Instellar.app Product Demo

We’re making good progress on our product. We’re putting in place things in our product that will serve as the foundation and change the way people deploy web applications! In this video we cover some of the changes / updates that will be coming to instellar.app.

Setup a brand new EC2 Instance

For this demo we are using EC2 for demonstration purposes. However it’s important to keep in mind that VMs or bare metals hosted anywhere can be utilized with Instellar.app. Once LXD is setup on the instance and the correct security ports are opened you are able to add the machine to instellar.

Setup LXD

LXD is extremely easy to setup and scale. The wizard initializer has great defaults and enables anyone to setup an extremely powerful compute platform in a very short amount of time. It’s important to keep in mind that port 8443 needs to be exposed for instellar to be able to manage LXD.

Initializing LXD is as simple as running

sudo lxd init

Once you’ve setup LXD simply reboot. Next we’ll connect the LXD node to instellar by running the following:

lxc config trust add

LXD will ask you for a name, simply type instellar and it will give you back a token which you can simply use in instellar.

Connecting to Instellar.app

Next we simply need to add the LXD node to instellar app. All we have to do is supply the ip_address:8443 and give it the token that was generated and instellar will do the rest. Once you see the cluster show up in instellar, you can setup Uplink next.

Setting up Uplink

Setting up uplink is very straight forward, simply click the Setup button on the cluster page and you will be able to setup uplink on your cluster. Uplink utlizes something called ‘kits’ which is currently unreleased however this is something that will help simplify every setup out there. We will be release kits in the near future.

Setting up our Web App

To setup our web app all we have to do is create the Installation and setup the required environment variables.

Once we’ve setup all the dependencies all we have to do is hit sync and instellar will propagate the change instructions to Uplink and ‘make it so’.

Domain Routing

To route the domain to our service all we have to do is create an A record or CNAME record with the ip or domain of our VM. We also need to make sure we’ve setup the hosts on our installation.

This change will be propagated to Uplink and once the dns settings takes place, the ssl certificate will automatically be issued. Behind the scenes uplink is using caddy app server to provision ssl certificate and provide load balancing.

That’s all Folks

In this product demo we were able to provision an empty machine and deploy our web application in under 15 mins. There are a lot of details that I didn’t have a chance to cover in this post which I intend on covering in future posts. Join the waitlist if you’re insterested in trying out instellar.app