First of all, thanks to everyone who helped with the beta test earlier this year.

Gigalixir, a Platform-as-a-Service for Elixir, now has a free tier so you can try it without a credit card. We also added Postgresql-as-a-service, and is no longer invitation-only.

If you’re interested, we highly recommend following the quick start to get started.

As always, feel free to contact me directly for help. You can find me in the Slack channel as @jes.

@OvermindDL1 it is more expensive than bare metal and more expensive than an infratructure-as-a-service like AWS, but we think the amount of time it saves you is worth much more than what you pay. You just git push gigalixir and forget about

1. Installing Kubernetes in high availability mode with multiple masters in a multi-zone configuration with autoscaling.
2. Configuring ingresses, services, deployments, replica sets, pods, volumes, secrets, etc.
3. Writing Dockerfiles to compile your code, build assets, build a release, and run your app.
4. Managing app configuration and secrets.
5. Tracking releases.
6. Rollbacks.
7. How to cluster nodes together: ensuring containers have network access to one another, can discover each other, and reconnect when networks partition.
8. How to perform hot upgrades as easily as doing a rolling restart.
9. How to connect a remote observer to a production node with SSH tunnels and iptables.
10. Running one-off or batch jobs like database migrations.
11. TLS certificates
12. Aggregating logs and tailing them.
13. Administration/Maintenance
14. Stability/Reliability
15. Capacity/Elasticity: ensuring you always have another machine when you need it
16. Security
17. Websockets: they don’t always work out of the box e.g. behind a load balancer
18. Usability: making all the above easy to use

It took us 6 months to put all the above together and we have a ton of experience running apps in production. At my last company, we went from Heroku to AWS to bare metal to try and save money, but the amount of effort it took to rebuild everything we took for granted at Heroku was enormous.

If you are running 100,000 machines, then it’s probably worth the developer time to migrate off PaaS, but for most smaller companies, it makes sense to outsource the devops so you can focus on building your app and providing unique value to your customers.

@OvermindDL1 my point isn’t that PaaSes are the only right way, but that for some, it makes more sense than doing things yourself. As a sort of silly example, I’d rather buy my coffee at Starbucks than try and save money by growing my own beans, roasting them, grinding them, etc. But for some, especially those with an interest in it, growing your own beans might indeed make sense.