I was looking at Webbynode today and while their comparable $20/mo plan has slightly more ram than linode what really interested me was their ReadyStacks system.

Basically, you setup a "webby" or whatever and you can simply click which version of Ruby/Rails/Django/etc and it would provision the server for you. Pretty cool.

I'm not jumping ship because I am happy with linode and while the ReadyStacks would be nice, I simply don't provision servers all that often.

However, I was interested in the idea. So, are there any plans in the near future for linode to offer something similar?

Thanks

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Personally I love Linodes current business model of focusing on VPS and leaving the software end completely up to you. IMO it's the best thing next to having your own hardware.

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Well, one could argue that rapid VPS setup is key to a good VPS.

At home, I sometimes hose up virtual machines and wished I had a quick way of provisioning them out.

Like I said, it's not a deal breaker for me but I think it's a nice feature.

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We have plans, and that's all I'm going to say about that!

My personal view is somewhat of a skeptical one. The pre-made distro deal or the install-what-I-checkbox-at-deployment-time is fancy, but it's kinda gimmicky.

How often do people deploy? For the majority: one time and then you stick with the distro you have. Typical usage is deploy once and forget it. If you need to bring servers up often then you're already into something involving configuration management.

Does it really save that much time when a single "apt-get install package1 package2 package3" gets you to the same point? Having apache and friends (for example) pre-installed saves you a step or two, but you still need to do the hard stuff -- configure virtual hosts, tweak configs, etc. Big deal.

Does one size fit all? There's a million different ways to configure things, and what I want may not be what you want.

It's a gimmick. Give me an example where package management doesn't take care of installing a stack for you (or where it doesn't but should). Is installing a couple of packages really that hard?

For first timers it may get them a head start, but there's still work to be done. Our answer to this is the Linode Library, which we just announced a few minutes ago. Recipes, how-tos, and guides that get you up and running quickly and easily.

-Chris

Looks like that is a promotion as well...

-Tom

One interesting feature of Webbynode is that you are allowed to have your apps set up on GitHub, and when a new instance is deployed, it automatically fetches the latest version of the app, and run through the setup scripts in there.

Personally I found it a great feature when you need to mass-deploy VM instances with similar setups I have a shell script somewhere on a private subversion repo that does pretty much that on a Debian Lenny box -- but I need to SSH in, download the script, and then run it manually. Would be nice to be able to instruct newly deployed VPS to run this script at this URL...

Would having a script create/deploy/boot a new Linode with a given ssh key in /root/.ssh/authorized_keys do the trick? From there, the script could fire off commands via ssh to do what needs doing.

Completely hypothetical

Who is going to take responsibility for technical issues people might have with those ready-made disk images? Or even worse yet, security holes?

In addition, on popular distros such as Ubuntu, a fully functioning LAMP stack is just a few apt-get's away. If you re-deploy frequently enough that this causes you pain, you might as well whip up a bash script that sets up everything exactly the way you like. I have one that I use every time I set up a new Debian server. I just run my script with a couple of parameters, and it installs all the packages I need, downloads and compiles some more, and fetches all my customized configuration files from my backup server. The whole process takes a whopping 5 minutes.

Couldn't agree more. I have vps's at a few providers (still waiting for Linode to set up in a few European/Australasian/RegionFoo/etc. datacenters ) and often have to spend a fair amount of time uninstalling all sorts of rubbish just to get started.

I haven't used it, but SUSE Studio lets you customize and build Xen images. Sounds pretty cool, if it works as advertised.

I see they don't offer a backup service either !

And Webbynode have an insane promotion going on! The 256MB plan is down from $15 to an astounding $15! Take that, Linode

Seriously, I'm sticking with Linode. I like the approach, it's like getting a dedicated server. It's just the hardware you get and the rest is up to you. The pre-installed stuff you could get elsewhere really saves you about 10 seconds (probably less, since you may need additional packages, etc.) installing apache and friends.

Thanks guys. And no worries from me...I'm sticking with Linode. The only other VPS I would consider is Slicehost but that's because they have a great API. But at least Linode has one going too.

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It's on caker's to-do list - right after "Acquire a fluent command of Bulgarian" and before "Become a virtuoso trombonist".

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/ Peter

MMM I'd suspect a good chance of overstacking their servers

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Where "Thought Crime" is commited

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