostingguru.com/mongoDB-server-hosting.php
2) If you are asking specifically about shared hosting, the answer is mostly no. But, if you could run mongoDB somewhere else (like from the above link) and want to connect from your website, it is probably possible if your host allows your own extensions (for php)
3) VPS
How about virtual private server hosting? The host gives you what looks like an entire machine... hard drive, CPU, memory. You get to install whatever you want, since it's your (virtual) machine.
In terms of MongoDB like others have said, you need the ability to install the MongoDB software and run it (normally as a daemon). However, hosted services are just beginning to appear, such as MongoHQ. Perhaps something like this might be appropriate once its out of beta (or if you request an invite).
It appears hosted CouchDB services are also popping up, such as couch.io or Cloudant. I personally have no experience with Couch so I can be less certain than with Mongo, but I'd imagine that again to run it yourself, you'd need to install the software (and thus require root access).
If you don't currently have a VPS or dedicated server (or the cloud-based versions of the aforementioned), perhaps moving your data out to a dedicated hosted service would be an ideal way to go to avoid the pain and expense of changing your hosting setup.
You can host your application and your database in the different hosting servers.
For MongoDB you can use mongohq or mongolab with space 0.5 Gb for free