Why Deis and what is it?

Do you want to join the era of open platform-as-a-service? Adopted by Mozilla among others, Deis is one option that combines the strengths of Docker and Chef.

• Groundwork of Deis
• DevOps & NoOps
• Born from Docker
• Decision to Transition to Chef
• Hats Off to Heroku
• Deis on the Rise
• Commercial Support Now Available
• Deis Hosting from Industry-Leading Cloud

Groundwork of Deis

If you are a developer, it’s nice to see all the different types of environments and tools that are becoming available to automate the implementation of apps and to manage infrastructural components. With the nuts and bolts handled, it’s becoming easier to really focus squarely on innovation.

One way to leverage new technologies to improve the lives of developers is via a platform as a service (PaaS). This form of cloud computing give them an ecosystem that creates a distinction between the program and the OS.

Many companies are still deploying their new software directly through servers, but the maturation of Linux Containers (LXC) means that the open source community now has virtualization that is safe and streamlined enough to be taken seriously. We are in the era of Open PaaS – and Deis is a frontrunner in the field. Mozilla and Coinbase are two of its most high-profile users.

How game-ready is LXC? It’s the basis of the Google App Engine. Everyone wants open source tools to have that same type of platform for the use of an individual company.

DevOps & NoOps

NoOps is the idea that operations professionals are gradually being replaced by platforms. From this perspective, it’s easy to see why some people would feel irritated about the notion of PaaS, explains Engine Yard CTO Gabriel Monroy – a central figure in its development. “However, the reality is today’s public application platforms can be shockingly expensive for even moderate workloads,” he says. “Worse yet, the very abstractions they promote are often exactly what frustrate sophisticated teams.”

Developers increasingly want an independently controlled platform where they manage operations exactly as they would like. In this climate, Deis was created in order to basically give developers a system in which they could access DevOps apps in a Docker-era container format.

Deis is built using Docker technology and Chef to manage the infrastructure so that you can have a development platform that is open source and utilizes legacy and cloud components.

Born from Docker

Deis has been part of the Docker movement since it originated. The impact on development was profound and clearly presented a new tool of incredible value, notes Monroy. Docker is “so obvious in retrospect,” he says. “Portable application containers based on LXC, file system de-duplication and tooling to automate building, distributing and executing containers. Obviously!”

Docker has succeeded by leveraging interest in open source containers.  Hundreds of developers have contributed to Docker, and it’s becoming less of a stretch every day to say that Docker is becoming the accepted standard for software containerization. Deis is a Docker PaaS at the forefront of the container movement.

Monroy’s essential argument for Deis is that it is preferable to other Docker-based PaaS systems because “it was developed after Docker launched,” reports Frederic Lardinois of TechCrunch, “so it has always had Docker at its core.”

Decision to Transition to Chef

Before creating Deis, its development team was primarily working with Puppet. Chef was growing fast, though – and there were quickly hundreds of Chef “cookbooks” available. The Deis team turned to Chef to see what it had to offer as the ideas for its platform were germinating.

Deis owes much of its success to the simplified configuration management offered by Data Bags, the agility allowed by its Ruby DSL, and directly arranged resources in place of the indirect RAL provided via Puppet.

Deis could potentially at some point switch to a different configuration management system, but now, the development team believe it’s the strongest choice.

Hats Off to Heroku

Heroku served as a model for Deis during its original creation, comments Monroy. “The command line workflow they’ve pioneered is second to none,” he says. “By treating the developer community as artists, they’ve managed to build a loyal following.”

Deis was built using two major elements of Heroku: its same basic command line approaches its’ “twelve-factor methodology” that serves as a guide for app development.

In addition to what it gets from Heroku, Deis goes beyond with the notions of formations, layers, and nodes. These elements allow operations to create an internal program framework customized to their needs using the trusted tools of Docker and Chef.

Deis on the Rise

Open source rapidly embraced Deis as an impressive way to deliver platform-as-a-service in a Linux environment. Continuing efforts by Deis as it continues to grow include improving installation, better support for services, hardening, authentication features, and the ability to scale to the extent needed by enterprises.

Commercial Support Now Available

Deis introduced a commercial support package last June. The standard and commercial versions of Deis are identical other than support. However, the commercial version does incorporate a user interface that’s intended to make life simpler for paid clients.

Deis Hosting from Industry-Leading Cloud

Are you interested in getting Deis up and running so that you have a reliable platform for your DevOps? Atlantic.Net offers extremely reliable virtual private servers backed by 100% enterprise SSD storage.

Cloud hosting services are only one of our offerings – we also offer dedicated hosting, managed hosting, and HIPAA-compliant hosting.