Here I am exited as a kid to read the new blog post about Now 2.0. Lets see what the awesome guys at Zeit have in store for us.

Wait... what?! What just happened? Did I miss something?

I honestly thought this would be the announcement of Serverless Docker coming out of beta with the full feature set. Maybe some new features announcements and migration guides for older docker images and node applications.

Boy, was I not expecting this.

Only in august, just 3 months ago, you guys announced Serverless Docker. I was like f*ck yeah this is awesome. Simple docker files for everything. Sub 500ms container startup. Max concurrent requests. Optimised docker images. Running tests as part of your build process. Static deployments using a Docker file. No vendor lock-in. I remember thinking to myself: Dude, this is what the future looks like. And now we are going back to lambdas all over again.

I just think its strange that a flagship feature announced 3 months ago is now just brushed aside. Like "We thought a lot about containers for the past 3 year... and lambdas are superior". Okey, thanks for the update...

You guys probably have your reasoning and I am curious to find out. Maybe its the technical limitations or the feasibility of a business model based on Docker containers. I don't know... from a developer/customer point of view I honestly feel like you guys just took a step backwards.

Serverless is a DevOps centric developer unfriendly paradigm. I'm certainly not moving to Serverless. I suppose I'll have to look at other hosting options. Very disappointing.

We literally just yesterday decided that we would switch our docker containers to now.sh after a week of experimenting and testing. Now after this announcement this makes the new service and any future of using it much more dubious. For our infra we already have pretty good serverless lambda support when we need it via the https://serverless.com/ framework.

The timing could not have been worse :/

Unfortunately I couldn't move one of my applications to the serverless paradigm even if I wanted to—I am rendering SVGs server-side and depend on fonts and other binaries to be installed. Docker was the perfect solution and Now's docker hosting was great.

Does anybody in this thread know of any alternatives that provide a similar service to Now v1 docker?

I will be checking out the Docker support at Digital Ocean. https://www.digitalocean.com/products/one-click-apps/docker/

Thanks,

@eivindml

!

Unfortunately, Digital Ocean's offering, the One-Click-Docker, is nothing more than pre-installed Docker and Docker Compose :/

Is there no one else in this space that has something like a docker swarm hosted model + dns + loadbalancing?

Agreed, I tried DigitalOcean last night and, yea, still have to setup SSL, SSH, etc..

Have you guys tried Dokku? http://dokku.viewdocs.io/dokku/

It's essentially an open source Heroku, worked great for me in the past

I was refraining myself from asking the question, but have no other response yet from Zeit regarding docker, I think we can share alternatives to other people in this thread..

Thing is I don't even want to have to SSH into a VM

maybe https://scalingo.com/ ?

nvm, no real native support for scalingo, maybe https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/build-docker-images-heroku-yml heroku then..

There's a decent list here: https://blog.codeship.com/the-shortlist-of-docker-hosting/

Well.... no more Docker on now is terrible news, at least I see I am not the only one who thinks that. Not everybody likes Lambdas, and Lambdas are not suitable for all use cases. As much as I like Now 1.0. if this decision stands, I am starting to look for alternatives tomorrow.

Did anyone try Hyper.sh ? they seem to embrace the Docker UX

I have tried Hyper.sh - although it is close to Now, I liked it much less. But given the docker ban, it might be a good fallback option.

Well considering we rely a lot on Docker, it seems the only solution available for us :(

Thx for sharing this, it looks like an alternative to hyper.sh

Scalingo is also not "direct docker hosting" as I just found out. They are also "app hosting" and they have docker behind the scenes, and a "docker addon", which I am not sure what is it for, but as I saw the 50 euro per month price tag, I realized it is a waste of time (seems like more of a Heroku clone, then a Now clone).

We've been planning to migrate a REST API with multiple endpoints to Now which is written in Python with Falcon. But with Now v2, this seems to become an issue unless we want to integrate with the http package provided by Now's Python runtime. As far as I understand it, each endpoint would become an individual AWS Lambda and routing would be specified in now.json, right? With Docker it would have been a breeze to deploy on Now. I don't understand the decision to go away from user-provided Dockerfile-based deployment.

I didn't realize this thread was happening here and was commenting on HN, but here are my thoughts. I am sure there are business, strategy or technical reasons for Zeit to announce this, but I hope they reconsider the support for Serverless Docker.

I work for a large media organization and we recently subscribed to a paid account and I have been moving over many of our internal projects like prototypes, design systems, vendor collaboration projects over to now. Now 1.0 is an awesome place to host these projects and possibly, we could have used Now in future for graduating some of our consumer facing projects. Currently, all our consumer facing projects are launched on our standardized AWS/Fastly infrastructure, where we have support for VMs, Containers and Lambdas.

The primitives of Docker are more standardized and cross-platform enough to support the above workflow. Using npm builders from

@now

isn't practical for us. Even though we are heavy node users, we are unlikely to switch over to serverless paradigm for many of our workloads anytime soon. Like others mentioned, it is certainly a no go for many of our PHP and Java projects. Additionally, using the now builders is a lock-in from our standpoint that we want to avoid.

I think if the Serverless Docker option will continue to be available in future, it makes sense for us to continue investing in Now based workflows. I am not a fan of using the alternatives in the form of AWS Fargate or equivalents from GCP or Azure

I truly love you guys, but the decision to abandon Docker is just killing me. I get when you say things like "We have no intention of shutting Now v1 down any soon". But announcing something like this in the way you did is just leaving me gutted.

I know not all customers are going to like product decisions. Sometimes you need to alienate a few customers to appeal to a broader audience. I do think we deserve a little more explanation and reasoning behind this decision. I mean

@matheus

and

@rauchg

here you guys were in April standing on stage and advocating a Docker first strategy with such a passion and commitment. Now 8 months later you are ready to move docker to legacy system. I mean... what happend here?

When a company moves to a relatively new service, it often a big deal. Lots of stakeholders need to convinced and pros and cons are endlessly debated. There are always a lot of naysayers who want to invest in a more "proven technology"... well today I just feel like I just got a big reality check.

Love what

@daniel-gimenes

said: "I think the biggest flaw here was the naming of Now 2.0 and how you presented it".

I think there should be a future for containers under Now. What I would suggest is to keep v1.0 under the "Now Docker" product name and move v2.0 under the "Now Lambda" name. I think having both options available can be awesome going forward. Spin up a quick Lambda to get some small project going. Use a container for a more complex setup where a simple builder isn't going to cut it. I think that would be cool.

Anyway thats my suggestion, hope you guys have a few minutes for a long time supporter.