Babak - I can’t really share the technical details about how we’re specifically implementing Galaxy instances but there isn’t a way for a customer to mix Galaxy container types from different Editions for the same Meteor app if that’s what you’re asking. If you have a mission-critical app that require the highest levels of stability, responsive support, or simply need more ECU/RAM from larger containers, Developer Edition shouldn’t be your first choice when compared to the current Team/Business/Enterprise editions of Galaxy. But Developer Edition does contain the core features that has made Galaxy popular among developers who want to focus building their Meteor app vs. their devops stacks. Once we begin rolling out Developer Edition to users in the coming weeks, the best evidence of how it performs and meets your various requirements/budgets will come from the developer community vs. speculating on what we’ve shared in the announcement. It will be our/MDG’s burden to deliver a solid experience for all of our paying customers and to improve the service based on your feedback.
Thanks for the feedback Mark.
Mixing and matching to create what AWS would call an “auto-scaling” solution where spot-instances compliment on-demand instances is generally how spot instances are used (and documented).
http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AutoScaling/latest/DeveloperGuide/US-SpotInstances.html
It would nice if Galaxy could auto-scale without any hassle and it “just worked”, 100% uptime.
Consider going in to do a private app demo (deployed to Galaxy) to raise capital, it wouldn’t be wise to rely on just a spot instance that will “probably be there”.
I look forward to seeing what we can do with Galaxy and for it to be a compelling solution.
Regards,
B
Yesterday I posted here asking Mark Trang why he told me MDG doesn’t recommend Developer Edition for production applications when here on this forum he says it’s “production-ready”.
Instead of answering my question, MDG removed my posts!
Mark send me an email saying as a user of Galaxy it’s “inappropriate and unprofessional” of me to share anything communicated to me privately citing the confidentiality clause in their terms of service.
WTF
It seems like Mark and Matt are either deceiving me, or they are trying to deceive this community. And before you have your moderators delete this post you should read your own confidentiality clause (7.2). The full contents of the email I quoted here was already public information at the time of my disclosure.
I don’t like the way you are treating me. I was a very early adopter of Meteor, and I’ve been a vocal promoter of Meteor for years. Keep this up and your going make me a very vocal detractor. You may control these forums but you don’t control Disqus, Github, Quora, Medium, and hosts of other blogs. I want a public apology, and you owe us all an explanation. Then I’ll consider removing this post entirely.
And then it shows the message:
(post withdrawn by author, will be automatically deleted in 24 hours unless flagged)
is that correct? That’s making it even stranger looking like you did it yourself? Multiple posts in this topic written by you seem to be gone?
The post withdrawn message is accurate - that message doesn’t show up if your post is deleted by an admin.
i’m not making this up.
but yes, after they did that I deleted a few posts on my own such as this one. because I don’t want to promote Galaxy anymore if they are going to engage in this kind of dubious behavior.
Censorship - This is not nice. At all.
Max - You’ve been a great contributor to the community and your feedback as a customer is valued. Your one specific post earlier today was flagged/removed because it contained a screenshot of a direct email detailing guidance I sent to you as a commercial customer. You never gave me the courtesy of a heads up to post the email nor did you ever try ask me directly for clarification. In fact, you replied to that exact email on Monday congratulating us on the launch and asking a Galaxy support question which I helped resolve. Instead, you chose to post an excerpt publicly in an attempt to create public controversy and imply that there was some nefarious scheme. After your post was flagged, I immediately sent you a private email explaining why and also scheduled time to speak with you 1:1.
But you’ve insisted on reposting excerpts from our email conversation and are now directly accusing MDG of deception and threatening to become a vocal detractor if you aren’t treated to your satisfaction? It also appears you’ve removed other posts you’ve made today on this forum thread…perhaps to stage the appearance that MDG indiscriminately flagged you on more than the one specific post to gain sympathy?
Let’s keep it professional and fact-based.
I’ve explicitly stated that Galaxy as a runtime platform is absolutely production-ready; meaning it’s not beta/pilot/preview. We had an early access program earlier this year and since publicly launching in October we’ve successfully deployed many commercial customers’ apps since - your apps included.
Here’s my exact post from earlier today in this forum thread:
But just because Galaxy itself is generally available, does that mean all editions of Galaxy are equal? Absolutely not. As I’ve stated ad naseum, when compared to the Team/Business/Enterprise editions of Galaxy, Developer Edition is not where you should be running your mission-critical apps. But is it a cost-effective way to explore the benefits of Galaxy and run a reasonable set of apps so you can see first-hand if it meets your needs/budget? Definitely. This is my most recent post on this thread:
MDG is now much more than the hub of a popular open-source project; we now have a number of paying customers like yourself who trust us as a key business partner. We take our growing number of commercial customer relationships very seriously which is why I’ve personally sent similar emails to each of our earliest customers to affirm this guidance in detail. But we don’t appreciate it when our attempts to run a professional business become fodder for out-of-context forum conversations that have an accusatory/threatening tone and don’t serve the goals of the larger Meteor community. It’s not a great use of anyone’s time when we should all be focused on building our respective projects/businesses.
I hope you understand and respect what we’re trying to do for the entire Meteor community (both open-source and commercial) and I look forward to speaking with you directly.
Mark the content of the ‘personal’ email you sent me is entirely taken from the public Developer Edition announcement. Why in the world you be upset by that and cite it as a violation of your confidentiality clause? The email you sent me was boilerplate press release material and, as I’ve demonstrated, the content is nearly entirely sourced from public material. Why should I think that was a confidential message that you didn’t want others to see?
You accuse me of trying to stir up controversy with out-of context quotes, but all I did was ask: do you recommend Developer Edition for production or not? You created the controversy by dodging the question and deleting my posts. Why not simply explain: Developer Edition is ‘production-ready’ as a platform, but no we don’t recommend it for production apps due to x, y and z. I wasn’t here to create any controversy. I was in fact promoting Galaxy and trying to help people understand the differences between Developer and Team which I’ve been using now for several months.
You tell me to act professionally and stick to the facts and then childishly accuse me of deleting my own posts “to stage the appearance that MDG indiscriminately flagged you on more than the one specific post.”
Matt deleted two of my posts, and I’ve already explained that I’ve removed some of my own posts because I don’t want to publicly promote your services anymore. I’ve reinstated what I could. I have nothing to hide. I was explaining why Galaxy makes sense for our organization, and I was saying the same things you are saying about Developer: not the right choice for mission-critical apps. Why you decided to censor me is beyond my comprehension.
I don’t understand what people are complaining about. Galaxy is a great service with very competitive pricing compared to other Meteor hosting providers. The fact that MDG have provided everything for us devs to develop and deploy web & mobile apps is quite an achievement imo.
I sometimes think that some people just need to step away from the keyboard & go for a walk before posting messages here.
I’m not sure which posts you are responding to, but on the whole I don’t think people are really complaining about the price of Developer. We are just discussing it to understand what it really means in terms of features, availability, performance, etc. and how it compares to other options.
@marktrang in all fairness some of the announcements and forum posts did sound like they were prepared in a “marketing voice” and probably almost to the extent that they concealed the fact that the developer edition is unfit for production by simply saying galaxy overall is production ready.
In fact, right before @maxhodges’ deleted post appeared, I was about to ask you for clarification of galaxy-production-readiness based on the “public” announcement (which seemed to be the exact same content with your said private email) contradicting your posts on this form thread.
I also do strongly believe that you guys should not have deleted that post. As far as I can remember, @maxhodges has always been one of your top evangelists, marketing your product much stronger than you have ever done, and with a genuine voice. His explanation about the situation (your email - whatever part he shared - not containing anything not already publicly disclosed) and why he chose to delete his former posts also hold up while your email sounds nothing like coming from a company who values their customers.
I sincerely hope that this is not the direction MDG is heading for. With all the existing controversy going on around community management and involvement, blaze/react issues and enterprise-readiness, this has not been much good and reassuring on your part.
I do wish things shift for the better.
I just mean the general attitude people take on these forums with regards to MDG.
Mark, you answered one of my posts about Dev Edition saying that it was production ready, but based on the posts that followed on the thread I am still a little bit confused. My current app is used in classrooms to play games, and if the app were to restart while the class was playing on their unique url it would be a disaster for the classroom. I really want to use Galaxy. However, the use of my app is not yet wide enough to be worth $500 in hosting and need 10 containers (hopefully it will soon 
)
But as @maxhodges said, it would clear everything up if we just got a clear answer as to whether this can be used on an app that actually matters and why. With that answer, all of this controversy could have been avoided. Now it feels like there may be a bait and switch situation going on, even though I am sure that is not the intention.
I think that in general, having clarity in answers and community communication could solve a lot of the issues going on right now, and could have even turned the Blaze/React situation into a positive. People are more than willing to pay for this product, it would be a shame if nontechnical reasons and confusion were to turn them away. This post started off as a Star Wars joke and has somehow degenerated due to a lack of communication.
I think this should have been called Galaxy Sandbox edition, similar to those free 512mb Compose sandbox databases
What is the difference between 1 pro edition or 1 dev container from 3 crashing? I would expect it to survive anyway. Just run on 2 containers for a while when pro edition will run 3 containers no matter what.
Recovering in both cases, just load for the 2 containers would be bigger…
Ruben - I think that’s one of the sources of confusion. I stated that Galaxy (the service overall) is production-ready, not that the Developer Edition is the best option for production-class apps (especially compared to the Team/Business/Enterprise editions of Galaxy, which was the point of the emails I’ve sent to our current commercial customers like Max).
Should Meteor developers run meaningful apps on Galaxy Developer Edition? Yes. Will many of these apps be considered “production” apps? Perhaps, depending on your definition and expectations. But if you have truly mission-critical app requirements yet no budget for something like Team Edition, it seems like a decision and tradeoff you’re going to need to make, no different than any other part of your business.
We’ve priced the Developer Edition to allow almost anyone to at least try it to see if it works for your needs/budgets; no amount of marketing or walls of text on this forum can convince you better that than actual experience with the product itself. And we will learn from ongoing customer usage and feedback much like we’ve learned from our earliest Galaxy customers. As I’ve stated before, it’s our goal to win your business. There are a number of other popular hosting solutions in the market. For MDG to be successful long-term, we’ll need to deliver competitive solutions at fair prices that deliver an awesome experience for as many developers and customers as possible.
I think I understand what you are saying. It’s not that $500 is not in the budget, it’s just that there are far cheaper options than 500 that are production ready for a project of my size. But those options advertise their uptime/dependability/etc. I understand that that is probably hard to do on a brand new product. I’ll give it a shot when I get the invite!
Hello Mark, if the Developer Edition is only spot instances rather than a scale up from an on-demand and if those spot instances aren’t diversified as Amazon outlines then it is entirely possible that your container(s) get shutdown.
I believe that if there is any chance at all to show off an app to the world, there should be no inherit possibility that your app will not be available when requested no matter what the price point is.
A car for non-professional non-critical purposes should still reliably take you from point A to B without needing a restart on the way. It should work, for sure, always.
Amazon tends to market spot instances and spot fleets as part of an auto-scaling solution. If you guys had a similar thing at a price point in-between Developer and Team, that could prove to be quite a cost effective solution for most who are perhaps in-between something with thousands of non-stop concurrent users and just a few here and there.
As for censorship, unless someone is being belligerent and/or violating forums rules (i.e., community destructive forms of forums advertising) it seems unnecessary.
What a trainwreck…