Two of us, I do design / development - been working on Omatum for a few years - BugPlug was around a 45 day build out. Josh, the second guy just started full time on Monday.
Nanobox supports multiple languages and we're working on rolling out support for more. Elixir is one we're really excited about. There isn't really any good, standardized support for Elixir deployments, but Nanobox is a huge step in that direction.
It's definitely a tricky balance. Ultimately there's best practices to follow, and there's no need to manually implement best practices in every project if you can automate it. The balance is between time-saved vs absolute control.
Nanobox tries to strike the balance between saving time and giving devs ways to hook into and control the dev-to-production lifecycle.
Core Nanobox team member here. A brief history of how Nanobox came about. We are a small team of developers who were doing a lot of medium to large-ish web applications and found ourselves having to do the same, tedious tasks over and over when deploying apps to production servers. So we built Nanobox to automate the process, save us time, and preserve our sanity.
One common mistake is thinking that you need a fully-fleshed-out dataset with real data. You don't. You just need the bare-bones structure with some generic data, which can easily be accomplished with a seed file. Django calls these fixtures: https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.10/howto/initial-data/.
Once the initial data is seeded, you then just need to implement migrations to update the database as the structure is modified. These too are already built into Django: https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.10/topics/migrations/.
With those in place, every developer can have their own local environment with its own database. I personally use Nanobox (https://nanobox.io) to spin up dev environments with local databases. I then can console into the environment, run the seeding process and any migrations I need too. You just need to set up a version control workflow to keep everybody's codebase in sync.
Yeah, idea to have fixtures is good. We recently migrated from django 1.4 to 1.10 and this time we are tracking all migrations in repo, so atleast the part of maintaining the schema is not a pain anymore. Thanks for mentioning nanobox, will explore.
There's a lot of services out there help to alleviate many of these. Companies like Heroku, Codeship, Engine Yard, etc. One of the newest services to hit the scene is Nanobox (https://nanobox.io).
Nanobox will build both development and production environments using docker containers, but it automates the deploy process, sets up all the networking, locks everything down with firewalls, sets up a load-balancer, health monitor, messaging system, then provides a dashboard that lets you introspect into your app's performance (at least for live apps). Locally it lets you configure your entire environment from a single config file, much like docker-compose, but different.
Artists pull inspiration from things they're familiar with, both then and today. Travel in Medieval times was challenging, causing people to generally stay where they were, limiting their view of the world.
I'm sure these artists had only heard descriptions of elephants from the few that had travelled and actually seen an elephant. They then referenced things they knew are were familiar with in northern Europe: wild boar, trumpets, etc.
> Artists pull inspiration from things they're familiar with, both then and today.
I think that you can broaden this to humanity as a whole. And this is why i find that old Ford quote about faster horses so aggravating.
It is used to claim that the masses are dumb or unimaginative.
But thats not the case.
People would ask for a "faster horse" because that is the means of travel they were used to.
That is not to say everyone (though perhaps some) would mean an actual horse, but that they can't begin to describe something they are not familiar with because they are not familiar with it.
Even the ancient philosophers had to use allegories etc to get an idea across.
- https://news.nanobox.io/packet-now-officially-supported/
- https://docs.nanobox.io/providers/hosting-accounts/packet/
Their full list of officially supported cloud providers is here: https://docs.nanobox.io/providers/hosting-accounts/