Time to start migrate away from Heroku

[frjo]

See https://wsvincent.com/heroku-is-finally-dead/

[wes-otf]

ugh this sucks!

[wes-otf]

@frjo what do you think is a smart next move? docker on a VPS?

[frjo]

To make it easier for someone to take over maintenance in the future I would prefer something like fly.io. The article mention several options.

[frjo]

I plan to test the options out and then we can pick one and move hypha test there as a test run.

[frjo]

I have tested several SaaS and PaaS and the one I have best success with so far is Digitalocean app plattform.

[frjo]

I have it running on Digitalocean app plattform at https://hypha-test-6b5je.ondigitalocean.app.

Nice system for the most part and it is quite a bit cheaper than Heroku I think. Build and deploys are however annoyingly slow. Also some bugs/quirks around getting databases with the correct permissions the first time.

[frjo]

I'm looking in to plain vps with docker now to see how easy you can get that up and running.

The issues I see are mostly around backups and deployments. Getting it to just run Hypha is likly the easy part.

[irl]

I'm looking in to plain vps with docker now to see how easy you can get that up and running.

The issues I see are mostly around backups and deployments. Getting it to just run Hypha is likly the easy part.

You might remember me from a while ago before we split up the AWS account usage to isolate the different applications.

Please let me know if you want to have a discussion on this, we could likely put together something for you with rootless Podman rather than Docker. It's not a complex app but a daemon sat around running as root all the time is a liability.

[frjo]

@irl I know about podman but never used it. Would love to learn about your setup. Even more interested in how you solved files and db backups. I'm keen on building systems that "fail well".

We have a the docker conf in place since people were asking for it. Have tried to learn some docker best practises and I have made some improvements to the docker conf recently.

[wes-otf]

@irl echoing @frjo's sentiments of wanting to hear more. I've previously done a bit of RHEL work that required working a bit with podman but maybe never went deep enough to notice a difference between that and rootless docker. If you had thoughts or resources please feel free to drop them!

[wes-otf]

If we need alternatives though I also like the VPS option - I feel like a containerized VPS setup lowers the barrier of entry for adopters and allows us to pivot easier if a provider goes down

[irl]

I think the VPS option gives you the lowest level of lock in. Our framework is to deploy some common things via Ansible to provide us a secured host with Podman available and then we just have the application running in Podman with those configs also deployed via Ansible.

• https://guardianproject.dev/sr2/ansible-collection-core contains our podman_host role
• https://ansible-lockdown.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ provides baseline hardening of the host, although we have overrides that are specific for our setup

For backups, we use snapshots of the block storage attached to the VM, but also for Postgres you can stream the WAL to another location so you can have zero data loss in the event of a failure, the backup is always up to date (minus some few seconds latency perhaps but you can live with that).

Potentially this is also just something we can provide you with VPS hosting for.

I am on annual leave this week but I'd be happy to have a call next week.