[web-devel] Haskell web application hosting

[Blake Rain]

On Sat, 2011-03-26 at 19:32 +0200, Michael Snoyman wrote: 
> Hi all,
> 
> JP Moresmau recently sent me an email asking for recommendations on
> hosting a Yesod app. I think a number of you have heard me mention the
> idea of setting up a WAI web hosting system (code named Lambda
> Engine). I think it's time to start hitting this idea hard, and I'd
> like community involvement as much as possible.

This is something that I feel would be *very* useful; perhaps even more
useful than the Yesod installer. I am very excited about seeing this
happen.

> 
> I think we have two extremes we can approach this from: at the one
> end, we can provide a complete hosting solution, similar to Heroku[1].
> People would simply "cabal sdist" their project, type "lambda-engine
> upload mytarball.tar.gz" and their site would be live. Lambda Engine
> would automatically handle database server configuration, DNS setup,
> and so on.


I currently use something similar to the 'vhost' middleware for Wai
(Network.Wai.Middleware.Vhost) and intended to expand it to a more
powerful proxy server; and I like the idea of easily uploading new /
updating current applications.

However, I would probably prefer to upload a binary rather than the
source. None of my servers have any compiler support (for reasons
similar to those stated by Rick Richardson).

I would love to be able to "lambda-engine upload server mysite" (which
would upload "mysite" to a server at "server") and immediately see the
result.

Oh my...


> 
> At the other extreme, we could simply provide a set of shell scripts
> for setting up a vanilla Ubuntu (or Debian, or Cent, or FreeBSD...)
> install to support compiling a WAI application, provide an nginx
> setup, etc. The user would be responsible- and have the freedom to-
> set up his/her own server however he/she wants.

I would prefer to be able to choose the Linux distro I used, so a set of
shell scripts would have to be reasonably generic. However I feel this
would take a lot of effort to realise. IMO better to be just a program.

> 
> There are lots of in-between points on that spectrum. For example, I
> was thinking of perhaps providing a central compilation server that
> everyone could use. In my experience, Haskell applications take very
> few resources to run, but actually building the things take a while.
> Compiling on a local system and then uploading is painful because (1)
> you have to deal with architecture issues and (2) you might have a
> slow upload speed.

If these were problems I suffered from, I would be more comfortable if
this service was commercial.

> 
> Anyway, I'm very interested to hear what other people think about all
> this. I'll enumerate a bunch of random thoughts on this topic:
> 
> * Should this be a for-profit venture, bankrolled by a few members, or
> a community, non-profit approach? (I'm favoring the latter.)

Perhaps both? For single users the community approach would be
wonderful. For us, we would rather pay for a service that would offer
certain guarantees.

> * If we decide to provide some serious hosting power, we might be able
> to make a deal with a hosting provider, stating that we're
> representing the "entire Haskell web community".

I believe that Rick's point about providing some guarantee of long-term
customers would certainly get some hosts on-board, but I fear that the
guarantee would be hard to make.

> * I don't really think this needs to be WAI specific: assuming we just
> use reverse HTTP proxies, this will work for any app that uses
> standalone hosting. We could also support FastCGI if we wanted.

Useful.

> * Remember that Amazon is now providing a free tier, which provides a
> micro EC2 instance (available as either 32 or 64 bit). I think the
> micro instance should be sufficient for running a few web apps, nginx
> and PostgreSQL.

I'm not sure about that one.

> * Since starting up and shutting down instances is so easy with
> Amazon, we could provide both a "web host" image and a "Haskell
> compiler" image. The web host could automatically start up a compiler
> instance as needed.

Sure.

> * Are we going to provide email sending support, with all of the
> complications of dealing with spam lists, or simply offload to
> external services (like Amazon SES[2])?

Would be very useful.

-----------------

* Load balancing? Install lambda-engine on a number of servers and allow
load-balancing between them cross-roads style (XR)?

* ... and be able to provide custom balancing algorithm in Haskell?!

* Upload binary to one machine and it mirrors it to all?

* How to handle per-application configuration (host, and so on)?

* Daemonized lambda-engine?

I'm very excited about this idea; I would love to be able to ditch
lighttpd/apache in favour of a WAI specific server (with optional
FastCGI support).

- Blake xx

> 
> Michael
> 
> [1] http://heroku.com/
> [2] http://aws.amazon.com/ses/
> 
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