Well, as of this writing, there has been a major disruption in what you might consider to be the cloud infrastructure of the internet. Amazon EC2 has been having issues in one of it’s major data centers for almost a day and a half now, which is what you would say is something of a catastrophe for a service that’s only supposed to be down for 4 hours in an entire year. Reports are spotty, but most people should be seriously looking at other options at this point.

The reason that you can be reading this right now, is because I’m not running my blog or most of my other sites on anything that depends on EC2. However I do work on a couple of sites that use Heroku, which is one of the services effected by this downtime. Heroku is what some people would call a PaaS, or Platform as a Service provider. They work with mostly Rails applications and make it dead simple. Just to illustrate, the process for deploying a new Rails application to Heroku is something like this:

• Run heroku create appname
• git push git@heroku.com:appname.git master
• Run heroku rake db:migrate

That’s it, there is no step 3 if you don’t have any initial data. Heroku handles all of the web serving, the gem fetching, and the database creating and configuration for you. It’s such a great service that I really want to have something like it around for ever. Until yesterday, I was content believing that Heroku would be around to provide that purpose. There are a couple of other PaaS providers out there, but Heroku is the model that I want to emulate.

Today I am contemplating what exactly you would need in order to duplicate the easy-deploy functionality that you have on Heroku on personal dedicated or VPS server. So far the services that I know that you would need are:

• Apache + Passenger (or Nginx + Passenger) for serving rails applications
• Gitolite (or maybe gitosis) for handling the git repositories
• Postgres database
• RVM for handling the possibly different environments that each application needs.
• sshd setup on the server
• A fairly complex git post-receive hook.

It wouldn’t be too hard to create a simple script (or one of Linode’s StackScripts) to set up all of this software with a single click / bash command once you have the basic server setup. In fact, this script is probably a good starting point, as it sets up nginx, passenger, postgres and Ruby Enterprise Edition.

The tricky part is the post-receive hook of course, which needs to do the heavy lifting of forking what was just pushed, setting up rvm correctly, running bundle install on the application, and resetting the server.

There are a bunch of features of heroku that aren’t duplicated by this type of a setup, but I think that this would cover the 80% case. It also has some advantages like having persistent local storage available that aren’t available on heroku. If this outage goes on for very much longer, I might end up setting up this stack just for one of my current clients. If I do, then I’ll probably share the setup instructions here.