The Heroku of Django
Heroku is a popular service where you can deploy your Ruby on Rails application without having to worry about servers. It’s an example of a Platform as a Service (PaaS).
Is there something analogous to Heroku where one can deploy a Django application? Is there a “Heroku for Django”?
I’ve been monitoring this question for a while, and I’ve found several startups currently working on a PaaS for Django (or more generally, for Python apps/sites). As far as I can tell, all of them are still in alpha or private beta. Here’s my list, in alphabetical order:
- 30loops
- AppHosted by Lumentica
- DjangoZoom by NodeRabbit
- ep.io by Epio Ltd.
- Gondor by Eldarion, Inc.
- Nuage by NuageHQ LLC
- Stable
- Pydra
- Stackato by ActiveState (extends Cloud Foundry)
There was Djangy, but it died in germination.
DotCloud promises to offer something more ambitious: a PaaS/SaaS for Django, Ruby on Rails, and a bunch of other things. They got funded by Y Combinator and, more recently, by some other investors, so hopefully they get out of beta some day. (Update: On June 22, 2011, they became open to all.)
Another option is to deploy a Django app on Google App Engine. That’s a kludge, because Django expects a relational database (like MySQL or PostgreSQL), and the App Engine Datastore isn’t a relational database. One can use fudge like Django-nonrel to make it kinda work, but that’s more hassle than I want.
PiCloud is another service for running python code in “the cloud,” but instead of running a Django app, one runs a single python function on the PiCloud cloud. I don’t think you could run a whole Django app on PiCloud; their documentation wasn’t clear.
Aside: Before writing this, I ran all my Django apps on WebFaction, which is a more traditional hosting company, but unique in that they have excellent support for Python and Django.
Updates
April 12: I’ve gotten a beta invite to DotCloud. Unfortunately they don’t support the PostGIS extensions to PostgreSQL yet. I thought of connecting a Django app running on DotCloud to a PostGIS database running on an external server, then I ran into another problem: geospatial libraries like GEOS, PROJ.4 and GDAL aren’t installed (and there seems to be problems installing them). I filed some support tickets with DotCloud and they were very responsive. They say PostGIS is coming. No word yet about the geospatial libraries.
April 12: VMware has announced Cloud Foundry, a PaaS for “Spring, Rails and Node.js applications” and potentially others coming in the future (e.g. Django).
May 13: Apparently ActiveState is going to offer a Python (and Perl) extension to Cloud Foundry called Stackato.
May 18: AppHosted is now out of beta and open to the general public. Also, I got a beta invite to try DjangoZoom.
June 2: Heroku recently announced a new stack that can “run anything”, including Django apps. For analysis, check out the comments on Hacker News.
June 10: I got an invitation to the private beta for Gondor.
June 22: DotCloud is now open to all, and they’ve announced pricing.
July 14: ActiveState invited me to try their private beta of Stackato (based on Cloud Foundry).
July 27: ep.io invited me to try their private beta.
September 2: Gondor has launched.
September 28: News from Heroku: “Python has joined the growing ranks of officially-supported languages on Heroku’s polyglot platform, going into public beta as of today. Python is the most-requested language for Heroku, and it brings with it the top-notch Django web framework.” Maybe the Heroku of Django will be Heroku!
October 6: Google has announced a limited preview of something they call “Google Cloud SQL.” It’s basically a MySQL database “in the cloud” that you can talk to via various APIs. One implication is that it will probably be much easier to put regular Django apps on Google App Engine.
November 8: Stackato is now in open beta.
November 18: Wired published an article about Cloud Foundry, noting how it’s quite different from Heroku and Google App Engine, especially in that it’s open source like Linux and Android.
Image credit: Django pony by Maven@China on Flickr is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 License. (I did some cropping.)
Troy McConaghy
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