This looks great. Will defo be trying it out soon.
Questions:
- Is auto-scaling available? And if so, is it managed by AWS or Waves?
- Where is the application code stored? Just AWS or Waves as well? Can the geographical location of AWS be configured for each app?
- Do you have 2FA?
- Are alerts incorporated?
Cheers for the link!
Hi!
- Auto scaling is available, configured in Waves and managed by AWS Autoscaling
- Itās stored on AWS S3, if you revoke the access, Waves cannot access your code anymore.
Yes, you can change the region for every app. You can use all AWS regions. - Yes. https://waveshosting.com/settings/security
- Not right now, but itās in the roadmap.
If you have more questions please ask!
Is Pricing/Feature comparison available?
In terms of pricing itās far cheaper than galaxy. Waves connect to your AWS account and you pay directly to AWS.
In terms of pricing:
On galaxy:
- 3x compact containers (0.5 ECU, 512 MB each).
- ~$120/month.
On AWS:
- 2x t2.micro containers (1 vCPU, 1 GB each).
- ~$50/month (2x t2.micro + network load balancer).
Waves is free for one app, you have to pay $29 if you need to use more, so itās still cheaper.
You can read this post for more info:
In terms of features, comparing the features Galaxy has on its website:
One-line āmeteor deployā command -> āwaves deployā command
Push button scaling -> Yes, and also auto scaling
Built-in SEO prerendering -> No
Automated SSL included -> Yes
Zero downtime coordinated version updates -> Yes
Designed specifically for stateful Meteor apps -> Itās designed for Meteor and others
Built-in Meteor performance monitoring tools -> Yes
High availability fault tolerance -> Yes
Unlimited maximum containers -> Yes
Flexible container sizing options -> Yes, and many more options
Advanced traffic routing to least loaded containers -> Yes
Full logging and performance metrics -> Yes
Automatic load balancing and cluster management -> Yes
Iāve just tried the service. I used a big app as a candidate (>5k LOC, around 1.5gb deploys) and it was the first time the deploy was as literally just one command.
Literally the only thing I had to do was waves deploy and done. I had my server ready.
I really appreciate being able to access my servers directly (I can ssh to the instances on AWS), and the support responded to all my questions in no time.
Iām extremely surprised at how easy it is to deploy apps. Iām thinking of migrating everything there!
Finally getting round to experimenting with this. Question:
I understand the faster set up time that comes with setting up an admin level IAM AWS account for Waves, but it seems overkill. What are the minimal set of permissions needed - is there a template user policy?
How does Wavesā monitoring tools compare to Galaxyās? What granularity does it offer?
Are there any more good or bad experiences with Waves?
So far so good for me. I havenāt really pushed it in terms of auto scaling but it was pretty easy to set up and their support has been good.
I set up Monti APM for app monitoring.
I use Monti too. So, I deployed one small website that I was keeping in Heroku and was really impressed with the level of convenience. I can run that free in a nano box for a year. It is a really small website.
Now I was moving a fork of my main project and realized ā¦ there are no T&C on the Waves website. There is no mention of SLA (at least for the paid accounts). In general there is no information about how confidential your data stays with them. If you paste all your env settings on their forms ā¦ get the guy on the web and sue him for the ā¦ unprovable.
So, I opened a question with them but as I see it ā¦ no minimum level of assurance, compliancy, GDPR etcā¦
I tried waves in early May, and could not get my app running. I tried contacting support and got an answerā¦ a month later. So I canāt say I was reassured, and he didnāt address the problem I had been facing either, so.
To be frank, it worked for me pretty fast, I only had some issue related to ā¦ the learning curve on the AWS portal, I may say. But overall Iād say the system at WavesHost is one of the best so far. If I had some Github behind it or some sort of CI Iād probably consider it the best option for Meteor. But then ā¦ going back to the initial problem ā¦ there is not much accountability behind it, or compliancy, or ā¦ standard ā¦ apparently no people too :))).
Anyway, prior to AWS I had my code in Heroku and with this box I was using I could not control the region more than ā¦ Europe. Initially I had Mongo Atlas and Heroku both in Frankfurt (both over AWS). Then Heroku moved me to Dublin and my methods DB time increased up to 500 ms. Since I moved my app in AWS directly and I have full control now on the region and I know I am in the same ābuildingā with both App and DB, my average DB time on methods is ā¦ 10ms ā¦ I run on a T2 nano for the time being :)). All free tier for a year.
Iāve done work to deploy a test version of my app to this service, but after waiting 2.5 weeks have not gotten a response from support, across multiple threads with basic questions about the service. Unfortunate, because this does seem like something I would potentially use for my apps going forward, but the lack of support availability is a bit concerning.
Other than that, there were a few noteworthy roadblocks I ran into right away:
-
You have to copy/paste your settings file every time you want to deploy. This is error prone and some kind of CLI support is needed IMO.
-
It seems settings.json data is plumbed through via an environment variable. You might think this could be fine, but there is an upper bound for 4096 bytes (for either the entire command or the environment variable IIRC ā I believe my settings file was well under that limit, so presumably it was the former). If anyone has an easy way around this, please LMK. I thought of some solutions but the idea of having to duplicate engineering around a solved problem is not something I really want to do. Iād rather they just fixed the issue, or at least reply to my support ticket!
Agreed. This project has a lot of potential as a solid galaxy competitor if maintained and supported.
Is anyone in this thread actively using Waves currently? Still no response from @nicolaslopezj. I hope he is OK.
We are still using it, but havenāt heard from them in months. Last time I checked they were developing a site for cryptocurrency called orionx and a platform/āweb templateā for restaurants called justo.
Seems like even their website displays a bad cert for ssl right now. https://orionsoft.io/
Weāre using it. Itās been great.
We also use it currently and it works perfectly.