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Show HN: A Bot to Deploy to AWS, Digital Ocean Etc.

by LukeFitzpatrick on 8/28/16, 2:08 PM with 39 comments

  • by vemv on 8/28/16, 9:18 PM

    There's a number of startups doing some variation of this.

    What many don't seem aware of is that plain pull requests, in combination with CI, entirely kill the need for a deploy app/bot.

    This is how I do it at my current company:

      * use plain git flow (master/develop, hotfixes, etc)
  * use additional explicit branches per deployment target (e.g. master-spain for http://myapp.es, master-mexico for http://myapp.mx).
  * Protect these branches using github/bitbucket 'protected branches'.
  * open a PR from master to master-spain for performing a deploy of said target, detailng nicely what is being deployed and why.
  * instruct CI to deploy my app on each build of master-spain. master and develop are never deployed.
    This setup has the same benefits (and then some more) than competitors:

      * Explicit deployment authors, reasons, timestamps
  * Impossible to deploy red code
  * Impossible to deploy code not in master
  * Impossible to deploy concurrently to the same target
    Hope it helps someone!

  • by avtar on 8/28/16, 7:01 PM

    Seems like a pretty neat service. To save others some time, they don't have a free tier, you can't host it yourself, and they use Docker for builds before deployments:

    http://support.deploybot.com/article/1028-plans-and-pricing

  • by schappim on 8/29/16, 1:34 AM

    We[1] use DeployBot every day and we can't endorse them enough!

    The combination of DeployBot, Github and AWS Elastic Beanstalk is awesome and is the closest thing to having Heroku in Australia.

    We used to just use Elastic Beanstalk, but when AWS moved their deploy method away from git to using zips of S3 bundles, it meant that you needed to reupload the entire app whenever you made a change (not just the delta). This can take a long time on ADSL. DeployBot saved the day here, and allowed us to pull the code from Github.

    [1] http://littlebirdelectronics.com

  • by jondubois on 8/29/16, 10:15 AM

    The problem with generic deployment services like this is that they don't account for scalability.

    Different stacks have different requirements. I built my own deployment service for my open source project/stack specifically so that it would handle scalability too. See https://baasil.io/ I know Laravel followed this approach too with https://forge.laravel.com

    I think using more sepcialized deployment stacks (as opposed to generic ones) is the best approach for non-trivial apps.

    Though I guess if you use a microservices approach, you could have a different deployer for different kinds of services.

  • by obisw4n on 8/29/16, 12:10 AM

    Migrated a complex Jenkins setup to Deploybot in 2015, saves our company a ton of time managing deploys. I'd highly recommend deploybot to anyone.

    If I could critique even just one thing it would probably be its pricing structure for personal use, I can't justify $15/m just for deployments. I'd love if they had some kind of personal "developer" tier with support for more repos. On the business side, $15/m is ridiculously cheap for what service we're getting.

  • by jszymborski on 8/28/16, 9:36 PM

    How does this compare to something like Laravel Forge[0]? Is it just that Forge focuses on PHP?

    [0] https://forge.laravel.com

  • by joshmn on 8/28/16, 7:37 PM

    Kudos to WildBit. They're undeniably great in all the ways.

  • by parasanti on 8/28/16, 10:28 PM

    Any suggestions on reading material/designs for deploying a complete CI process for a new development team using these newer processes/applications?

  • by lsiebert on 8/29/16, 1:23 AM

    Heh, my company uses this. I didn't realise it was so new that it deserved a HN post to it's front page.

  • by vs2 on 8/28/16, 6:34 PM

    I have used deploybot for over a year, great engineering. My favourite deploy tool

  • by riffic on 8/29/16, 3:07 AM

    Happy user of DeployBot here. Does exactly what it's advertised it does.

  • by sandstrom on 8/28/16, 8:56 PM

    Any suggestions on similar open-source tools?