I stumbled upon Convox a couple weeks ago, and found it pretty interesting. It’s led by a few people formerly from Heroku, and it certainly feels like it. A simple command-line interface to manage your applications on AWS, with almost no AWS-specific configuration required.
An example of how simple it is to deploy a new application:
$ cd ~/my-new-application
$ convox apps create
$ convox apps info
Name my-new-application
Status creating
Release (none)
Processes (none)
Endpoints
$ convox deploy
Deploying my-new-application
Creating tarball... OK
Uploading... 911 B / 911 B 100.00 % 0
RUNNING: tar xz
...
... wait 5-10 minutes for the ELB to be registered ...
$ convox apps info
Name my-new-application
Status running
Release RIIDWNBBXKL
Processes web
Endpoints my-new-application-web-L7URZLD-XXXXXXX.ap-northeast-1.elb.amazonaws.com:80 (web)
Now, you can access your application at that ELB specified in the “Endpoints” section.
I haven’t used Convox with more complex applications, but it definitely looks interesting. It uses a little too much infrastructure than I would like for personal, small projects (a dedicated ELB for the service manager, for example). However, when you’re managing multiple large deploys of complex applications, the time saved by Convox doing the infrastructure work for you seems like it would pay for itself.
The philosophy behind Convox:
The Convox team and the Rack project have a strong philosophy about how to manage cloud services. Some choices we frequently consider:
- Open over Closed
- Integration over Invention
- Services over Software
- Robots over Humans
- Shared Expertise vs Bespoke
- Porcelain over Plumbing
I want to focus on “Robots over Humans” here — one of AWS’s greatest strengths is that almost every single thing can be automated via an API. However, I feel like its greatest weakness is that the APIs are not very user-friendly — they’re very disjointed and not consistent between services. The AWS-provided GUI “service dashboard” is packed with features, and you can see some kind of similarity with UI elements, but it basically stops there. Look at the Route 53, ElastiCache, and EC2 dashboards — they’re completely different.
Convox, in my limited experience, abstracts all of this unfriendliness away and presents you with a simple command line interface to allow you to focus on your core competency — being an application developer.
I, personally, am an application / infrastructure developer (some may call me DevOps, but I’m not particularly attached to that title), and Convox excites me because it has the potential to throw half of the work necessary to get a secure, private application cluster running on AWS.