Or so they say. Haven’t seen any data on this yet.
Do post a comparison for us when you get on-board. More competition is certainly welcome and benefits us all.
Regarding features, Bluemix and Galaxy also support one-line deploy. Bluemix also appears to be built on Docker Cache sounds like it could be dangerous depended on how it’s implemented.
$495 wouldn’t be bad, especially if it saves you from having to hire another employee and opens up time to work on the actual app itself instead of deployment.
Say you’re paying a senior developer $50/hr— if galaxy opens up 13 hours a month for him to work on things other than deployment, galaxy is easily paying for itself (at the $650 tier).
In people’s experience, can they see Galaxy saving them 13 hours a month in time? Of course some months it’ll save more time than others, but on average-- what are people’s thoughts?
But if you don’t need all that, then cheaper is better right?
Galaxy is certainly worth the money if you actually need 10 x 1GB containers. If your app performs well on just a few containers, then Galaxy Team Plan is like using an tractor trailer to deliver a pizza.
It’s overkill for us, even running several apps. We could get by on fewer containers and less RAM, but it’s take-it-or-leave-it. We have dozens of simultaneous users max. Not hundreds or thousands.
I understand, but does using galaxy save you 10-13 hours a month in hosting/deployment issues? My guess is “no” for you-- but maybe yes for devs who aren’t experts in this area of things.
Is that a fair assumption?
Yes, it was the best option at that time for us because we really were spending too much time dealing with hosting problems at Modulus. But do these Galaxy plans appear to be as flexible as and competitively priced as Bluemix?
Well, I think that depends on the total cost of working with each technology. So,
(Cost of Hosting Option) + (Man Hours Needed to Deploy/Manage * hourly wage) = Total Cost
The first part (cost of hosting option) is pretty straight forward. The second part (man hours needed to deploy/manage) is where I’d be curious to hear your thoughts.
To me, the analysis is worthless unless you’re looking at the total cost.
Regarding deployment time, you can see for yourself. We are talking minutes, not hours.
IBM looks like a good option, going to test it out. I’m not sure what issues you have had with Modules I had issues in the beginning but now there really good.
As for MDG I 100% agree here I think they really messed up.
1 Like
You did see the news about Galaxy Developer Edition, right?
2 Likes
Yes I did, but I excluded it here because in the announcement they mention it’s for “personal apps or early-stage projects” which don’t need same scale, high availability, and high-touch support as production apps. You can only “view the past five minutes of metrics” and they say you can deploy apps for “for small groups of users”. So it sounds it’s more of a sandbox than something for production apps.
They now seem to have flip-flopped entirely so I don’t know what to think about it anymore.
Regarding Bluemix:
(from their site)
Language: NodeJS
Memory: 512 MB
Instances: 2
Users: <8000
HTTP Requests: <600/s
$24.15
Is 512MB really enough for a medium- to large-scale Meteor app with that many users using it??
Probably not, but I guess it depends on the app! But it’s a much cheaper option to start with and you can always add more RAM as needed. 
I have an educational game app running in production. It is a standardized testing app, so it means, at the time of the tests, hundreds of students are flocking in to create concurrent load with both high writes and high reads. I also keep images and attachments on the db (gridfs) so there’s lots going on.
The app on stand still needs around 180MB (lots of default publications), average consumption goes steadily around 200-300MB range during daily usage, and only heavy spikes during the first few minutes of the tests require around 500MB. And yes, I did see higher consumption a few times. But I guess if one were to design especially the publications carefully, 512MB is actually quite sufficient for many “production-grade” apps.
After all, we have horizontal scaling options and one should be able to design an app to steer it into using two 512MB instances instead of one 1024MB instance.
Hi @maxhodges, as an early stage project, I bet you can access Galaxy Developer Edition (request invitation from my referral) , pay-as-you-go basis of $0.035/GB/hour (~$13/month per 512MB container) (limited to 5 x 512MB)
Did you ask MDG ?
Thank you @maxhodges for telling us about Bluemix. It looks like 1 instance with 512MB of memory is completely free each month. If there’s going to be no downtime or restarting then it looks more attractive than Galaxy Developer Edition.
IBM has been doing IT infrastructure for decades and serve some of the biggest companies in the world, so we can expect them to deliver a solid service.
1 Like
I’m looking at the Bluemix pricing calculator page and it looks like there are a lot of extra things that are made available for free including monitoring and analytics.
1 Like
In Bluemix a 250MB MongoDB database can be added to an app for free, though it’s listed as experimental at the moment.
1 Like
hi there… wondeirng if folk have any more recent demos on how to install on bluemix. I see this article, https://medium.com/@guidouil/meteor-1-4-on-ibm-bluemix-f36aac93856f#.hkie4pnb9 but was looking for some more details on how do a more complex settings.json file vs trying to enter via Bluemix name/value pairs, which are a bit too simple.
You can use https://github.com/AdmitHub/meteor-buildpack-horse to deploy to Bluemix using command cf push <app name on Bluemix> -b https://github.com/AdmitHub/meteor-buildpack-horse.
I just put settings (name-value pairs) into the Environment Variables page of the app on Bluemix.
1 Like