Introduction
What Penny is and what problem it solves
Penny
Serverless for your servers.
You have a $5 VPS with 10 side projects on it. They all run 24/7 eating memory even though nobody's visiting them. That's wasteful.
Penny is a reverse proxy that only starts your servers when they get a request, and kills them after they've been idle. You go from 10 servers running all the time to one reverse proxy that provisions them when they're needed.
How It Works
Instead of telling Penny which address to proxy to, you give it the command to start your server. It runs that command on the first request, waits for a health check, proxies the traffic, and then kills the process after a configurable idle period. Next request comes in, it starts all over again.
Each request resets the idle timer. As long as traffic keeps coming, the app stays alive. Once traffic stops, Penny waits for wait_period and then shuts the process down.