

DotCloud (YC S10) Mix and Match Cloud Platform Launches - sbisker
http://techcrunch.com/2010/12/22/yc-funded-dotcloud-an-application-platform-that-lets-you-mix-and-match/

======
shykes
This is Solomon, co-founder at DotCloud. We're around to answer any questions
you may have!

Also open to suggestions for a "Offer HN" post :)

~~~
spahl
Since we are introducing ourselves, I'm Sebastien, the other co-founder:-)

~~~
pquerna
Congrats on Launching guys!

Should come by the Cloudkick/Rackspace offices again sometime, would love to
catch up.

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bjonathan
I think this is the first YC company with french founders so congratulations
to the team for that, and most importantly congrats for your launch I look
forward to test it! Dotcloud seems awesome!

Cocorico :)

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jjoe
Congrats on the launch!

Is there any reason you're running an outdated version of Nginx (0.7.65 vs
0.7.68 vs 0.8.54)? It's one major revision behind current and a few minor
behind stable. Which brings me to a question I had lingering in my mind, what
is your "software" upgrade process since users have no control over it?

Another question, do you cache non-static objects (cookie based caching when
proxy_pass'ing)? If so, how are you handling the different cookies for each
particular app? Can this be turned off?

Regards

Joe

~~~
spahl
About the nginx version:

\- 0.7.65 is the version currently used in ubuntu lucid. We use it only as a
proxy.

\- On services like python-wsgi we currently use 0.8.52 and we will soon
upgrade to 0.8.54

\- On the ruby-passenger service we follow the nginx pulled by passenger

So it's always dependent of the context. The idea is to keep the stacks stable
and secure at all times.

Once we have tested and approved an upgrade we create a new revision of the
corresponding service and deploy it across the platform. If the upgrade
requires downtime we schedule a rolling maintenance window and notify users.

On caching:

We don't cache by default (but this could change). Users have the option to
add caching services like varnish.

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inovica
As a developer struggling to also be a sysadmin I find this very interesting.
We were just about to start looking for a sysadmin to manage what we're doing,
so it will be interesting to see how DotCloud works. We're Python focused, so
this looks to be right up our street. Curious to know what others do in terms
of managing the servers etc - do you think that it could be dangerous to rely
on a service like this? Do you think its better to understand from end-to-end
what you're using and why?

~~~
geuis
I HIGHLY recommend Dotcloud. We have been using them for a couple of months
and its insane how easy it is to get setup. The Dotcloud guys have done a
spectacular job in making it painless to use their system. Ours was a
Python/Django app and just took a few lines of configuration to get up and
running.

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moe
Wow, you guys are fearless, so much for sure.

Cassandra and Hadoop alone need a good chunk of domain knowledge to keep them
running smoothly. Seeing them listed casually next to so many other deployment
stacks makes me feel slightly dizzy.

I'm definitely looking forward to see if you'll be able to pull this off.

~~~
shykes
DotCloud co-founder here.

You're correct, there's a beefy learning curve to properly configure, fine-
tune and scale each of these components. Our job is to tackle that learning
curve _so you don't have to_.

As a developer, you get a little more value out of that deal every time you
want to play with something new.

It works for us, because after a while you start seeing patterns in proper
automation. There are only so many ways to store, modify and move bits around.

~~~
moe
You're preaching to the choir, most of my day- and nightjob involves just
that. ;-)

That's where a bit of skepticism stems from, as I've dealt with both of these
databases first hand, also various other stacks ranging from java, python,
ruby, even lua.

The not-so-stellar uptime record of Heroku shows that making one size fit all
is quite hard, even when you're doing it only for a relatively small set of
components.

Doing it well for nearly _all_ of them is nothing short of the holy grail in
systems management.

~~~
shykes
One important detail: we're not releasing all these components right away,
although we did package and test them all.

We'll start with the fundamentals, and gradually expand to the full catalog.

------
sbisker
Direct link to the company: <http://www.dotcloud.com/>

If someone can tell me which YC batch they're a part of, I'll edit the title -
this is the first time I'm hearing about them.

~~~
spahl
We are Summer 2010.

~~~
sbisker
Fixed. Congratulations on the beta launch.

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js4all
I like the courage trying to manage this. Two thumbs up.

To be honest, I am skeptical, that a newcomer startup can do the heavy lifting
of supporting such a big stack. Each of these has a lot of specialities that
need to be known and to fight.

Background: Our stack uses appjet, nginx, varnish and couchdb. Each of these
has different challenges. Think of optimization, scaling, resource limiting,
leveling, monitoring, statistics and enforcing governor limits/notifying
customers. We needed over a year to establish this. I don't want to sound
negative, just think about all this, what we needed learn.

~~~
shykes
If you think about it, isn't it incredible that _you_ had to invest so much
time and money in building out your infrastructure? How many web businesses
had to re-invent the wheel to get to the same result?

Yes, it's hard work for us. But 90% of the work is the same across all
deployments. We take advantage of that fact to offer massive savings in
engineering and sysadmin time.

~~~
js4all
Wise words. I will be really impressed, when you guys can deliver this. Your
startup has a great future and will be very useful to many of us.

~~~
shykes
If you mention you HN username in your beta request, we'll send you an early
invite so you can see for yourself :)

~~~
js4all
I appreciate it. Thanks.

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thibauld_
Congrats to the dotcloud team! I already had the luck to work with seb and sam
from the dotcloud team and I can testify that they are extremely skilled and
reliable guys. They won't fail you nor your servers :) My 2 cents

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jsarch
Fantastic idea; wish I had thought of it. I'm very curious to see how
efficient your "glue" code is between the components. It's one thing to have a
modular hands-off system, it's often another to have that system perform
reasonably well. What level of system administration do you expose/hide to the
developer? How do you plan to make money?

~~~
shykes
Our focus is on giving control a developer needs: how do I install language-
specific packages? How do run my tests? How do I pass settings to my app? How
do I run that custom build command?

We don't offer root access. But we're working on customization tools that will
make you forget you ever had to ssh into a server directly.

As for pricing: we're already charging a few test customers, and will expand
paid plans to all beta users very soon.

~~~
jsarch
If I understand correctly, your basic assumption is that a developer only
needs access to the configuration options. Essentially, a developer isn't
going to hack the code, they just modify the package configuration as needed.
I think this would be a fair assumption and targets a huge number of users
looking to leverage the cloud.

As for pricing, looking back, I realize that my question may have been a bit
blunt and offensive. What I was really curious to know was whether you were
going to be charging "per instance", "per hour", "per instance-hour", "per
package", etc. For example, is Apache+MySQL on a single machine (if that's
possible) less expensive than Apache on one machine and MySQL on another? What
about compared to Nginx+Cassandra? (FWIW: You don't have to answer this
directly if you want to keep the cards close while in testing...)

None the less, I wish you the best. (signed up for a beta.)

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dtran
Congrats Seb, Solomon, and the rest of the Dotcloudees!

~~~
citricsquid
Hey, you have a gold name! That's funky, is that because you're a YC company
or something else? I've never seen that before!

Edit: now it's gone... that was _strange_. I'm sure I saw a gold name!

~~~
augustflanagan
I'm also seeing that. Anyone know what it's about?

~~~
rjett
From what I can see, it's people affiliated with YC.

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datums
Heroku has a fixed stack with tiers that they could tune, tweak and
horizontally scale. Is that what dotcloud provides for each of the listed
technologies ?

~~~
spahl
Each technology will have it's own way of scaling.

For example:

\- for django you will have an easy way to add more instances

\- for mysql more slaves

\- for celery or resque more workers

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ameyamk
very interesting. I am interested in seeing how it actually works though. Its
still behind the doors. Hope to get invite. (btw, heroku is not just
deployment platform, it helps u scale as well. Interested in seeing if dot
cloud helps in that fashion)

~~~
shykes
Yes, we do help you scale as well. Think of DotCloud instances as a
generalized version of Heroku's "dynos".

You can scale up any component in your stack by cranking up the number of
instances. We automatically provision and reconfigure instances for you.

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barrydahlberg
How's the Mono / .Net support coming along?

~~~
shykes
We assumed Azure had the .Net world covered. But if we get enough demands, we
might reconsider.

Would you be willing to host a production .Net app on Mono?

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barrydahlberg
Yes, if the host is good. I love .Net but I'm continually jealous of things
like Heroku which really support a fast and nimble development approach
favouring smart developers rather than heavyweight process. Azure isn't quite
there.

Azure's addon options are pretty limited too.

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okaramian
I like the strategy of using other YC companies as alpha customers. If any of
the companies on the platform get traction it looks pretty good for DotCloud
as well.

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pbiggar
One of the (only) advantages of App Engine over Heroku is that they auto-
scaled. Will you guys be doing that?

~~~
shykes
We're taking one step at a time. First we'll give you metrics to help you
decide when to scale up or down. Eventually we'll offer to take that decision
for you, with a configurable ceiling.

In our experience, for most customers 10-second manual scaling is just as good
as auto-scaling.

~~~
pbiggar
I don't know what 10-second manual scaling means.

Our problem with Heroku was that we didn't know how many units to allocate,
and ended up way over-spending. But if we had tweaked it to be just right, we
would have been screwed by an unexpected surge.

~~~
shykes
It means that you type 'dotcloud scale' and wait 10 seconds :)

We offer resource usage data, so you can make an informed decision when
scaling. You are correct that a very sudden surge can still screw you - but we
are preparing an alert feature to help you mitigate this.

~~~
pbiggar
I don't mean to be negative, but I like your product a lot less without
autoscaling. If it's hard to do, then it'll be nearly impossible for me; if
its not hard, then I'll be annoyed that I'm writing code that you guys could
have trivially written.

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minalecs
anyone know about their pricing ?

~~~
shykes
Expect a pricing page very soon. We are validating the model with a few paying
customers already.

We would love to hear your suggestions at questions@dotcloud.com.

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grigy
Congratulation with the launch! Are guys going to handle database
versioning/migration somehow?

~~~
spahl
Database migration is a complex subject:-) You have full control over you
database (with sql prompt and everything). That means that you can use any
migration tool you like.

If we start seeing a recurrent pattern we'll try to automate.

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ajaimk
Whats the difference from CloudKick?

~~~
shykes
Cloudkick helps you deploy and monitor your own servers. DotCloud helps you
deploy and scale your application, without having to worry about servers.

