Some of you may remember Rails Deploy In An Hour, a Ruby deployment class I tried selling last year. More of you probably remember Ruby Mad Science, the open-source software that went with it.

I’m not selling the class any more, though I haven’t taken down Ruby Mad Science, and I don’t intend to. But it won’t be getting the maintenance it would want… now that I understand just how much that is.

I wondered, “why aren’t there more good Ruby deployment products out there?” And “why don’t people know more about the books there already are?” And as I learned more I started to wonder, “why aren’t there more Heroku competitors?” And “why did Ninefold stop supporting Rails?”

These are interesting questions. I know the answers better now, and I’m happy to share them. Perhaps they’ll help the next person fix the problem better than I did.

What People Want

It turns out that programmers hate doing deployment. The programmers I’m targeting (hobbyists, early developers, small startup guys) extra-specially hate doing deployment. They just want it done and working with minimal work.

This is still a pipe dream, it turns out. My software helps a bit, but not enough. Let’s talk about why.

Why the Technical Side Fails

All the components of your server, including the OS, the system libraries, your web framework, your database, other storage (MemCacheD, Redis, etc.), your work queue, your app itself and any other little utilities (process manager, log rotator, monitoring, web server, app server) are gonna fight. Individually, any two of them are more-or-less compatible.

But you know that exercise where they say “each component of the space shuttle is 99% reliable and there are 1000 components, how reliable is it?” (Answer: 0.0043% chance it works) And that exercise where you calculate the number of relationships between N components? You wind up with O(N^2) relationships that are each, like, 95% reliable, and the end result falls over and dies.

I knew all of this and I still wrote Ruby Mad Science. I did it by saying I was gonna lock down everything. And to be fair, I nearly did. It’s hard to lock down, say, the version of Chef that Vagrant uses, plus all its cookbooks, plus their packages, plus… Yeah. You should be grateful for the Bundler. For anything in Ruby it’s really easy. If the rest of the world followed suit, this problem might be tractable.

Here’s where we fail: the OS. There is no equivalent of Gemfile.lock for Ubuntu packages, despite a number of ugly attempts to hack it together. There’s just no easy way to do it. Here’s what depends on the OS: everything.

(Real outfits with an Ops group handle this by keeping a local mirror of some version of Ubuntu they’ve tested out so that nothing gets quietly upgraded while they’re not looking. It’s possible, but not pretty, and completely inappropriate for my customers to have to do.)

Also, if you somehow succeed then your security is hosed. You know all those OpenSSL bugs that come out? If you upgrade for them, you have to test everything again. It’s really, really ugly. If you don’t upgrade for them, well, then everybody using your software is 100% vulnerable to those bugs. Also ugly.

So: that’s why this is seriously high-maintenance for me and still doesn’t work well enough for you.

If I got this working, though, it turns out there’s another problem. I think I could have eventually solved the technical problem. But the next problem? Not so much.

Why the People Side Fails

Remember how I said developers hate doing deployment? My mental model of this was “people hate doing deployment, so they’ll use my software as a quick start, get it working well enough with a fixed set of tools, and rarely think about it again. As long as it works, everybody’s happy.”

This model turns out to be flawed.

First: people hate being told what tools to use. I can say “you’ll be using Chef, MySQL, Unicorn, and Capistrano.” People respond, “eh, maybe if you support Postgres and Ansible.”

This is, of course, perfectly normal and reasonable. Right now people have a menu of hundreds of these tools, and they want to use the five they know the interface for. I should know this – why do you think I picked the menu I did? They were the ones I knew best.

I can tell people where to debug, a comprehensive list of what errors you can hit, where you add package names and how to turn on various software with third-party modules… But if programmers are going to have to debug things, they want to debug things they like.

It can work so well there’s nothing to debug. But you can’t (mostly) tell people “you’ll be doing these things with tools you don’t know and don’t want to.”

Won’t people learn the new tools? Mostly no. That goes back to the whole “developers hate doing deployment” thing. If it’s going to take as much effort as learning a new programming language, and they hate it, they’re not going to do it.

That’s fair.

What Do People Use?

If you’re technically handy, you can deploy a server yourself, once, and then hope it never needs updating. This solution is very popular and very cheap. It has terrible security, but it turns out most people don’t care (yet.) We’re hitting the point where this is a really bad idea even if you’re not a serious target, but (weirdly) we didn’t get there years ago. It’s starting to happen.

If you can afford an Ops team, the equivalent is to do a deployment and then maintain it, first manually and then with Puppet or Chef over time. It works pretty well, but it requires constant maintenance from people with high salaries. Good for companies, not an option for hobbyists.

And then there’s Heroku or (for the rich) EngineYard. This is what people actually want: “look, you manage it for me.” It turns out that this is fairly expensive. Heroku makes good money for large installations, where people stop using them as soon as possible. But in return they take a big loss on vast numbers of price-sensitive free hobbyists. This isn’t as cushy a business as it looks like, is what I’m saying.

Questions

In no particular order…

But Didn’t People Buy It?

A few. But this is clearly not as good a business as, say, continuing to sell my Ruby on Rails ebook, and that’s not a crazy high bar. More to the point, there was very little continuing buying of it. This is just a hard market. And with this much maintenance, “not as good a business as selling one specific ebook forever” is a pretty severe condemnation :-/

Does This Mean Nobody Will Ever Solve This?

Not at all. Heroku is doing a pretty darn good job with one solution, and there are various other up-and-coming solutions that are (slowly) happening. Things are better than they used to be, and I have every confidence they’ll keep getting better. I just don’t think it’ll happen overnight. And I don’t think my approach will be scalable for the next guy, either. Prove me wrong! I’d love to use your product if it works.

Will Everybody Stop Using Chef?

Nope. This basic approach (config management, orchestration, VMs) is actually really powerful, including the Docker variation on the same thing. But right now it’s a lot of work. Several important tools are missing, and several more are clearly not at all usable for this.

If you have a dedicated DevOps team, it’s great right now. If you’re a single random developer, it’s too much work. But the amount of work decreases every year. In 5-10 years I expect it would be workable… Except something else is likely to overturn the whole current arrangement before then.

So I guess everybody will stop using Chef, but not for awhile. All of the current tools (Chef, Puppet, Ansible, Salt) are early and have significant warts. I can’t be 100% sure one of them won’t be the long-term solution, but not in any of their current form.

Doesn’t Docker Fix All This?

Not really. Docker still has a huge question mark for state of all kinds — logfiles, databases, data files, caches. Most vendors would like you to pay them to handle the stuff involving state, which is ten kinds of “not the whole answer.”

When I say “huge question mark” I mean “what do you do about that?” Do you migrate it off immediately? To where, a paid third-party service? How do you make a seamless transition, given how hard SQL database switchovers are? There are various (early, slightly ugly) answers, but none that feel like what we’ll be doing in 5-10 years.

Docker is powerful. But our workflow about how to use it is still in its infancy.