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Django container work underway at (mt)

May 7th, 2007 at 2:31 pm

Updated: Django GridContainer Beta now accepting applications.

Due to increasing popularity and customer demand, our engineering team is working hard on getting a container infrastructure in place on the (gs) Grid-Service platform that will support Django. For those of you who haven’t heard of it, Django is a web application framework implemented in Python that simplifies development and promotes the use of good, clean design principles.

The implementation will be technically similar to our existing RoR containers when completed. There is a fair amount of engineering yet to be done before we are ready for a production release, but we are working as quickly as resources will allow. Stay tuned to this blog for more information on the project as it progresses.

20 Responses to “Django container work underway at (mt)”

  1. Tom Says:

    That’s great to hear! Can’t wait.

  2. adriand Says:

    Excellent news!

  3. arthur Says:

    This is great news. The two obvious questions:

    - any (rough) time frame for this: 3 months, 6, a year?

    - what does technically similar to RoR means: are you guys going the lightty route, or mod-python?

    cheers,
    arthur

  4. chl Says:

    Hi Arthur. I’ll say what I can regarding your questions. Not that I’m holding anything back, we just don’t know all the answers yet.

    1) I’d certainly hope we’d have this out inside of 6 months, but the plan is to release it when it’s “ready for production”.

    2) Technically similar to the RoR containers means that we assign a small, dedicated VPS server as we do for RoR for each Django container, and that there are certain other similarities with how we connect the VPS to the account on the Grid. Since the containers are essentially constrained by RAM in these cases, we are currently planning on using lighttpd instead of apache + mod_python in order to maximize the use of our hardware. We’re investigating nginx as well, but lighttpd currently is the frontrunning candidate.

    Thanks much for your interest!

  5. cnladd Says:

    Will Django containers cost a little extra (as do MySQL containers), or will an initial “entry-level-sized” container be free (as currently with RoR containers)? If it will be the first one, can we opt to have an “entry-level-sized” Django container in place of the RoR we currently have?

  6. demian Says:

    We are still figuring this part out. It’s looking like there will be a fee associated with this new system however similar to the MySQL containers to help justify all of the development time and extra hardware costs.

  7. Nathan Ostgard Says:

    Woo hoo! I’ve been dying for this. I love it. Too bad there’s going to be a fee for it. Oh well, can’t have everything I guess.

  8. Brian Z. Says:

    Awesome! Is there plans to include in article on how to install for your (dv) customers?

  9. nexusprime Says:

    Great news, can’t wait to get this. In testing I’ve found Django to be a fair bit lighter on resources than RoR on the same hardware.

  10. Ale Says:

    Still no release-date?
    I realy need it for a web-site we’r building,
    and need to know if have to find another hosting, or I can plan on using django on mediatemple in a month or so
    (when the site will be ready)

    thx

  11. chl Says:

    Ale - the containers will not be ready inside of a month. There’s still too much work to be done on them. However, many customers have installed Django on our (dv) Dedicated-Virtual line of servers and are using it happily if you want to go that route. Good luck with the site!

  12. Vance Dubberly Says:

    Well given that ya’ll have been talking about this for about a year I’m not very hopeful.

  13. Graham Dumpleton Says:

    For an Apache based solution that is more lightweight than using mod_python, maybe you should look at mod_wsgi. Also, a lot of time what people perceive as bloatedness in mod_python is simply because it wasn’t compiled correctly to use Python shared library. That said, mod_python does carry more bloat than it needs to, but mod_wsgi doesn’t and is much more leaner due to being written all in C against the low level Python APIs. Because mod_wsgi has both an embedded mode and a daemon mode, it can also function like fastcgi solutions and delegate WSGI applications off to separate processes, thereby keeping the size of the main Apache child processes down in size.

    For more information see http://www.modwsgi.org and commentary on http://blog.dscpl.com.au in respect of current suitability for web hosting companies.

  14. Ivan Says:

    Awesome. I just switch from TextDrive to MediaTemple because the dedicated virtual server’s chroot configuration makes things ridiculously convenient to get Django up and running. You do need to ask to turn things on, like the developer package.

  15. J.R. Says:

    Perhaps we should get to choose whether we want Django or RoR as our container. I would love to have a Django one, but have no interest in, or use for, a RoR container.

  16. Terrence Says:

    Still no news of when the Django container is going to be up?

  17. David Preece Says:

    Hey, came via the django blog … sounds great! Let me know when you’re live.

  18. Nick Says:

    Still no release date yet? I’m very interested!

  19. RM Says:

    is it django server soup yet??? if not, when will it be ready?

  20. Krishnan R.S. Says:

    Very cool!! I’d be very interested in getting an email once the Django support is in - even if it does cost some $$ - as long as it is not $$$$ !! I’m sick of preaching Django to my existing hosting service.