As a user of Docker, I'm excited. But as someone who uses the dotCloud PaaS right now to run a company, I'm a little annoyed, mostly at myself for not seeing this coming.
Clearly there's a diversion of resources away from the dotCloud PaaS to Docker, and that's going to have a toll somewhere. Despite the company's reassurances that everything is business as usual, I know that Docker [the project] is just too much of a beast and eventually the Docker [the company] will need to move on from the PaaS. (I should know, since I gave a talk about how "Docker is the future" just a few weeks after Docker was announced.) [0]
I'm not really sure what my choices are now, either; DigitalOcean, I guess? I don't want to manage servers myself, and I want to be able to pay on the memory-usage axis for my app instances (which Heroku doesn't allow). I wasn't super excited by DO last year, but maybe things have changed.
My current "light at the end of the tunnel" is hoping that the Docker-based PaaS ecosystem matures, but for now none of them seem like they're mature enough, and it's tough to keep up with all of them since it seems like another one pops up each week.
Here's my wishlist:
-- (1) command-line client for deployment via git repository and doing anything related to deployment (add new instances, remove instances, create new environments, assign domains to the PaaS router, etc.)
-- (2) clear pricing
-- (3) I can pay for more memory as I need it
-- (4) ability to specify environment variables in a configuration file that take effect on the container process
-- (5) web interface for administering the account
There's no need to make a hasty decision -- we haven't changed the platform in any way or lowered our support efforts. If you've found that you can count on the dotCloud PaaS for your business (and thank you for that!), then nothing changed today. We're still here for you.
If you feel like you want to get ready for running on another platform, or using Docker as it matures, then I'd suggest the first step would be to move your databases to a neutral third party provider. With that in place, you can still run your code on the dotCloud PaaS, or anywhere else. As Docker and the ecosystem around it mature, there will be many more options.
I work for Docker Inc on the dotCloud PaaS and manage the support. If you have more private questions, you can reach us at support@dotcloud.com
Thanks for the reassurance, Andy. We've chatted a couple of times in IRC and you've always been awesome in my complicated support requests.
Still, my concern isn't about the quality of the dotCloud PaaS going down -- it's pretty high already, and I don't have any plans to move immediately.
Instead, I'm more concerned about the shift in general. You know as well as anyone that software that doesn't get love and care eventually rots, and the blog post explicitly says that the focus is now on Docker and away from the PaaS.
From that, I infer that the PaaS is eventually going to have to go away as is the natural order of things. Since my company depends critically on that piece of infrastructure, I need to make sure I'm covering my bases with an exit strategy if you do decide to turn out the lights on the PaaS, or at least make sure I've thought about what to do as an alternative.
I also hope you guys make a bajillion dollars on Docker. It's really an excellent idea whose time has come.
Hey John, thanks for the kind words! I just wanted to add one datapoint to back Andy's response: the resource allocation to dotCloud has been the same for the last 6 months, and there is no change planned to that allocation as of today. In other words, if you were satisfied with our service over the last few weeks, you are likely to continue to be satisfied for months to come.
I would worry about an exit strategy too if I were in your shoes - but just know that your trust and success as a customer matters more to us than any bajillion of dollars we would stand to make if we betrayed it.
In fact I'm pretty sure we can "make a bajillion dollars" and continue to earn your trust :)
Thanks for doing business with us John! Docker is in part thanks to you.
Wow, its people like this (both comments from docker/dotCloud) that make you really love a service.
In fact, I would have put my next side project on dotCloud if the prices weren't steep - but I get that they're for businesses and not for side projects.
I guess DO is good for that stuff (at the very least! - I'm sure they're good in general as well, I've actually been reading/discussing them a lot - mostly for hobby projects though).
EDIT: Forgot about dokku/flynn as a PaaS (plugin?).
Also learned about other services in the thread which I'll be looking at.
How the heck can you put a PaaS business on the back-burner while you bet the company on a small piece of software and expect customers to stick around?
It depends on your definition of "back-burner". DotCloud might no longer be one of the most innovative PaaS, adding features left and right like it used to - but there's no reason it can't continue to be a reliable place to host your applications. DotCloud production customers want availability, performance, reliable support, good tooling, prompt bugfixes, and generous advance warning and transition support in the event of a sunset. It's very important to us that they continue to get all these things.
"While Docker, Inc. will continue to offer PaaS services under the dotCloud brand, we will be devoting the vast majority of our resources towards growing Docker and the Docker ecosystem, and have fundamentally re-oriented our business model towards Docker-related products and services."
dotCloud is quite stable and mature, so running and maintaining it at the quality standards of our customers (including support, 24/7 ops, bug fixes, etc.) requires surprisingly little resources. Little enough that we can "devote the vast majority of our resources towards growing Docker" while continuing to offer a quality product.
My argument to support this is that we have actually been doing this for 6 months, and so far there hasn't been any kind of exodus - in fact we have many more paid customers than we had 6 months ago :)
I think this is one of the reasons the public PaaS market is difficult: at the end of the day, past the excitement of developing a new app, people will pay for a reliable service that doesn't get in their way - not for the bells and whistles. It is very difficult to differentiate a paas on features.
The issue is really about the future. Your service is as useful today as it was yesterday or six months ago, but the perceived usefulness of your service a year from now has gone way down. We all appreciate your honesty about the pivot. But how will your customers fare in the long run?
It is kind of a strange situation. You're clearly the leader in hosted Docker PaaS at the moment. However, you're also promoting an ecosystem where all these Docker based startups are springing up, like deis.io. Why won't you be out innovating them? I fear you'll be moving down the stack, and letting others fill the PaaS role. It isn't clear to me how you're going to make money out of Docker (perhaps it isn't to you either).
I say this as someone who was going to be deploying my first Django app in a couple of weeks. I have a dotcloud account, and had messed around a little. That was my deployment plan. However, I spent tonight reading the Heroku docs. It seems at some level you realize you've lost out to Heroku, and have pivoted to this shiny thing that is getting lots of traction. That's great, and I'm sure that is the right path to take business wise. However, it doesn't sound like your current dotcloud customers will get any particular benefits from the great Docker fueled future.
I'm leaning very much towards a Vagrant/Ansible setup to provision/deploy/configure instances across a range of VPS providers. I'm actively testing with DigitalOcean/Linode/AWS right now, spinning up Ubuntu 12LTS and 13 instances both locally (in VirtualBox) and remotely, and it's looking very promising. It'll only get you 1,2, and 4 out of your list though – but does have the big advantage of not suffering "lockin" to any of the VPS vendors. It also gives me really easy local Vagrant/VirtualBox development, test, and A environments – with very high assurance that they're all sensible replications of the deployed environments.
If your app/service is architected to make spinning up a new 1G or 2G instance when your 512M one is running short of resources, "faking" 3 would work. I'm not sure where I'd start looking if I needed a web interface for it all though…
Gabriel Monroy here, creator of Deis, one of the Docker PaaS's (http://deis.io/overview/). I'd love to pick your brain about your current dilemma and see if we can help. Email me: gabriel _at_ opdemand.com.
I think the shifting nature of PaaS is something inherent to the market and ecosystem, and something that should be taken into account as such.
I struggle to find a PaaS as well, but I think we should have an appreciation of what the market is like, and what it takes to stand out and carve out a business for yourself these days.
There are lots of hosting providers besides digitalocean - linode is a big one, so is joyent.
I've been trying out digitalocean, but they make me nervous about reliability. Twice in 2 weeks I've gotten nonsensical abuse notifications (spamming, copyright infringement). One of the complaints was only 10 minutes after I spun up a droplet - my deploy script hadn't even finished. Makes me very nervous that DO will shut off all my droplets due to complaints about what the guy who previously owned the IP address did.
MPAA-based failure is far harder to plan for than disk failure.
Those providers are not PaaS providers, though -- they're IaaS providers. I don't want something where step 1 is "install an OS" or "configure iptables". I want something where deployment looks more like "git push origin/master --app production".
That's my current light at the end of the tunnel, but for now none of them seem mature enough to put my customers on. And it seems like there's a new one every week!
I imagine it'll be easy-ish to migrate between Docker-based PaaS's, though; just upload the container and change the provider-specific config, right? So that's a little reassuring.
Windows Azure has the features you listed, although I'm not sure about #4. I too wanted a PaaS cloud, not an IaaS, and I found Azure to be the best option for my needs. I would have prefered a European company for legal reasons but there's no good one yet.
Not sure how much it meets your needs (I know it does on 1 and 5, but probably not on 2) but have you considered Windows Azure? They have managed Linux instances with git deployment and a great web interface.
If you're just looking to deploy a single application on Digital Ocean or some other VPS, the digitalocean plugin for knife will really help out (https://github.com/rmoriz/knife-digital_ocean).
EDIT: In regards to Stackato...
-- (1) command-line client for deployment via git
repository and doing anything related to deployment (add new instances, remove instances, create new environments, assign domains to the PaaS router, etc.)
We have a clear memory-based pricing plan. This allows users to scale out their infrastructure to as many nodes as they like, and only have to manage their total memory in their clusters to figure out pricing.
-- (3) I can pay for more memory as I need it
It's on your own hardware. EC2/Rackspace/VMWare pricing depends on their model.
-- (4) ability to specify environment variables in a configuration file that take effect on the container process
Disclaimer: I work as a product manager for ActiveState, working on Stackato. We'd love to have you over here! We're also on Freenode, channel #stackato if anyone is interested in this stuff :)
Candidly, Stackato is an interesting platform/fork, but I looked into your pricing before and it's not really all that reasonable. If pricing was more realistic, or there was an open-source release of your CF fork, I'd be more interested.
Stackato is built for large enterprises who want the convenience of a public PaaS (like Heroku), but with the flexibility to run it in the datacenter of their choosing. With that, our pricing is built for large enterprise, which entails support calls, training sessions, webinars, bug reports, and all of the other good stuff that comes with enterprise support models. We really pamper you through the startup process to get you running on your feet. I understand though that our pricing is unreasonable for smaller businesses. We are however very open with our customers, and a lot of our existing customers really like that aspect. A great example of this would be the interview we did with Chris Turra at Mozilla on Wired: http://insights.wired.com/profiles/blogs/upholding-the-open-...
Clearly there's a diversion of resources away from the dotCloud PaaS to Docker, and that's going to have a toll somewhere. Despite the company's reassurances that everything is business as usual, I know that Docker [the project] is just too much of a beast and eventually the Docker [the company] will need to move on from the PaaS. (I should know, since I gave a talk about how "Docker is the future" just a few weeks after Docker was announced.) [0]
I'm not really sure what my choices are now, either; DigitalOcean, I guess? I don't want to manage servers myself, and I want to be able to pay on the memory-usage axis for my app instances (which Heroku doesn't allow). I wasn't super excited by DO last year, but maybe things have changed.
My current "light at the end of the tunnel" is hoping that the Docker-based PaaS ecosystem matures, but for now none of them seem like they're mature enough, and it's tough to keep up with all of them since it seems like another one pops up each week.
Here's my wishlist:
-- (1) command-line client for deployment via git repository and doing anything related to deployment (add new instances, remove instances, create new environments, assign domains to the PaaS router, etc.)
-- (2) clear pricing
-- (3) I can pay for more memory as I need it
-- (4) ability to specify environment variables in a configuration file that take effect on the container process
-- (5) web interface for administering the account
Anyone have any recommendations?
[0] http://spreecommerce.com/blog/spreeconf-DC-speaker-highlight...