Gigalixir: Platform-as-a-Service designed just for Elixir/Phoenix

Hi @jesse,

This looks very interesting. A couple of questions:

• Do you have any plans to provide locations other than the US? (I’d be interested in the UK and Europe.)
• When do you think you’ll provide PostgreSQL?

Adding locations other than the US is on our long-term roadmap, but exactly where and when we go will depend on what customers are asking for. If you need a ton of instances, let me know and I’ll see what I can do to help you.

Providing databases-as-a-service is also on our roadmap, but I’m not sure when it’ll happen. For more information about how to use a third party database-as-a-service, take a look at the last paragraph of How to Connect a Database.

In the meantime, however, I can manually set up a Postgres instance for you on Google Cloud SQL and include the cost on your Gigalixir invoice. Just let me know once you’ve created an account and what disk size, vCPU, and memory you’d like. I won’t charge you more than what Google charges. Keep in mind, Google Cloud SQL Postgres is still in beta, but then, so is Gigalixir =)

Thanks. I’m not keen on the idea of a remote database as I can’t imagine response times are great, even when the database is in the same country/area. But I’d be interested to hear others’ views on that.

It’s very unlikely I’ll be needing many instances of anything anytime soon, and my current project’s requirements are extremely modest. But I’ll keep an eye out for updates. All the best with the service!

Oh I assumed you’d be using the database with Gigalixir in which case they’d be in the same datacenter. Let me know if things change!

Ah, I didn’t realise that. Good to know.

I’m curious, my newest server (got about 5 years ago now, I need to get yet another new one someday, I have like 4… >.>) is 64 gigs ram, 24 physical cores, 1 terabit unmetered connection with multiple dedicated IP’s on both IPv4 and IPv6 for about $280/month (I have a few extras like backup mirroring and such that I’ve never, thankfully, needed to use, in addition to my local routine backups). The price on the website I am either sorely mis-reading or it is substantially more expensive by orders of magnitude?

It’s a PAAS, similar to Heroku, so one has to go there to compare prices..

a 512mb ‘dyno’ there is 25$ so it’s comparable. CPU info/benchmark could be very useful.

baremetal is great, but comes at devops cost and especially operational risk.

I remember horror stories of people having to fw upgrade network interfaces and what not. so baremetal is clearly not for all

And what’s the price for your server if you want to start another instance for 10 minutes for a one off batch job?

I haven’t read enough about gigalixir’s offering to have an opinion if their pricing is fair, but this seems to be a completely different product than just a dedicated server.

Not a thing, I can host as many containers as I want on that. Admittedly most of the time I’m using <8gigs ram with the cpu barely flickering… All my containers are well containered as well, so I can easily split them off and spool them on one of my other servers if I wished (docker). I think my next big server will probably run some variant of illumos, take down my 2-3 old servers at the same time (my oldest is 17 years old… >.>).

I’m still not sure what this devops cost is that so many allude to, managing a server is pretty simple.

As for operational risk, well my servers have better uptime than Amazon’s services so…
Really though, my containers are easy to swap around my servers if something starts to happen, I just ssh in, run a couple commands that I have scripted up, a new container spools up and redirects setup until DNS propagates, then done.

Huh?

Overall I’ve been always running ‘baremetal’ FreeBSD in the old days with lots of jails, docker nowadays on debian and redhat(work), and the effort involved has always been minimal, if hardware breaks then my contracts get that fixed (image rollover to new machine in about a minute then back when the hardware is repaired, though everything is hotswap now so that’s not been tested in probably a decade…), if software breaks, well I made it 90% of the time so I know what happened and I can fix it in generally seconds. My big server’s downtime has never occurred in its 5 years of life except for purposeful and announced ahead-of-time kernel updates during dead hours, which take all of a minute to complete (with getting 500 maintenance errors for clients and to retry in a minute), otherwise software updates are done via rolling restarts where the new system comes up while the old is running then I swap the socket over. It is all quite simple to do, and considering my income is very little (not enough to live on at all, hence dayjob as well, I host a lot of open source and community sites for free…) something like Heroku or Amazon seem like outright extortion to me (especially considering that Amazon’s engineers have stated that their IT services like PaaS and others bring in more profit their there shipping business, so it does not sound cheap).

@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.