

Ask YC: The AppJet shutdown and the future of proprietary cloud platforms - neovive

I just finished reading the Sitepoint article at: 
http://www.sitepoint.com/blogs/2009/06/03/appjet-discontinued/.  The AppJet example seems to highlight the inherent risk of building your business on proprietary cloud platforms.  Although AppJet offers some suggestions for porting your app to another server (http://appjet.com/hosting), it seems that building anything beyond experimental apps and services upon these platforms is extremely risky.  Is the trade-off of easier maintenance and faster time-to-market worth it?<p>Perhaps the approach of selectively outsourcing components of your application to a cloud service provider with a real SLA is the better model (as people currently do with Amazon).
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trickjarrett
A startup cloud company is prone to death even moreso than other startups I
would think. You've got a physical deliverable which has extremely high
expectations and low acceptance for growing pains.

Further corporate cloud services are something that can't easily (to my
knowledge, I'm not an expert on them) be done by three guys out of an
apartment.

~~~
lsc
depends on what you mean by "cloud" - if ec2 is the cloud, yeah, three guys in
a basement can do a hosting company. Takes some capital, but not that much.
EC2 is not competing on price. I believe few weeks of hacking on a good
provisioning system is all that is stopping me from claiming to be a 'cloud
computing' provider, in the sense that ec2 is a 'cloud'

The ec2 cloud is a lot like traditional dedicated servers, only with a nice
provisioning interface.

The advantage of that is it's linux; and there are many providers willing to
rent you linux boxes. you just need to modify your provisioning setup.

Now, if you mean 'the cloud' like google's app engine or something else that
is a platform that is only offered by one provider, then yeah, I agree. you
never want to be in a position where you are dependent on one supplier.

