I recently got my beta access to ep.io, the Python application deployment platform. I had the chance today to have a play around and try out some deployments so I thought I would try and give my view on the experience before. I’ve deployed Python apps to Heroku and Gondor before so those services form my reference points here.

So firstly, there’s a command-line client that you install via pip and you effectively deploy to the platform via a client-command, SSH keys and what looks like git on the server-side. This is more like Gondor than Heroku (which is intimately linked to git). It means you have your choice of source control and if you want to be a Python purist you never need to step outside of Python for everything you are doing.

Applications consist of essentially one configuration file that states where the WSGI application is and what the requirements file is. Compared to Gondor it is a very simple setup but it did feel that it could be even simpler if it made convention-based assumptions such as the requirements file being called requirements.txt, for example.

Leveraging WSGI and configuration this way gives a very flexible platform and I was able to get both Flask and Bottle to work (the former very quickly because it has documentation, the latter via trial and error that might require its own blog-post). I didn’t have time to try Django but I felt pretty confident that I could get whatever framework I wanted working once I understood the basic setup.

Unlike Heroku, Epio provides a fixed framework for executing the apps. It seems you will be running behind NGINX and Gunicorn. Both are good choices and I certainly like them but if you want to play around with different servers like Tornado or CherryPy you may prefer Heroku’s more open deployment model. I did like the way that you can use the configuration file to have NGINX serve static content directly.

Epio naturally has less of an ecosystem than Heroku but has Solr, Postgres and Redis out of the box. All solid choices and covering off the majority of what I would need. I was certainly grateful that I didn’t have to grapple with remote database administration and could prototype apps with just Redis.

Deployment and logging have kind of rough edges. Being able to access logs directly from the application page was a win for me, however when I was struggling to define the WSGI entrypoint correctly it seemed as if the application wasn’t being really compiled until the first request comes in. I would see an entry confirming a new deployment but then nothing until I hit the app. I think there should be some kind of sanity check of what you have uploaded to see whether it will even run.

Right now epio is providing a Python-based cloud deployment platform with a sensible set of supplementary services and low opinion about the source control system to you use. It feels like if this had been around at the start of the year it would have blown me away. However now there is more competition and therefore questions of price and ease of use will matter in terms of  how compelling it is to use the service.

If you do Python web development I would definitely recommend you sign up for beta and give it a go yourself as it seems a very solid prototyping platform. If you are not a Ruby and Git fan then you may well love what is on offer here because it is already very convenient, makes few demands on you and gets your web app public in minutes.