
AppFog Now Part of Savvis Cloud - aaronbrethorst
https://www.appfog.com/savvis/
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tlongren
That's too bad. CenturyLink is a horrible company to deal with. Heroku
provides enough functionality for what I need, thankfully.

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JeremyMorgan
Let's hope they don't kill what is an otherwise great product.

I'm hoping they bought AppFog for the right reasons, because they want to add
resources to accelerate it's market share (and of course profit). This would
be good for us and PAAS in general.

But if they just bought it so they can play around with "cloud" and seem hip
and cool to shareholders then let it wither on the vine, we all lose a little.

PAAS is where we're going next, any many already have. AppFog has done a great
job of pushing out features and keeping the community competitive.

~~~
cardmagic
Hi, this is Lucas, founder and CEO of AppFog.

I would not have picked CenturyLink if they didn't intend to add resources and
accelerate us. I am thrilled about this combination, there is so much cool
stuff CenturyLink can do with us, it is not even funny. Expect a lot of fun
announcements in the near future.

~~~
flyt
Said absolutely every company ever acquired and neglected.

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hunvreus
At the risk of sounding trollish: isn't the acquirer (Savvis aka CenturyLink)
a major US telco who is pretty friendly with the NSA snooping (and who somehow
also acquired Qwest which resurfaced a few times through the NSA maelstrom)?

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JeremyMorgan
Since the PRISM news broke people are starting to associate cloud with a place
to get spied on. It's no different than a web host. If they want your info,
they'll get it and whether you us a cloud service won't be the deciding
factor.

~~~
hunvreus
I was merely outlining that the acquirer hasn't displayed a pattern of being
very interested in defending the privacy of its users. There's a difference
between complying with the law and what the big telcos have been doing.

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mark_l_watson
I have played with AppFog, but nothing serious. In any case, I like using PaaS
products and more completion should make pricing fair.

Off topic, but what I would like to see is more low end for resources, but
high end in services PaaS offerings: low memory and bandwidth, but: never get
swapped out so loading request times become an issue, and inexpensive SSL
support. I have some fun projects that may get less that a thousand requests a
day but that I would still like no swaps and SSL for.

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ballunk
Savvis was pretty fun to work at back in the day. The CEO was a bit of a mess:
[http://blogs.riverfronttimes.com/dailyrft/2008/09/businessma...](http://blogs.riverfronttimes.com/dailyrft/2008/09/businessman_andrew_gladney_sentenced_33_months.php)

~~~
salimmadjd
Ssvvis. Now, that's a name I've not heard in a long time...

Seeing it, brought back memories that I rather repress for rest of my life :p

Okay, it wasn't that bad but it sure brings back the first bubble era. It's
amazing how amazon was able to figure out this business and they're were just
a book seller.

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devonkim
What's a bit amusing is that when I was at Savvis just before CenturyLink
acquired them, the snarky comment was that they only offered the fog, because
it hadn't quite taken off yet. Also, despite that #1 Gartner assessment, it
certainly doesn't mean that it's got #1 market share for their sector either
(Terremark was acquired by Verizon and I'd bet a lot of money they're making
more than with Savvis' cloud services).

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ballunk
Savvis was a pretty fun place to work back in the day. The CEO had some issues
though, probably why it was fun.
[http://blogs.riverfronttimes.com/dailyrft/2008/09/businessma...](http://blogs.riverfronttimes.com/dailyrft/2008/09/businessman_andrew_gladney_sentenced_33_months.php)

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kbar13
[http://pastie.org/8043348](http://pastie.org/8043348)

^the email I received

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Kiro
I miss PHPFog. It was so much struggle getting AppFog to work for a simple
CakePHP app that I actually gave up even though I had a $100 free package.
With PHPFog you could deploy with git which was awesome but in AppFog they
replaced it with their own af tool which was subpar. They also removed support
for persistant file storage.

~~~
krapp
What are your opinions on Pagodabox?

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Kiro
Not used it. Would you recommend it?

~~~
krapp
I've gotten wordpress and a couple of other projects running on it, and it
does have a free option you can try out. But it's also the first such service
I have tried so I can't compare it to others.

But I can say they've been courteous and helpful with trouble tickets.

~~~
mgkimsal
Not used pagodabox directly, but they had a techie give a overview of some of
their tech to our PHP group last year (via Skype), and he went above and
beyond what was called for in answering questions in detail.

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meritt
Huh, well that's a nail in the coffin of that company.

~~~
cardmagic
Hi, this is Lucas, founder and CEO of AppFog. Just wanted to address this up
front.

CenturyLink is committed to taking our PaaS offering to the next level through
significant investments. AppFog is going to evolve rapidly, both for the
public and private cloud. For our public cloud developers, this means more
infrastructure options, increased levels of support, and accelerated launches
of new features that our community has been asking for. We will soon be adding
high-speed Savvis infrastructures options for deploying apps, including paid-
only infrastructures with better reliability and performance. And for our
private cloud developers within enterprises, we will soon be delivering
AppFog-in-a-Box, a self-service private PaaS offering baked into Savvis’s
cloud offering, a Gartner #1 Leader.

We have found a great partner in CenturyLink. CenturyLink is the 3rd largest
telco in the United States, providing fiber networks to business around the
world. Savvis, CenturyLink’s IaaS, is a great complement to AppFog so that as
you scale your applications past the boundaries of AppFog, you can start
adding high-speed IaaS resources quickly and easily.

CenturyLink is going to be an accelerant for us and I am proud to prove you
wrong. :)

~~~
meritt
Good to hear the positive plans currently. It's hard to separate the image of
CenturyLink away from a small and agile customer-focused PaaS provider.
Hopefully the benefit they provide to you is financial and infrastructure and
not in corporate bureaucracy, shitty service and worse customer service that
CenturyLink excels at currently.

