What I do to run applications is this: I fire up a vm or dedicated server on some provider and run my stuff on it. I use Amazon and a couple of other providers.
Ok. That's great. Then let me try to give you some examples #:
Imagine you have setup your SaaS to run from some containers (1 container with your web app, 1 container with your worker, 1 container with your queue and a database somewhere.
Now let's walk through a scenario for a significant new release of your web app:
1) Package your new web app, Launch it for testing (on the same host, cheap) to point to a testing database.
2) Fails? Rebuild, test immediately.
3) Happy? Now relaunch your container to connect to the production database
4) Everything works completely? Now re-route your traffic to the already warmed up container. Chances of failure? < 0.1%
Some other ideas:
- Package your worker. Run it once (on the same host), more load? run it multiple times, run it on multiple servers. -- it is so much quicker and cheaper than spinning up virtual machines.
- So your developer made some changes.. He packages it and you run it. It fails. You now just save the entire container including the last state, logs and everything exactly as you crashed it. And hand that back to him.
Hope it helps.
these examples are based on intended use, because right now the whole development is still moving so fast production deployments are no yet recommended.
Sorry, I dont even understand your first sentence. "Imagine you have setup your SaaS to run from some containers". What is a container? What is a "Worker"? What do you mean with "queue"?
Then you say "Package your new web app, Launch it for testing". I never package my web app. It just runs and runs and runs. And my customers use it. I develop it on another machine, and from time to time I push updates from the development machine to the production machine. Everything seems fine to me. Am I having a problem I dont know about?
A worker is usually something that does background processing. For example a user uploads an image and you need to convert it to multiple sizes. You can either do this on your application server within the scope of the request, or set up a task queue.
Here's an oversimplification of the latter: You have an application server, a queue (something like 0MQ, or redis) and one or multiple workers. When the image is posted, you add a job to the queue, asking for the image to be processed. The worker polls the queue asking if there are any jobs, an if there are, it executes those.
> I never package my web app. It just runs and runs and runs. And my customers use it.
Imagine you have setup your SaaS to run from some containers (1 container with your web app, 1 container with your worker, 1 container with your queue and a database somewhere.
Now let's walk through a scenario for a significant new release of your web app:
1) Package your new web app, Launch it for testing (on the same host, cheap) to point to a testing database. 2) Fails? Rebuild, test immediately. 3) Happy? Now relaunch your container to connect to the production database 4) Everything works completely? Now re-route your traffic to the already warmed up container. Chances of failure? < 0.1%
Some other ideas: - Package your worker. Run it once (on the same host), more load? run it multiple times, run it on multiple servers. -- it is so much quicker and cheaper than spinning up virtual machines. - So your developer made some changes.. He packages it and you run it. It fails. You now just save the entire container including the last state, logs and everything exactly as you crashed it. And hand that back to him.
Hope it helps.
these examples are based on intended use, because right now the whole development is still moving so fast production deployments are no yet recommended.