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Comment by tlrobinson | Hacker News Reader

Here's my outsider's analysis of how Heroku works (well, worked in 2011) from a couple years ago: https://www.quora.com/Scalability/How-does-Heroku-work

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Here is the full link, for those that are not on Quora: https://www.quora.com/Scalability/How-does-Heroku-work/answe...

Has the whole or parts of the architecture been made available as open source?

I want to create a container based PAAS architecture myself, based on docker etc. Does anyone recommend a ready made solution similar to heroku, to serve ruby web apps.

This looks promising https://github.com/progrium/dokku and even uses Heroku buildpacks.

Dokku is cool, but its a small piece of a full PaaS platform like Heroku. It doesn't scale beyond a single "dyno"/machine or do multitenancy.

https://github.com/ddollar/foreman is what is used for the local testing, but also for the actual running of the app on the Cedar stack. One could use Foreman and Docker and AWS to make a pretty reasonable PaaS.

(I'm working on a S3 static-site-only version of Heroku so people don't have to serve static sites behind 3 layers of web servers.)

> S3 static-site-only version of Heroku

You mean...a CDN?

No. I mean a command line tool mimicking the Heroku Toolbelt API but for static sites.

Ah, s3cmd then!

s3cmd is to ec2 as what I'm working on is to Heroku.

Deis will be released soon. It's an open-source PaaS based on Docker & Chef, with a user experience modeled after Heroku. You create a "formation" which contains a configurable number of backends and Nginx proxies. After you git push your app to the formation, you can scale web=N worker=N just like Heroku. Deis will automatically balance Docker containers across the backends, reconfigure routing, etc.. all using Chef. The goal is to provide a Heroku-like platform where you control everything: Chef Server, PaaS controllers, hosting providers, routing layer, etc..

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