I am officially in love with the simplicity that is Galaxy!
I’ve been a huge fan of phusion passenger and the flexibility it brings on the table, granted it’s still my top choice for mixed environments and hardcore server utilization, and more bang for the buck, but as of today, I’ll be endorsing Galaxy for all meteor-only deployments.
I’ve only subscribed for the developer edition and deployed two client apps for beta, but I am looking forward to graduating to the professional edition.
On a side note, I initially went for a compose.io database but after more than a handful of crashes of their pretty-looking but unusable control panel, I switched over to mongolab without a hitch. The UI may be bad, but hey, I’m used to the no-ui self-deployment, so any ui is improvement for me
I only wish the galaxy logs were searchable/exportable and that the stats had a tad bit more retention. I was hoping kadira would help, but it did more harm than good (zonejs is a nightmare and db hijacker is buggy but I’m sure they’ll all be resolved soon).
Anyway, so far, I like the galaxy+mongolab set up.
I’ve started to migrate self hosted solutions up as well, and so far so awesome! Really loving the simplicity of it all, and the nostalgia factor of using meteor deploy again! A few extra comments:
I agree about the logs; actually I’ve found the log section of the admin to be a bit janky; might just be an issue on my side but scrolling while the logs are loading/refreshing seems a bit strange. The UI can’t seem to keep up, which creates some visual weirdness. It all sorts itself out after a few seconds though.
I had one small issue with a recent deployment regarding the SSL cert setup. First of all - the SSL config process is awesome! Dead simple. One small issue I had is that I had created new certs using http://sslmate.com locally as root. Using Galaxy’s admin panel, when I selected my local cert for upload it looked like the cert uploaded successfully (got the green all good notice). In reality though the file wasn’t really uploaded as I was uploading as a normal local OS user and didn’t have read access to the local cert. Very minor though; was able to figure it out pretty quickly.
Ouch about compose.io - I’ve never once had a problem with them or their admin app. I love their service, and recommend them to everyone (hopefully it was just a bad day/couple of days).
All in all though, I’m very happy with Galaxy so far - definitely my go to recommendation as well.
Yep, I was looking forward to compose.io as well because of a few other encouraging comments you’ve left around in this forum, but I guess it was a bad day. Anyway I’m happy with mongolab so far and the mongolab endorsement by galaxy is reassuring.
I was also amazed by ssl deployment. Due to past experienced I’d freed up a big chunk of the day to follow through with it and when ssl-signup to deployment was done in the first 15 minutes, I kind of had this strange feeling of “emptiness”, like the time Seinfeld ended after a thousand years
I think what’s ultimately missing is a galaxy user community. I know it is here within the forum, but it just gets lost unnoticed.
Their developer pricing is worth it to me. I want to focus on features, not wrestle with servers, firewalls and other things I know nothing about. Galaxy rocks!
I can answer this one - to never have to run an apt-get dist-upgrade again! Seriously - I love mupx as much as the next person, but mupx isn’t really the problem. It’s the headache that comes with managing your own servers. I use the term headache loosely here as it’s not really a headache if you like managing your own servers, and double pinky swear you’ll always remember to keep them up to date with the latest security patches. Managing servers adds overhead though; sometimes that’s a good thing, but in a lot of cases it isn’t. The servers aren’t really paying the bills; the product is (yes there are exceptions). As long as your infrastructure is in good hands (and so far so good with Galaxy), then this makes it easy to know where to focus your time/effort.
Well I must admit I have never used mup before, passenger has been my
go to solution.
But off the top of my head
piece of mind of dedicated support
auto scaling
one click scaling
app metrics
provision, stop/start/delete apps with a single click
a “meteor-native” ui (although there’s room for improvement)
The financial difference is the 5$ DO compared to $13 Galaxy which
honestly is nothing compared to the amount of time and money we spend
on problems and the key is problems. It is all fine when things are
running, but the value of the platform shows itself once you hit a wall.
As for a main drawback, the lack of larger containers (1GB) and
occasional restarts make it a bad choice as a production deployment
target after the beta and before the $500/month mark.
I have a $5 DO I use to host multiple apps, (mostly just play ones ) though also used it for a competition website and it worked fine with several hundred users hitting the site at once. Do you get 1 app for $13 or many?
Well, the way I see it, galaxy value proposition comes into play given two main conditions:
You don’t want to deal with deployment woes. Should you ever encounter a problem and your hourly rate is, say $100, and you spend two hours fixing it, there you go! $200 lost!
It is an app that you built not for yourself, but for a client, and you don’t want to make sure someone’s got your back for that day of deployment problems
The Galaxy base image runs Ubuntu 14.04 and comes with a set of packages pre-installed. Please note that package versions are not frozen and may be updated at any time.
nodejs (0.10.41)
build-essential
wget
curl
rsync
phantomjs
ca-certificates
imagemagick
graphicsmagick
libcairo2-dev
wkhtmltopdf (for HTML to PDF conversion including prerequisites)
libssl-dev
xfonts-base
xfonts-75dpi
libpoppler-qt4-dev
I think the era of dedicated email (smtp) servers is over.
Although I would see exchange, qmail, icewarp deployments, and some occasional postfix self-deployment in the past, I have not seen much use for them over the recent couple of years.
My clients tend to use google apps or office 365, both of which allow authenticated smtp relay. For more high-throughput requirements, though, one could use transactional-email services from amazon ses or mandrill/madmimi/sendgrid etc.
and @skirunman that’s a pretty comprehensive list which cover most use-cases. In fact, anything not on that list (and not platform-independent anyway - as in available natively to node) would count as a very specific use case.
