Roll Your Own PaaS With Flynn
As a developer, I’ve long struggled with the problem of how to deploy the applications I create. In an ideal world, I could spend all of my energy doing what I do best (building applications), and none of my energy dealing with operations concerns. That sounds like a good reason to have an operations team. But an operations team has the same problem because ideally, the operations team could spend all their time handling operations concerns, and none of their time worrying about how applications were created.
Deploying an application is largely an exercise in defining (or discovering) the relationship between an application and its environment. This can be a tricky and error-prone job because there is so much variety in applications, environments and the people who create them. If everyone involved could agree on an interface contract, we’d all save a lot of time and energy.
This is what PaaS has tried to do. Solutions like EngineYard, Heroku, Google App Engine, and OpenShift have sprung up to varying degrees of success. Of these, Heroku has had the largest impact on the way we think about software service deployment and what PaaS can do. You can find an entire ecosystem of software packages on GitHub designed to make your applications adhere to the tenets of The Twelve-Factor App. And that’s a good thing because we’re starting to see what life could be like in a world where apps fit neatly into PaaS-shaped boxes.