Convox Blog

Interesting to see more competitors to Heroku popup. Kind of amazing how the big cloud providers still haven't solved this problem. Heroku still has one of the easiest setups of anyone on the market, and they've just been coasting in recent years. Poor container support, auto-scaling is naive, random routing (see rap genius), no health checks, pricey, etc. Previously Deis built a Heroku like service on top of Kubernetes, but they got acquired by Microsoft, and the product has since atrophied. Convox[0] seems similar to Qovery, with the added ability of self-hosting (UI is closed source though). I think Qovery not having a UI is a deal breaking for many. Heroku's CLI, UI, and API is a killer combo. [0]: https://convox.com

No-one has mentioned Convox yet: https://convox.com Kubernetes is great, but Convox is way easier to set up. It's much closer to having Heroku in your own AWS account. It also leverages a lot of AWS services (ECS, RDS, etc.) instead of re-inventing the wheel. The only downside is that it only supports AWS. I'd recommend Convox for personal projects, but it can be a bit expensive because you have to run a minimum of 3 EC2 instances.

Question for mitchellh or others at Hashicorp: Will "zero configuration" be a feature/goal in your next attempts at this abstraction? Was this one of the things that made building Otto so challenging? A few months ago when I tried Otto I found the "zero configuration" idea off-putting. In fact, I couldn't even get a basic Python app to work because there was no way for me to install libmysqlclient[0]. There really was no way to configure anything in Otto. FWIW, we ended up using Convox[1] and loved it. [0] https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:9QfCNXO52GsJ:htt… [1] https://convox.com/

I agree with this sentiment. AWS can be an overwhelming challenge for small teams. Convox (YCS15) is addressing this head on and helping lots of small teams immediately get the best out of AWS. It's open source, built by a core team and a growing community of AWS specialists. It fully automates AWS setup and deploys and infrastructure updates so you and your team don't have to. https://convox.com Disclaimer: I work at Convox full time

For context, we have a different AWS account for each environment (production, staging, etc.) and have as much parity as possible between them (although resource sizes might vary - for example different RDS instance sizes for staging vs. production). All of our services run on AWS ECS and CI is done through CircleCI. Our deployments start with a Github PR needing to have 2 approvals from peers and have all CI checks pass. Once the PR has been approved it can be merged into master which will trigger CI workflows again with the additional step of deploying the changes to staging and building a new release for production. The author of the changes can then verify they work as expected and promote the release in production or rollback their changes if things aren't working. All of our AWS resources are created and tracked through Terraform but services are created through Convox[1]. We use Convox to create "releases" (ECS task definitions), manage their lifecycle (creation, promotion, releases, rollbacks, etc.) and it's CLI is pretty convenient (promoting a new release is as simple as running `convox releases promote <ID>`). That being said we've had some shortcomings with it and have outgrown it's flexibility. We'll be starting our migration into k8s early next year but it's worked great for us for the past 2 years. [1] https://convox.com

I use Convox (http://www.convox.com). It is backed by ECS which gets me out of the infrastructure game for the most part and the CLI interactions in Convox are similar to heroku style commands so the learning curve is much simpler than deploying and learning my own Kubernetes or OpenStack or ECS configurations. They've also thought of the other things you need like environment based secrets(uses DynamoDB and KMS behind the scenes), as well as external load balancing, TLS, RDS integrations and more with single simple commands. They also have CI/CD out of the box and builds can be triggered in your existing cluster with a 'convox build' or triggered on pushes to your private github repos. Overall, unless you have a team that actually sees benefit in managing your own container and cluster manager(you better be big), id recommend embracing Convox, or something like it. The complexity still exposed by Kubernetes, OpenStack or ECS is still significant.

I would encourage anyone looking at porter that needs more flexibility, a deeper feature set, a more extensive cli, and/or flatter pricing structure to check out convox [https://convox.com]. I've been using it for years on top of EKS and have been able to defer hiring a dedicated dev ops person.

Oh, I didn't realize convex was still around. How are you guys doing ? Edit: just read that article. "dump databases". huh, what? weren't you guys doing a heroku alternative in the past? Edit2: Sorry, I confused your company with convox! https://convox.com/

looks promising! how does it compare to convox[0]? (never used it, but I think it’s similar?) [0] https://convox.com/

On the one hand, I don't want to post a shallow dismissal on your big launch day. On the other hand, this does look like something that's been tried a dozen times before. To name one example, Convox (https://convox.com/) started out using ECS on AWS, but more recently switched to being a multi-cloud platform on top of Kubernetes. Cloud66 has also tried a few things in this space. What sets Porter apart from other products in this apparently crowded field?

https://convox.com It's basically heroku on top of k8s and you bring your own cloud.

We’ve been using Convox[0] for the last 2 years. I’ve been pretty happy with how simple it is to work with. We’re still on version 2 which uses AWS ECS or Fargate. Version 3 has migrated to k8s and is provider agnostic. We just haven’t had the bandwidth to upgrade yet. [0] https://convox.com/

You can use Convox https://convox.com to easily (almost as easy as Heroku) manage deployments on AWS

If you're looking for the simplicity of Heroku but want to run on raw AWS check out Convox. It's open source and free to try. https://convox.com Disclosure: I'm one of the cofounders

FYI, your link is pointing to the OP. I think you meant https://convox.com/

+1 for convox (https://convox.com/) we've been using it successfully for a number of our clients - it's easy to setup and run.

Did anyone checkout https://convox.com/ - which is a more direct alternative to Heroku?

I used to be in this situation. Then I started using https://convox.com/ and all my problems went away.

Convox (YC S15) is hiring a Solutions Engineer. Convox is an open-source, private PaaS that runs in your own AWS account. http://www.convox.com You can read the full job description here: https://www.dropbox.com/s/g0o2dv9j7nsg8gi/ConvoxSolutionsEngineer.pdf?…

I definitely agree that better tutorials and/or a simpler interface would makes AWS more accessible and user friendly. A YC S15 startup, Convox (http://convox.com/), aims to "make AWS as easy as using Heroku." It looks really promising.

Check out http://convox.com/ (YC S15) for an alternative to avoiding manual infrastructure.

Check http://convox.com if you haven't. Discussion from HN: http://www.hackertoolbox.com/tools/395

This was making the rounds a while ago as half DIY half managed: http://convox.com

Not every product needs AZ from the start (specially for small teams or solopreneurs), in most cases you'll be doing over-engineering. And in the use cases you need AZs and do it right new tools like convox* are really easy to use and can save you a lot work. It's never been this easy to manage your own infrastructure. During the years I've used ssh, puppet, fabric, ansible, capistrano, cloud formation, etc for managing servers and infrastructure. And I think that the main benefit of any PaaS, AWS Lambda or AWS API Gateway is (obviously) that they're time saving and abstract the internals. In fact I use them in several small projects. * https://www.convox.com

Convox is working on making it easier to spin up an ECS cluster. http://www.convox.com/ I've been playing with both and conceptually they're very similar. ECS is a little less sophisticated and extensible than Kubernetes, but that's by design since it only works with AWS services. For example, ECS uses ELB to abstract services whereas Kubernetes has its own service load balancer and service replication mechanism.

Don’t forget Convox. https://www.Convox.com

Convox for AWS: https://convox.com/

If you're okay with AWS, check out https://convox.com/

Also: https://getporter.dev/ https://convox.com/ https://atomizedhq.com/ And closely related: https://humanitec.com/ https://www.okteto.com/ https://www.env0.com/ And then old options like: https://dokku.com/ https://caprover.com/ And maybe: https://swarmpit.io/ https://coolify.io/ https://www.bunnyshell.com/ https://platform9.com/ And probably a dozen more. It's kind of wild.