Hi everyone,
I have been asked to take a look at NodeChef recently and have a play about with it. I have deployed my Meteor application to it and it works fine as it does when hosted with Galaxy.
Can anyone who uses NodeChef/has any knowledge of it please explain what the benefits of using it over conventional deployment are? I’m still a student and i’m struggling to see what the point of NodeChef is when I can deploy through Galaxy.
Many thanks,
George
Honestly? NodeChef is cheaper and does the same exact thing as Galaxy. Also, Galaxy’s APM is proprietary to MDG, I believe, whereas it looks like NodeChef uses the excellent and recently open-source Kadira for performance monitoring.
If you want to support MDG by having a Galaxy subscription, that’s awesome, but if you’re on the fence, read up on both. The choice should be pretty obvious.
As for why it’s better than a “conventional” deployment, it basically saves you all the overhead, hassle, and cost of setting up and maintaining your own server and DB environment, lets you focus on building your apps. I know because I manage my entire project deployment, including all my servers, DBs, and versioning locally.
I think as a student it could be an incredible learning experience for you to do that as well, but if you’re trying to build and host an app to the public to make money or whatever you should definitely just leave it to a hosting provider like Galaxy, NodeChef, DigitalOcean, or AWS, etc.
NodeChef includes Mongo, Galaxy/Heroku etc don’t. They are very competitively priced, include Kadira, and offer a lot. They aren’t well known which is why you don’t hear about them more.
I use nodechef for a couple of apps. its been fantastic.
I don’t think they do, or i’ve missed where this is in the dashboard?
ive seen their own ‘app insights’ tab which is a home grown reporting portal, no where near as comprehensive as Kadira was but still useful.
Edit: I just saw they have actually done integration with Kadira 
This.
Also true, I use it for my project, $10 bucks a month. WORTH IT.
I self host on a dedicated machine. It took a LONG time to get setup… I burnt thru a lota CPU cuz my code was bad. But for lightweight apps, use a provider.
Thanks a lot for your help and advice! Very much appreciated!
It looks like it, but it really depends on your situation. We have 7 ‘servers’ at Galaxy:
5x 1 small container
1x 1 small container + AMP
1x 2 small containers
And mongo hosting at Compose, 1Gb plan.
(Note that these are all 512mb containers, smallest ones at Galaxy)
If you sum that up, that would be 300USD/month. But half of these servers are staging environments, so the actually monthly charge is about 200USD/month because Galaxy charges by the hour.
Nodechef charges by the month. So the same setup would cost us 238/month at Nodechef, with the exception that all servers would have AMP.
Now I don’t know about the Kadira version that Nodechef uses, because the one that MDG uses is a very stripped down version of the former Kadira (plus it is not that reliable - as in - often it does not load or show data without doing crazy browser refresh tricks). So a reliable more complete Kadira would be a good selling point for Nodechef.
But overall conclusion is:
Nodechef is not per definition cheaper. Make your own calculation before moving from Galaxy.
NodeChef uses the open source version of Kadira with all the features. I didn’t know Galaxy APM was a stripped down version and not reliable, that is really bad and not acceptable IMO. We run our own Kadira instance and I can tell you it needs a beefy server + db.
The above assessment by @satya completely eliminates the CPU factor, which actually happens to be the more crucial component when it comes to cost assessment of Meteor Hosting. NodeChef containers have access to 4 bare metal cores for even the 512MB tier. When compared to the ECU equivalent on galaxy, it becomes rather obvious a number of containers will be required to match the performance of a single container on NodeChef.
1 ECU is the equivalent CPU capacity of a 1.0-1.2 GHz 2007 Opteron or 2007 Xeon processor. Take note of this, The Galaxy 512MB tier provides you only half of that (0.5 ecu - as read from the Meteor pricing page). Compare this to the 3.4 GHZ 2015 - 2016 Xeon processors offered by NodeChef. In fact some of our users have even gotten as creative as running multiple processes in a single container because of the CPU advantage. The CPU factor completely eliminates the perceived negligible cost advantage of NodeChef imagined by @satya.
This also holds true for our Mongo Deployments which has access to 8 bare metal cores and runs on Local SSD. The only Mongo PaaS which offers anything close to this will be MLAB but that comes with a minimum price tag of $1,390 for their entry level high performance tier. Although, it might appear both platforms price a 1GB replica set at $15 dollars, the difference in value provided by NodeChef is so vast any comparison simply becomes untenable.
Hi @NodeChefMatt, thanks a lot for clarifying. This was all unknown to me and I’m happy I now your USPs now!
Galaxy 512MB = $0.04/ hour ~ 29$ / month (0.5 ECU)
NodeChef 512MB = $25 / month (4 CPU)
Is the CPU power guaranteed in anyway ?
And is that 8 core + SSD dedicated or shared?
Yes, it is guaranteed.
Yes, the bare metal host is shared with other tenants but that does not invalidate anything i said. Although MLab chooses to decorate some of its offerings with the adjective “dedicated”, those plans are still shared since the VM shares resources with other VM’s mounted on the host. The VM might be dedicated to your instance but it still shares resources with other tenants on the host similar to how NodeChef containers share resources with other tenants mounted on the host.
Then why don’t you leverage this in your advantage ? Buy a galaxy instance, then a nodechef instance, put meteor on them 512mb of ram, run some cpu intensive tasks like encrypting/decrypting stuff and show us some benchmarks.
So this makes NodeChef ~8x more cost effective not to mention providing Mongo and full APM. I really think this should be advertised more.
I dont like nodechef because when I need use autoscaling, I pay one month of server and not by hours.
Galaxy is more expensive, but it is complete!
DB I use mlab.com and dont have problem of performance.