Introducing Empire: A Self-Hosted PaaS Built on Docker and Amazon ECS

This looks great: simple yet powerful. I&#x27;m working a lot with Kubernetes, and you don&#x27;t actually need to run an overlay network on AWS (or GCE). On AWS, there&#x27;s some VPC magic that surprised me when I first saw it! But I believe that&#x27;s beside the point; it&#x27;s not about ECS vs Kubernetes, it is about what we can build on top.<p>In particular, I think the idea of embedding a Procfile in a Docker image is really clever; it neatly solves the problem of how to distribute the metadata about how to run an image.

I&#x27;m interested in hearing more about how you use this in terms of development lifecycle. Does a container image get created for every release of your app? I&#x27;ve always wondered about the more correct approach to this.<p>This is how I currently use Docker:<p>1) Custom base image with all the things my company needs like supervisord, libpq, etc..<p>2) Custom per-service base images like ones with Java for our Clojure services or Python for our research services which are built off of the base.<p>3) A release consists of pulling the latest version of the base image, example, acme-python, and then injecting the latest project code into it.<p>My concern here essentially boils down to the image repo. Github needs to add container storage because while I admire Docker Hub&#x27;s efforts, I don&#x27;t trust it.

Really cool stuff. Seems like you found a good way to hand off most of the hard stuff to AWS and only do a few key things yourselves to make the experience better. As such I think Empire has the potential to be a viable option for many companies, which is something I rarely say about a PaaS project :)

This is neat. You might want to check out KONG (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;Mashape&#x2F;kong" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;Mashape&#x2F;kong</a>) instead of putting a plain nginx in front of the containers&#x2F;microservices. It is built on top of nginx too, but it provides all the extra functionality like rate-limiting and authentication via plugins.

This work has plenty about it that was interesting. The best part to me was their answer to &quot;why not feature X?&quot; They said they prefer to build upon the most mature and stable technologies along with naming a few. Too many teams end up losing competitiveness by wasting precious hours debugging the latest and greatest thing that isn&#x27;t quite reliable yet. Their choice is wiser and might get attention of more risk-conscious users.

Thank you, this looks awesome! As someone who still hasn&#x27;t embraced docker due to all the orchestration &#x2F; discovery madness I really appreciate such an elegant solution. I love and run everything on AWS so building on top of ECS is just another selling point.

Does this really classify as &quot;self hosted&quot; if it&#x27;s heavily dependent on AWS?

How do you handle running one-off tasks (consoles, migrations etc) on this setup? This is something most of these systems seem to ignore...

Congrats, not everyone can create a simple elegant platform and write about it in such an accessible manner. I suppose you&#x27;re standing on the shoulders of giants, but still.<p>This is the level of engineering&#x2F;communication I always shoot for, and which (somewhat disappointingly) is rare where I&#x27;ve worked.

personally i use dokku (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;progrium&#x2F;dokku" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;progrium&#x2F;dokku</a>). i would be happy to see one standard &quot;heroku-like&quot; paass since i feel too many people trying to tackle the same problem.

Instead of nginx, we&#x27;ve had a pretty good experience using vulcand (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;mailgun&#x2F;vulcand" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;mailgun&#x2F;vulcand</a>) as the front-end router for our micro-services.

&gt; We tried Deis briefly but ultimately decided that it was more complicated than we felt it needed to be.<p>That kind of reminds me of <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;xkcd.com&#x2F;927&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;xkcd.com&#x2F;927&#x2F;</a><p>Sorry if that&#x27;s not the case. I&#x27;ve also played briefly with Flynn and Deis and I haven&#x27;t found anything <i>that</i> complicated that would need a whole rewrite and changing the entire approach. Moreover with Deis I can easily change providers (DO, AWS, Azure, etc.) and with Emprire I&#x27;m bound to ECS. At least that was my first impression, I have to read more.

How to autoscale with this?

<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.openshift.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.openshift.org&#x2F;</a><p>Just putting this out there in case anyone is looking for an alternate open-source PaaS.<p>I&#x27;ve never personally used it before (self-hosted), but it may be something that someone out there is looking for.

aws is silly expensive. Why didnt you build this on top of digitalocean? Digitalocean is so awesome right now. They dont even charge for bandwidth overages.