
AppFog Wants To Do For Developer Platforms What Google Did For EMail - turoczy
http://techcrunch.com/2012/07/25/appfog-wants-to-do-for-developer-platforms-what-google-did-for-email/
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redslazer
Im really not sure about the pricing model. Here are a couple of points:

There are tons of people looking for $5 vps that have like 500mb on ram. Your
pricing structure will be like a magnet for those type of people. I dont think
may of those people will upgrade to a $100 a month plan though.

As with the point above, you are relying to heavily on the people who have
bought into the system at the free plan and now have to migrate. If I were to
go onto one of the paid plans I would feel bad knowing most of the money im
spending is going to provide a free service tier.

50Gb data transfer limit 0_0. Its 2012, bandwidth is dirt cheap and 50GB
really is not that much. Especially if the person is paying $100+ per month.
If someone is using more than 2GB of ram they are most likely using more than
50GB of incoming/outgoing data.

Edit: I signed up to test it out and while it says unlimited services (free
plan) once you signup it limits you to 10.

Edit2: Turns out you need to have some ruby knowledge to get started (even if
they offer a ton of languages). Since I dont I will have to postpone playing
with it till the weekend where I can dedicate some time to playing with ruby.

~~~
benmccann
FYI, it's $0.15/GB for additional data transfer:
[https://groups.google.com/d/topic/appfog-
users/UtTmKrxSTYA/d...](https://groups.google.com/d/topic/appfog-
users/UtTmKrxSTYA/discussion)

~~~
redslazer
It doesn't matter, even if the bandwidth was free. It is not stated anywhere
so a potential customer will see that number and be less likely to buy the
plan even if it is the smallest limitation.

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ericcholis
I'm seeing a lot of comments talking about "just get a {VPS, dedicate box,
Amazon, etc...}". I think people are missing the point. AppFog is trying to
take all the "hard" work out of SysOps. Think Chef on crack, you are paying
for their pre-configured infrastructure from the top down.

Their idea is provide a powerful, scaleable platform quickly and easily. Their
mentality is called NoOps (<http://blog.appfog.com/what-is-noops-anyhow/>).
It's a cheesy marketing term, and pissed a lot of people off, but it's pretty
spot on for what their service offers.

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cardmagic
<https://console.appfog.com/pricing>

2GB RAM FREE | 4GB RAM $100/month | 16GB RAM $380/month | 32GB RAM $720/month
| More if you contact AppFog

Scaling your app is free, choosing multiple infrastructures is free, custom
domains are free, fastest available servers in the infrastructures

~~~
patrickaljord
on the other hand, ovh offers dedicated servers for:

16GB RAM £70/month

24GB RAM £100/month

24GB RAM £180/month

64GB RAM £260/month

<http://www.ovh.co.uk/dedicated_servers/>

~~~
EwanToo
That's so far from a like for like comparison that I can only think you've not
read what AppFog is offering...

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nl
_AppFog's service extends across different infrastructure providers_

Dropping into the IaaS world for a minute, is this as common as it seems me to
be?

Personally, I run servers over number of cloud providers, and then have a few
VPSs around too, plus some servers at home, and lots of people I know are the
same.

Is this a common thing people do?

I've been thinking about doing a dashboard type app to display/manage servers
across providers.

What tools are people using at the moment for this kind of thing?

(I'm actually running a very short survey on this at the moment. I'd love it
if people would do it - happy to share the results here:
<http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/LDNZFG3>)

~~~
dangrossman
It may be a common thing individual developers that play with everything do. I
doubt it's common for businesses to deploy production apps across multiple
clouds. Unfortunately I don't think that survey will be able to answer that
either way.

~~~
nl
It's interesting.

I've been running that survey for a little while, with a non-HN audience. More
than 50% use more than one provider, and people managing more than 10 servers
(who I presume are doing it for a business) don't seem any less likely.

(Thanks for all the answers BTW. I especially liked the OrionVM vs Ninefold
comparison someone did in a comment - I'm from Australia, and for various
reasons are reasonably familiar with the offering available. Alex from OrionVM
is on HN, too)

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Maxious
"Page Could Not Be Loaded

We're very sorry, but the page could not be loaded properly. This should be
fixed very soon, and we apologize for any inconvenience.

Debug Info:

Status: 503 Response: Service Unavailable XID: 1889032339

AppFog"

Uhh, scaling issues?

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tangerine
Just curious - How is this different than buying a server from Amazon, and
sticking Ruby (or whatever it is that I need) on it and using it? Does the
incremental value provided by Appfog lies in the fact it abstracts this get-
meself-a-server-from-amazon part? Genuinely curious and hence asking.

~~~
cardmagic
A thousand words, or 30 seconds start to finish of deploying a Ruby app
yourself on AppFog - <https://console.appfog.com/signup>

~~~
tangerine
I registered as you suggested. I agree that getting productive in 10-15
minutes is great, but the setup time, at least for me, even if it takes a
whole day, is a negligible overhead in my life as a programmer. Currently I
run multiple servers on Amazon and as someone that programs in more than two
languages, I drop an instance of whatever I am working on (Ruby, Java, Django
as examples) and they really do not take much time at all. I am sure this post
shows my age, but I am trying to understand the real value a service like
Appfog provides.

Also may I ask how do I setup ssh trust and how do I access the command
prompt.

~~~
EwanToo
AppFog handle things like software updates, scaling beyond one machine, DDoS
attacks, all those kind of things.

You ask them to deploy a (for example) MongoDB service, they do it, and they
are responsible for the operation of it.

The idea is to reduce the amount of day to day (or more likely month to month)
work involved in doing things like security patches, upgrading infrastructure,
etc, that suck up a lot of time, especially for people who don't have
experience in building load balancers and so on.

~~~
manku_timma
That is true, but what appfog (and the other PaaS providers) do not give is
the ability to tweak service[1] configs even to a limited degree. Not needing
to worry about Mongo or MySql setup is great, but for all of my non trivial
use cases, I have had to adjust configs at least a little.

[1] Cloud Foundry(and by implication AppFog) differentiate apps from services,
where services are backend infra like databases.

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timjahn
I think AppFog needs to figure out their branding, with regards to how AppFog
and PHPfog are perceived.

Is AppFog the parent company and PHPfog is a product of that company? Are they
two separate brands/companies?

We're using PHPfog for our MVP of matchist (matchist.com). Does the new AppFog
free plan apply to PHPfog too? I sure hope so, otherwise we just got screwed
by this.

I think they need to be a bit more clear about this.

~~~
malachismith
AppFog is the parent company. PHP Fog and AppFog are the two PaaS products
that AppFog the company make and sell.

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ilaksh
Does this give me one VPS that I can resize up to 2GB without paying for?

Can I launch multiple VPSs that are up to 2GB?

If you are trying to say its not a VPS, I don't believe you. I bet it is at
least built on some kind of virtualization. What is it exactly?

~~~
EwanToo
It's not in itself a VPS no, it's an "application environment", that's self
contained and runs inside the Linux operating system. You can have multiple
applications running over multiple instances, and Appfog handle all the
deployment, scaling, and back-end management.

Those Linux instances are hosted on one of multiple providers (your choice),
for example Amazon, Rackspace, HP Cloud, etc.

~~~
ilaksh
I didn't ask if it was in itself a VPS. You know what I asked.

Thank you for giving me a little bit of an idea.

So basically, AppFrog launches VPSs with their own images on Rackspace or AWS
for you, which you don't access directly. So back to my question.

Is there a button I can press to say that I want another 'instance' (= VPS)?
If I press that button twice, can I get two 2GB instances? Or is there no way
to ask for another instance directly, instead I deploy another app, and it
will always just resize the instance up to 32GB at which point then it would
finally deploy a new VPS?

I understand that hand-waving and magic is the way that you sell a 'cloud
service'. I need more details about the mechanics of using it and also
specific information about the implementation in order to evaluate it,
however.

I mean not to be a dick, I think the idea of starting with 2GB of RAM for free
is freaking amazing and the right direction to go.

~~~
EwanToo
Yeah you can explicity launch multiple instances at your own control, each one
uses the same amount of memory - so you could launch 10 instances with 200MB
of RAM, or 1 instance with 2GB of RAM.

It's definitely worth signing up for, I've been using it for a couple of
months and overall I've been impressed, though they still have too many
glitches for me to be entirely happy deploying an important application to it.

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pacomerh
I tried phpfog free for a while, I had very basic codeigniter setup and
noticed the mysql queries where much slower than a regular shared hosting. I
guess the free account works as a dashboard demo?, not sure.

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codenerdz
This is nice, but i hope FREE lasts....

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jhack
They're going to be explaining the business model tomorrow on their blog:
<https://twitter.com/appfog/status/228380656407826432>

~~~
malachismith
Right here: [http://blog.appfog.com/if-paas-is-expensive-and-slow-why-
not...](http://blog.appfog.com/if-paas-is-expensive-and-slow-why-not-use-a-
vps/)

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adverscott
This is going to change the PaaS game!

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GameDev
They claim to support .NET. But after sign up and creating an app in "Step 1:
Choose an application" i can not select any .NET "Application".

So their .NET Support claim is essentially a lie ?

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dangrossman
It seems, from their past blog posts, that some advertised features are in
"private beta" still.

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shpoonj
AppFog wants to make developer platforms load slowly and be so disorganized
and haphazard that you can't tell what's going on... great.

~~~
tegansnyder
People need to spend some time understanding their architecture before just
blindly moving into a PaaS provider. There are pitfalls and I bet we see some
startups go the PaaS route then pivot later on.

