Hello and welcome to the inaugural post on the Viaduct blog! In this initial post I wanted to quickly explain our plans and what we're doing about making them a reality.
Why are you doing this?
For many years, we've been dreaming of an application hosting platform which did everything we needed as developers. We didn't want to re-write lots of our code just so it worked with a specific platform, we wanted a platform to work with our code.
This is the reason for Viaduct. Viaduct is a platform which offers everything we think developers need from a hosting platform. The list below is just a few of the things we wanted to solve out of the box:
No need to re-write your application to have your all configuration in environment variables. Just upload a config file and we'll ensure it's always in place when you deploy.
Ability to mount shared directories which persist across all deployments.
Ability to instantly add or remove resources at the click of a button without worrying about extortionate costs.
Support for multiple environments (Ruby, Python, Node.js, PHP etc...) from the company provider and the ability to deploy applications with a mixture of environments. If you need to run Ruby webservers and Node.js background workers - no problem!
Ability to use enterprise-quality database instances for a variety of different database backends. We plan to support MySQL, Postgres, MongoDB and Redis initially. We're also providing free "hobby" databases for MySQL & Postgres. Who wants go "off network" for their databases?
What's happening right now...
Right now we're working away like crazy on the backend management platform. This system is now very much on it's way and is already deploying & managing applications in our development environments.
We're just about to place orders for some serious amounts of hardware to power everything we have planned.
We're going to continue working hard over the upcoming Christmas period and hoping to launch a beta to our mailing list towards the end of January.
What can I expect on this blog?
We want to keep everyone in the loop about what's going on so we'll be using this blog to talk about upcoming features, development progress and lots of other behind the scenes information.
How can I get on the beta?
Simple. Just pop your name on our mailing list and we'll let you know as soon as we're ready to go!