[joshavant]

I'm a front-end developer.

I'd like an OSS solution that will allow me to deploy an arbitrary server-side service - be it a Ruby, Python application or even a package like OpenVPN - to some cloud infrastructure, easily.

This solution should spin up a hardened OS distro (CIS-compliant, maybe?), provision it with my arbitrary services (using Ansible or Chef or something), and deploy it to AWS or some cloud infrastructure for me (using Terraform or something).

All these component pieces exist, but nothing ties all of them together for an easy deploy for a front-end developer like me.

(And, I know things like Heroku and CodeDeploy exist, but I dislike lock-in and they nearly universally come with their own restrictions, like lack of support for server-side Swift applications or custom services like OpenVPN or git-annex.)

EDIT - I'm strongly considering taking some time off to write this soon, so get in touch if this is something you're interested in! Contributing or using!

[jacques_chester]

There's an overlap with what BOSH does. Starts with a stemcell, compiles your packages against it, spins up whole VMs configured with those packages.

It also adds monitoring for both VMs and processes.

Don't underestimate what you get from a PaaS like Heroku, though. If you're able to stick to 12-factor apps, the lockin is pretty mild -- you should be able to hoist your skirts and move to Cloud Foundry or even OpenShift without too much pain.

Disclosure: I work for Pivotal, we work on BOSH and Cloud Foundry. We compete with Red Hat and Heroku.

[rloewenherz]

We're actually about to release a product that does exactly this! We're in private beta right now, but will have something available to the public soon. If you're interested, check out www.nucleus.codes. And if you want to join the beta, email us at [e-mail].