[ovi256]

I'm amazed something that works like stackful.io or heroku for your own servers has not been written yet. Like you, many tinkerers have a cheap server to use as a lab. It would be great if one could install on it some piece of software that provided heroku-like zero-friction deploy for new apps. Just do "app create", push a git repo and, bam, the app is deployed, with sensible defaults. The defaults are not supposed to make everyone happy, but, like a default heroku deployment, to allow you to start new apps with zero friction, thus encouraging experimentation and hacking.

[michaelbuckbee]

You should check out Cloud66.com they are _almost_ there with what you are describing. I'm really hoping to be using them in a month or two.

They'll read in your Github repo and then based on that configure VPS's for you according to your specs (shared db server, standalone, etc.), it's very slick.

Right now, they're lacking in documentation and don't handle some aspects of admin (most notably server security updates) very well.

[drbawb]

Not exactly what you're talking about (I think the linked `juju` is probably closer), but I came across Docker[0] recently.

It's more of a framework for managing deployments locally. -- It seems really cool but I haven't had a chance to play with it yet.

[0]: http://docs.docker.io/en/latest/examples/python_web_app/

[jcastro]

We're working on it: http://juju.ubuntu.com

Here's a simple example with rails, you can do the same with node or django apps: http://www.jorgecastro.org/2012/11/16/deploying-your-rails-a...

[hdeshev]

Our Chef-based stack(s) are open source and hosted on github. We are thinking of packaging them in a form that is convenient to run in a local Vagrant box or something of that sort, so that you can easily test your app without wrecking your production environment first.

[sciurus]

What about Red Hat's Openshift or VMware's Cloud Foundry?

http://openshift.github.io/

http://cloudfoundry.github.io/