empire

People at Convox[1] and Remind101 are doing similar open-source work. Convox's business model is selling you the managed version of their open source rack. We've been using Convox in production for over 3 years now and we've had pretty good success with it. It's not perfect but the UX improvement for developers when building docker images, promoting new builds or rolling back cannot be understated. Remind101 has built Empire[2] which is not a product they actually sell but rather the tool they use internally and have decided to open-source it. Empire is a little less managed and while it allows you to run services on it it requires you to have your own solution for building and hosting docker images. [1] https://convox.com/, https://github.com/convox/rack [2] https://github.com/remind101/empire

Heroku has really become a defacto standard in PaaS space. If you want to reduce the cost and have better control over your infra, there are several options available like Empire[1] and Datacol[2]. We (datacol.io) provide Heroku-like infrastructure in your cloud account (AWS/GCP). It's a modern Paas build around containers and kubernetes. [1]: https://github.com/remind101/empire [2]: https://www.datacol.io/

I'd respectfully like to submit my project, Convox, into the discussion of not reinventing a PaaS: http://convox.com/ https://github.com/convox/rack Convox is another open source PaaS, but we're building it entirely on top of AWS services like CloudFormation, ECS, ASG, etc. This means it's only suitable for teams that have 100% bought into AWS. If that's you, we make all the hard parts of operating a distributed deployment system Amazon's problem. There's another project in this same space, Empire: https://github.com/remind101/empire If 100% AWS is not you, Docker Datacenter / Swarm, CoreOS, Deis, CloudFoundry, etc. are doing incredible work. It's amazing how these sophisticated tools are available to all of us.

If you don't mind using AWS, check out Empire. Open source, 12-factor compatible PaaS built on top of amazons robust ECS container scheduler. Rollbacks/versioning/load balancing/scaling included. https://github.com/remind101/empire

How does Convox compare to Empire? I see a bunch of similarities (good use of AWS features in particular), and they both look pretty great. (Empire: https://github.com/remind101/empire, http://engineering.remind.com/introducing-empire/)

There's a few projects out now that do most of this for you; there's a lot of rapid innovation in higher-level docker tools. eg https://github.com/remind101/empire (built ontop of EC2/ECS) You get a 12 factor compatible PaaS out of it, pretty easy.

> I much prefer each service having an IP that is registered to DNS. This means that I can hit up service.datacenter.company.com and get a valid service. (using well tested dns load balancing and health checks to remove or re-order individual nodes) There are docker-backed service management tools that will automatically this for you(assign public/private dns per service cluster inc load balancing), like Empire https://github.com/remind101/empire

Yes, docker-compose (https://docs.docker.com/compose/) is just great. Another sweet tool, but I haven't used it in production yet, is empire (https://github.com/remind101/empire) for deployment (AWS centric).

We actually have a relay (https://github.com/remind101/empire/tree/master/relay) service that can be run alongside Empire that acts as a proxy to interactive Docker sessions. It's a bit of an experiment right now and something we'd like to solve better in the future, but it allows you to run containers with `emp run <command> -a <app>`.