Please list the complete feature set of Galaxy.
(that stealth)
Oops! Youāre right. Sorry.
Thatās not stealth, thatās just a lack of communication and the fact that theyāre in the middle of developing it. Galaxy is Kubernetes wrapped in Meteor-specific services. I donāt think even MDG know what the ācomplete feature setā of Galaxy looks like yet. Feel free to ask them, though!
How about MDG tells us what Galaxy will be and release a MVP.
I think our community is a mix of good biz, dev, ops and marketing people.
I bet we can help in many ways.
We all want to use Galaxy. We were expecting a MVP since January 2014. Now itās more than one year.
We are waitingā¦
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After the rise of Salesforce no one is selling or investing in software product sales like that anymore. Itās all service-oriented. If Galaxy uses a custom build of Kubernetes thatās an implementation detail (and hopefully irrelevant to the user). What services Galaxy offers and why one would want to buy it is not public info yet. They may still be figuring that out. But I imagine the vision is of a turnkey PaaS as generally described in this thread. It fits with the Meteor culture of abstracting away as many implementation details as possible and providing the widest reach.
The āfailure to communicateā is justifiable as proper expectation management. But it is interesting that weāre all building atop a company whose one profit center hasnāt been described to us yet in any meaningful detail. Yes these are open source tools but itās too big a project to survive only on volunteers. Though Iām not worried for Meteorāmost developer tools (other than from the big companies) are on much shakier ground. And itās terrific that there is an independent tools provider that can abstract across rival platforms and cherry-pick the bests of breed and avoid corporate politics.
So I hope they brew up a tremendous offering and are able to stay independent and grow strongly. So far, less than a month in, Iām very impressed with nearly everything I see here.
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Galaxy is MDGās source of revenue and viabilityā¦ its understandable that they donāt want to expose it before its ready. At the same time, weāre betting on the platform, so some transparency would be nice.
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I donāt think thatās an issue. They days development done in public. (even they are proprietary)
Hiding things not going to help anyone. Itās true specially with dev+ops market.
Itās a bit of a shameless plug, but letās do it. Iām cofounder of the Platform as a Service Scalingo: https://scalingo.com. Basically we are providing an heroku-like workflow but with extra support for some technlogies, and particularly Meteor. Weāve done the choice to internalize data storage solution including MongoDB databases with oplog tailing support. If your application is a Meteor app, we automatically enable sticky sessions when you scale your app. Basically deploying and scaling Meteor is completely out of the box.
We are a France-based startup, using our own hardware and not based on any public IaaS to have a complete control on the performance of the applications youāre hosting. Docker containers is part of our internal architecture, but basically all you have to do is a git push.
So, weāve a free tier, you should try deploying a meteor app, Iād like to have your feedback: https://scalingo.com/meteorjs-hosting
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Looks interesting.
As I get it - https://scalingo.com/datacenters - you are currently only in France.
I know this requires a whole other conversation, but, why did you choose not to go with known clouds (or multicloud).
For many businesses, trusting even known cloud companies is a challenge, so why should them/us trust a āsmallā ānewā company who may even be a few oem servers operating from a garage?
My point is, if you are not offering a ādeploy on your preferred cloud providerā (except for the enterprise option I see on the web site), Iād sure like to know more about your infrastructure.
Take digital ocean for example. When they launched with their disruptive pricing schemes and ssd flare, they were not that big a piece of news, but then they announced millions of dollars of founding and only then it got really serious.
But again, a few pictures from your datacenter, some information about your current connectivity/backup systems etc would go a long way compared to what we currently see on your web site.
Apart from that, your offering does sound really exciting! And congratulations on being one of the first adopters of Meteor.
While I appreciate your thinking on building a one man startup @msavin, I think your ideas arenāt fully formed. Any SaaS business is about building a funnel and converting that funnel isnāt paying customers.
Most devs think, āOh hey, I can just build this app and make some cashā, but the truth of the matter is people donāt really know you and you have a trust issue on your hands. It takes time and marketing to convince those people to use your solution. Most devs never think about the marketing aspect of it, and that is one of the things that Lean Startup principals try to get you to do in talking to customers - you need to learn their existing lingo and know how to tap into the community they already exist in.
Granted building tools for developers might make this easier because you are marketing to a peer group, ala Github, but at some point if your startup is successful, you wonāt be a one man shop anymore 
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ReactionCommerce has already been working on a docker platform to make deploying and scaling apps pretty cheap. Their goal is to the wordpress of the ecommerce world and they want an easy place to spin up an instance to play with that is cheap. See https://github.com/ongoworks/launchdock
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I have to strongly disagree with you here, @spicemix. I very much think that a project of this size can now survive on itās own without MDG around. Will the release quality change? Maybe. But plenty of other options donāt have one driving business behind them and they have done a good job of growth. I see many indicators to me that show the community is in a major growth mode and plenty of people are driving scaling at a higher level than most of us now. Those scaling changes are seeping back into the community from places like MixMax and Workpop.
Meteor has already changed the landscape and their improves will only further cement their place as a future platform that developers will want to be on.
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Come on @arunoda, you already know more than most when it comes to Galaxy. There have a 2 or 3 person team working on this project right now and I know they are working hard to get something out right away. MDG as an organization has always been driven to produce a very solid and clean product. We are all here because of their vision in the first place.
I think there isnāt any disservice being done to the community by them working on Galaxy without giving you a feature list or an expected launch date. Can you imagine if you had to give a launch date when you first started working on Kadira? Humans suck at estimation and guessing things up front, so let them work on their options.
There is nothing wrong with the options of Mup + DigitalOcean, Modulus, or Scalingo, at least for me. I have a $10 slice at Digital Ocean and an $18 compose elastic install to run crater and I handle 150-200 peak concurrent users, the box barely breaks a sweat at 10% average CPU utilization.
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Oh! I didnāt meant to be rude. May be I shouldāve written it in a better way.
Yeah! I know Mup, Modulus.io and other stuff are there. Thatās will save us in the short run.
Yes it is. But we deserve to see what Galaxy is
It took a time to launch Kadira. . When we are building Kadira, we had almost zero dollars in our pocket. I donāt think thatās the case with MDG.
(I know MDG has lot of things in their bucket. Thatās why I am raising this. We can help. May be not with code. But in other ways)
We all spend a lot of resources on Meteor. We want MDG to be profitable and make it viable.
So, Galaxy is not only important to MDG but for all of us.
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@joshowens Haha I can assure you Iām not a ābuild and they will comeā type (although organic growth is very possible). Iāve had a couple of SaaS products with revenue go under because I couldnāt scale them, or didnāt want to undertake the challenge of it, and this can be a clever solution.
I prefer to live in the design and marketing side of things, and if Meteor can solve the technology problem for people like me then bravo. It would be much easier for me to throw money on this type of thing than to recruit and manage someone who can scale your infrastructure.
Of course - its in the context of compartmentalized products and not a Facebook-type company
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Where can I find this?
You can find our prcing page here: https://scalingo.com/pricing
Ā« To get you started on Scalingo, we give every account, 3 Apps using a maximum of 1 Container per App per month for free, whereby one Container equals one 512MB resource unit. It means that we let you host upto 3 single container apps for free! Ā»
Additionaly, each addon we provide has a free plan, including the MongoDB database: https://scalingo.com/addons/scalingo-mongodb
Ah, thank you! Iām blind 
Signed up!
Launchdock was / is really a prototype PaaS tool - and what we are currently using to launch demo shops / docker containers. It works reasonably well, and as a Meteor app, is also tuned for Meteor but in the long term, weāre also looking for another solution - as this wasnāt really meant to be my full time focus (and itās clear it could be).
Tutum.io, Galaxy, Modulus, and Docker itself (with swarm,etc) are all working towards solutions that weāll be testing. Itās not really the launching or scaling of Docker+Meteor containers thatās tough (relatively speaking), but as has been pointed out - the management and scaling of MongoDB is the real challenge. From what MDG has indicated to us, Galaxy is going to be Docker+Kubernetes tuned for Meteor, and the Meteor CLI. Tutum is a more agnostic way of creating Docker stacks āDB+HAProxy, appā, and is a nice (free) tool on top of your existing infrastructure.
Weāre looking at launching and scaling 800-1500 full stack deployments (DB+Proxy+App) per month, and have tested various approaches with the 5000+ or so alpha shops weāve launched at reactioncommerce.com.
Iāve tested our own physical DB cluster (4 R3 instances + MongoDirector), Compose.io Elastic Deployment, and both MongoDB+Meteor in a single container, and as linked db+app containers. With physical, or compose databases, the problems tend to be speed of instantiation, a 20,000 connection limit, and only being able to manage about 1800 databases on a single cluster. Iām thinking that best performing solution would likely be a persistent volume docker host + mongo containersā¦ but havenāt tested this at scale yet. But db persistence and data migration, load balancing will all be challenges here as well.
I should add that weāre pretty easily able to get around 800-1000 containers on a single R3 instance, but without āreal worldā load.
This is the most important thing to address when it comes to Meteor and Galaxy. Creating a hosting company is and will be great but if developers/dev-ops people canāt scale an app horizontally then they will not have any devs to sell their software to.
People have come up with great ways to host meteor applications @arunoda created MUP which is a fantastic tool to help you get an application off the ground. @jkatzen and myself used AWS, docker and opsworks for our production meteor deployment. As long as there is a community, people will find ways to get hosting to work on a variety of platforms. What people canāt do is use livequery for any serious applications. There are a few solutions to livequery scaling such as removing livequery or moving high velocity data off the meteor mongo. Considering how integral livequery is to meteor these options only seem like quick solutions. IMO making meteor great for creating things is the most important thing for them to focus on. I can live without Galaxy indefinitely if it means that MDG is solving the problem of making meteor more than just a prototyping tool and then after they solve that problem I will happily give them my money to host my apps.
I was pretty frustrated with the meteor platform for the last few weeks (due to livequery scaling issues); however, MDG and the meteor community is filled with incredibly smart people solving some really hard problems. I trust that when they come out with a hosting solution it will be a great one but I canāt imagine they are able to build a great hosting service when horizontal scaling is impossible.
tl;dr once meteor becomes a horizontally scalable framework out of the box I will happily give them my money to host my apps, until then I think making it scalable is the most important thing
side note: modulus should never be used for any production deployment. They are a bad hosting company with poor customer service.
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