[leeber]

Can somebody explain what the use-case for this is? The site says it is a "PaaS that makes it easy to deploy and manage applications on your own servers".

Most apps I've been making follow a similar recipe: run single ubuntu instance on digitalocean, use nginx for http to serve static content for single page app (ex. angular project), and nginx proxy to gunicorn to serve a python flask API that stores and retrieves data to/from mongodb.

Where in that picture would something like Deis fit in? Or is this not for me?

[jvandyke]

Pretty much the same as Heroku. As a developer, I want to deploy my application as quickly as possible without setting up nginx, gunicorn, etc. per service. I have a front-end service, three API services, and some daemon services. I'd like to be able to scale eventually.

With Deis, you first allocate the number of machines you want to be your cluster and install Deis on them. Think of the cluster as a large physical machine that can run many services. You might have a production cluster (7 machines), dev (3 machines), staging (3 machines), etc. Now, deploy your apps to that cluster via a git push for each.

Need to boot a new front-end server to handle load? Just run an extra container in your cluster. Same with API.

How would you do that with your current setup? I'm guessing provision an entire second machine (or VM, same thing) and put them behind a load balancer.

With Deis, each cluster is exposed behind a single load balancer and each app/service is exposed as a subdomain on that loadbalancer. Deis handles the internal load balancing.

Cluster getting full? Just add a new machine/vm to it.

So, if you like the idea of Heroku, you might like Deis, especially if you'd like to use your own hardware/VPC or want to use Docker locally and in production.

[chuhnk]

How long was the install process for you? Was there much involved?

[jvandyke]

In the beta, it took me a while to get the cluster up and running. I'd say on the order of a couple hours.

[thruflo]

Deis is, in a sense, a deployment framework that allows you to deploy your stack (basically a python app) in such a way that you can scale and configure it easily.

I deploy python apps (running behind gunicorn) on heroku and basically pay for the convenience of dealing with their client and ecosystem rather working with VM boxes directly. Deis provides similar abstractions without the per-process price tag.

If you don't have a problem manually managing / self rolling your app deployments, you don't need it.

[saiko-chriskun]

The use-case is a heroku-style system that you control.