<i>"Publish a fully functional working machine with your project on it</i><p><i>Don't worry about complex package management systems, or what environment a consumer of your program might have.</i><p><i>Just give them a copy of your environment: it will always work in the future."</i><p>I'm not convinced that a virtual machine snapshot is an adequate replacement for wrestling with a package manager. If all you distribute is a VM image, then:<p>- Users can't easily run your software without provisioning an entire virtual server and, as far as I can tell, giving Terminal money and their email address.<p>- Without active maintenance on your part, the other software on the image will get out of date. Security holes will be discovered in the versions of nginx and openssl that your image uses. Have you ever tried to upgrade a Linux box that hasn't been touched in a few years to the latest version? After a few years, every potential user of your software will have to go through that first.<p>- If Terminal goes out of business or pivots, your image will no longer work (I think?).<p>- Your software will not fit naturally into your users' deployment environments. It will not by default show up in their administration tools, know about their VPNs, integrate with their logging infrastructure, or appear on their graphs.<p>I think this makes a lot of sense as a low-friction way to distribute software, but if you're writing code that people will care about in a few years it shouldn't be the only way.
Looks like they are running on AWS -- you can see in the video "xlarge" and other systems types that are named the same in AWS. Interesting how they are playing some "tricks" to enable some cool capabilities. I am willing to bet they have a AWS box running of each type and using Docker or something like that. Probably spinning up instance types as they are used up. I am also willing to bet that if they got some non-significant traffic, that 5 sec will be 5-10 min. Don't mean to throw cold water on it but over all looks cool -- not sure what I would use it for. I would love to see the architecture for this product.
I would like to see some info on how they're counting CPUs in their pricing. 50 CPUs for $30/mo is too good to be true unless the CPU is not very powerful. Also, most apps that could actually use 50 CPUs would be hurt by only having 800 MB of memory. I think they should just price CPUs and RAM independently.
So someone turned Docker into an online service. Interesting. It seems promising, though not yet mature. For every day computing the cost still seems high however, and I worry about security. Still, it smacks of the future.
Thanks for the feedback everyone! We didn't expect this. If you are in SF, we have a meetup for data scientists tomorrow evening in SoMa at ThoughtBot offices.<p><a href="http://www.meetup.com/Terminal-com-Developers/events/192262892/" rel="nofollow">http://www.meetup.com/Terminal-com-Developers/events/1922628...</a>
Nice.<p>I currently use <a href="http://nitrous.io" rel="nofollow">http://nitrous.io</a> for ad-hoc linux terminal sessions with an integrated editor, and it looks like this does pretty much the same at what will be (for me) a fraction of the price.<p>I like nitrous, so am unlikely to move away - but I will be checking this offering out.<p>The editor could probably do with some polishing, and I'd need an obvious way to create and set environment variables.<p>There's some confusion for me as to what it is you're selling. Is it an adhoc terminal people can spin up when they need - or is it an application server? If just the former, then why have gitlab, and ghost in your images list. If the latter, then why the auto-shutdown on sessions, and what is relatively a high price for hosting.
I, for one, love the name. (I'm impressed they were able to get the domain.) "Terminal" seems like a perfectly natural name for this sort of product.<p>Very excited to see this tech used for online computer science education. When I took CS classes (and TA'd them) it was always a royal pain in the ass to configure everything right on every student's personal computer / OS / etc. Being able to pre-install all the libraries, code, and data once and then blast it to everyone seems like a huge win. Not sure how the pricing would work for a large CS class (or even an online version) but hopefully they can figure that out.
I really like the idea of being able to take a snapshot of my scalable computing environment and sharing it with others. Everything looks slick - will definitely try it the next time I'm building/tweaking a ML model. Are there other solutions which enable the same ?
So for $61 I can access 3,200 CPUs for one day?<p>How does that work?<p>I didn't know there were any computers that had 3,200 CPUs?<p>How would I test that?
I participated in a user study for terminal, although it was a modified version marketed toward a specific use case. We came away quite disappointed in the product, primarily because it didn't include most of the community-provided features/functionality provided here on their full site.<p>Needless to say, we all walked away from the meeting, hit terminal.com and were puzzled as to why they didn't show us this version of the site. Our opinions/feedback would have been drastically different.<p>I'm looking forward to giving this version of terminal a proper run through. The overall concept I found very interesting.