On Sat, 2011-03-26 at 19:32 +0200, Michael Snoyman wrote:
Hi all,
JP Moresmau recently sent me an email asking for recommendations on hosting a Yesod app. I think a number of you have heard me mention the idea of setting up a WAI web hosting system (code named Lambda Engine). I think it's time to start hitting this idea hard, and I'd like community involvement as much as possible.
This is something that I feel would be *very* useful; perhaps even more useful than the Yesod installer. I am very excited about seeing this happen.
I think we have two extremes we can approach this from: at the one end, we can provide a complete hosting solution, similar to Heroku[1]. People would simply "cabal sdist" their project, type "lambda-engine upload mytarball.tar.gz" and their site would be live. Lambda Engine would automatically handle database server configuration, DNS setup, and so on.
I currently use something similar to the 'vhost' middleware for Wai (Network.Wai.Middleware.Vhost) and intended to expand it to a more powerful proxy server; and I like the idea of easily uploading new / updating current applications. However, I would probably prefer to upload a binary rather than the source. None of my servers have any compiler support (for reasons similar to those stated by Rick Richardson). I would love to be able to "lambda-engine upload server mysite" (which would upload "mysite" to a server at "server") and immediately see the result. Oh my...
At the other extreme, we could simply provide a set of shell scripts for setting up a vanilla Ubuntu (or Debian, or Cent, or FreeBSD...) install to support compiling a WAI application, provide an nginx setup, etc. The user would be responsible- and have the freedom to- set up his/her own server however he/she wants.
I would prefer to be able to choose the Linux distro I used, so a set of shell scripts would have to be reasonably generic. However I feel this would take a lot of effort to realise. IMO better to be just a program.
There are lots of in-between points on that spectrum. For example, I was thinking of perhaps providing a central compilation server that everyone could use. In my experience, Haskell applications take very few resources to run, but actually building the things take a while. Compiling on a local system and then uploading is painful because (1) you have to deal with architecture issues and (2) you might have a slow upload speed.
If these were problems I suffered from, I would be more comfortable if this service was commercial.
Anyway, I'm very interested to hear what other people think about all this. I'll enumerate a bunch of random thoughts on this topic:
* Should this be a for-profit venture, bankrolled by a few members, or a community, non-profit approach? (I'm favoring the latter.)
Perhaps both? For single users the community approach would be wonderful. For us, we would rather pay for a service that would offer certain guarantees.
* If we decide to provide some serious hosting power, we might be able to make a deal with a hosting provider, stating that we're representing the "entire Haskell web community".
I believe that Rick's point about providing some guarantee of long-term customers would certainly get some hosts on-board, but I fear that the guarantee would be hard to make.
* I don't really think this needs to be WAI specific: assuming we just use reverse HTTP proxies, this will work for any app that uses standalone hosting. We could also support FastCGI if we wanted.
Useful.
* Remember that Amazon is now providing a free tier, which provides a micro EC2 instance (available as either 32 or 64 bit). I think the micro instance should be sufficient for running a few web apps, nginx and PostgreSQL.
I'm not sure about that one.
* Since starting up and shutting down instances is so easy with Amazon, we could provide both a "web host" image and a "Haskell compiler" image. The web host could automatically start up a compiler instance as needed.
Sure.
* Are we going to provide email sending support, with all of the complications of dealing with spam lists, or simply offload to external services (like Amazon SES[2])?
Would be very useful. ----------------- * Load balancing? Install lambda-engine on a number of servers and allow load-balancing between them cross-roads style (XR)? * ... and be able to provide custom balancing algorithm in Haskell?! * Upload binary to one machine and it mirrors it to all? * How to handle per-application configuration (host, and so on)? * Daemonized lambda-engine? I'm very excited about this idea; I would love to be able to ditch lighttpd/apache in favour of a WAI specific server (with optional FastCGI support). - Blake xx
Michael
[1] http://heroku.com/ [2] http://aws.amazon.com/ses/
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