
PiCloud has joined Dropbox - aseidl
http://blog.picloud.com/2013/11/17/picloud-has-joined-dropbox/
======
cschmidt
As a very happy user of PiCloud, I'm sad to see it go. It is a shame they had
such A-list VC's (Andreessen Horowitz, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, and
Greylock Partners), who don't have an interest in just a good solid business.
They only wanted a huge, home run.

I've been looking around for a good replacement, and there is a gap. PiCloud
really had three components. The first was an ability to run code with
arbitrary dependencies with no more than a second start up time. PiCloud
called them environments. This is really the same problem Docker is
addressing. Both were using LXC and AUFS to solve the problem. Unfortunately,
Docker-as-a-service is very early days. People like orchardup.com are getting
there, but so far only have hourly pricing. There is enginedock.com which has
per minute pricing, but is it super early on. I'm in a "Docker gap", where
these services are really not at the same level that PiCloud was.

The second was the nice Python API, RESTful interface, and the command line
interface for triggering off jobs, querying when the finish, and getting the
results. That part will presumably be open sourced, but it is really all tied
in to the hosting portion.

Then the third level is to have a bunch of machine you can load balance
across, to allow per second pricing on AWS. They had such lovely high memory,
high CPU machines to run on. The split up some of the biggest EC2 cluster
instances, and you could run each process on your 1/8 share. The nearest
current replacement is iron.io's IronWorker. However, they only have 320MB per
job, which doesn't work for my application. Also Heroku workers are billed per
second, but they only have up to 1GB of memory. I'm hoping that this (new?)
entity Multyvac can serve that role successfully. Hopefully, they'll tell us
more detail on this soon.

Anyway, best of luck to the PiCloud team. You were great. Especially Aaron who
did much of the tech support. Thanks.

~~~
shykes
Hey Craig, speaking on behalf of the docker project: we are busy filling the
"docker gap" you speak about. There are currently _many_ businesses aspiring
to offer infrastructure to docker users. What we're doing is giving them a way
to integrate directly into docker itself, so you can "docker run" straight to
the provider of your choice, either from the docker command-line or remote
API. All with minimal risk of lock-in.

You might also be happy to learn that some of the talent behind Picloud is now
part of the Docker team itself :)

~~~
cschmidt
Hi Solomon,

There are tons of companies that are working on Docker based solutions to my
problems. In six months, or a year, there will be plenty of great ways for me
to use Docker. The only problem is that PiCloud shuts down on February 25, so
I'm in a bit of a hurry. Today, I'm in a gap, and there isn't a great
replacement. Specifically I'd need:

* Per second pricing (per minute would be Ok). This makes parallelism "free"

* Large instances with big memory and CPU

* Ideally on AWS (My data is on s3, and it would be good to avoid bandwidth charges).

Nothing seems to fill these requirements yet. Any of you Docker startups out
there want to help me out? Any pointers would be great if I'm missing
something.

------
ibejoeb
Oh man, two things: first, I wonder what DropBox will do with PiCloud, and
second, I feel like a dodged a bullet. I kinda hate saying that, since it
always turns up on these threads, but it's just true.

I had been working seriously on converting a financial application to run on
PiCloud. It's mid-November. In the hundred days until they cease operations, I
would have had to deal with 10-K filings for my clients _and_ scramble to get
the hell out of there, just in time for Q1. What an absolute mess that would
have been.

No other time would have been much better, and I know there's an API
compatible replacement in the works, but I've been there, and I'm sure
something would have freaked out.

Whatever happened to having some kind of reasonable transition period where
the buyer continues to support all of its clients? PiCloud, your product was
really neat. DropBox, I really wish you wouldn't just hit it and quit it.

~~~
cschmidt
I think it is pretty clear from the wording it is an aqi-hire by DropBox. They
are just getting a talented team.

I am very close to launching Predictobot.com, which uses PiCloud for all of
its computation. I spent last week moving to Heroku after DotCloud's pivot,
and now I'll need to replace PiCloud. The web sure is a stable place.

~~~
ChuckMcM
_" The web sure is a stable place."_

This is an interesting variation on this round's "boomlet". So in the previous
dot.com boom there were lots of companies who didn't have revenue so they
appeared, until the cash ran out and then fell back to earth. Now we can start
a company with much less money, but they go poof in an aquihire when things go
squishy.

So was it a pricing issue? or a customer acquisition issue? How is it that so
many of these companies get into this squeeze? Is it a chicken -/\- egg thing
where you can't price it to be self sustaining until you get critical mass? Or
is it that Amazon, Google, and Microsoft are just sucking all the oxygen out
of this space?

------
dwiel
At PlotWatt, we've been using the picloud's pickler for a while in our own
implementation of the picloud job queue. We don't have all of the bells and
whistles that their service did, but running our own queue made it easier to
control the details like the number of machines, environment and network
configuration, though we tried them out first before their environments
feature was set up, so they might have solved most of those problems by now.

Anyway, if anyone is interested in seeing even a bare-bones python function
queue based on picloud's pickler, get in touch and maybe we can open source
what we have and build it out a little more. Its not open source right now
just because its tied into some of our other libraries, but if there is
interest, we could probably split it all up.

------
gpjt
Sorry to see these guys go, they were a great company to have in the Python
space (though they did branch out to other languages, I think).

When we started PythonAnywhere they were right up there on the list of
potential competitors, though as it turned out our early adopters steered us
more in the direction of hosting and lightweight computation (ping an API
periodically and do stuff with the results) rather than heavy-duty computing.

The big problem with VC backing is that they really want $1bn exits. For them,
Heroku's $200MM exit to Salesforce was almost a failure. I guess they couldn't
see PiCloud going that way, so they chose not to invest again. Better to put
the cash into a more likely-looking moonshot.

IMO this is a pity, because there are a bunch of smaller-than-$1bn but still
solid companies that are getting starved of funding. The business-to-developer
space is particularly prone to that kind of issue; it's less of a winner-
takes-all market, so the big wins that VCs want are rarer than they are in
other markets.

------
curiouslearn
So sad to see PiCloud go. They made parallel computation so easy to implement.
Their service was really well-built.

~~~
kkg
Yeah - unfortunately there aren't a ton of companies in this space, which is
rough. I've started using Domino
([http://www.dominoup.com](http://www.dominoup.com)) and it's pretty similar -
probably the closest thing out there right now to PiCloud that I've seen.
Worth checking out for sure.

------
zokier
What's PiCloud and what's Multyvac, and what does all this mean?

------
kunle
Just checked out www.multyvac.com, which has webvan, boo.com, etoys and lehman
brothers listed as customers. What's the joke? Not sure I get it.

~~~
cschmidt
I guess just that they are there to pick up the pieces from PiCloud, like
someone should have done for those other failures.

------
joschu
Love the Isaac Asimov reference in "Multyvac"

I use Picloud for my CS PhD research, I hope to be able to continue with
Multyvac or the open-source version.

