Nanobox, Focus on code, not operations.
August 17, 2018
Nanobox, Focus on code, not operations.
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Nanobox
We use Nanobox to deploy our entire server side resources to a chosen cloud. It helps us remove any need for an operations person. With a click of a button we deploy the entire system - a NodeJS server, a NodeJS queue manager, database, static sites and web applications.
To a certain extent, we do not need to deal with many operational needs, SSL, code delivery, logging, load balancing, scaling, networking, etc...
To a certain extent, we do not need to deal with many operational needs, SSL, code delivery, logging, load balancing, scaling, networking, etc...
- Relatively easy setup. One file named "boxfile.xml" controls all relevant services including there communication ports, routes and build steps.
- Scaling is easy - you can put everything on one machine, split certain services to dedicated machines and scale services to multiple machines. best of all this can be done at any time with almost zero down time.
- I have not used this yet, but for a few hundred dollars a month you can get dedicated operational services to help you make your setup even easier and ensure your system is operational.
- The company has not been very communicative as of lately. Not much news, no apparent work on missing features.
- Some components are incomplete as far as some critical features. For example, I use RethinkDB as my database and it's missing critical features like backup and clustering, so It is unusable and they should have made that clear from the get go.
- The pricing on the support plan is vague. I do have the feeling it is actually well worth the money, but it's hard to form a decisions based without more predictable specific.
- Seems to me like the platform's future is unclear.
- The platform is saving me a lot of time I would have been wasting on operations instead of development.
- The platform is saving me a lot of money as I can easily switch between cloud providers to find the best price.
- I am worried though for the price I might have to pay in case of an unexpected system issue.
- Hopefully I will be able to pay the support plan before that.
The ability to choose your own cloud provider is huge, especially for a small start up like I have. We have a lot of free credit from AWS, Google Cloud, IBM, Azure, etc...
The data layer is baked into the system which is better for integration then an external provider.
There are also a lot fewer differences between environment as everything is Docker based which gives me the confidence that what works on my machine is going to work in production.
Heroku doesn't have good support for Docker containers yet and although Heroku has served me well in the past, it is limited in some aspects.
The data layer is baked into the system which is better for integration then an external provider.
There are also a lot fewer differences between environment as everything is Docker based which gives me the confidence that what works on my machine is going to work in production.
Heroku doesn't have good support for Docker containers yet and although Heroku has served me well in the past, it is limited in some aspects.