
Ron Conway, Chris Sacca And Others Invest 800K In Dotcloud (YC S10) - razin
http://techcrunch.com/2011/02/28/dotcloud/
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moe
I've said it in a previous DotCloud post and I'll say it again: _If_ they can
pull it off then they'll be golden.

But I'm extremely skeptical they can.

Many of the components they list require intimate domain knowledge. E.g. there
are entire companies dedicated to designing and babysitting Hadoop clusters,
yet DotCloud just lists it casually alongside other bleeding edge mammoths
such as Riak or Cassandra.

DotCloud will need to not only stay on top of things for so many components
and provide smooth upgrades for an inherently growing diversity of
deployments. They'll also have to support old versions effectively forever and
deal with all those little customizations that people need.

Of course all that is doable, given enough man-power. However, after a certain
point it's not very _automatable_ anymore.

So, that said, I remain curious if this will really come out as the holy grail
that they seem to be shooting for. Or if it will gradually degrade into "just
another managed hosting provider" (which isn't a bad thing either, of course).

~~~
simonw
That was exactly my concern when I first heard about it. I got a chance to sit
down and chat with one of the co-founders a few weeks ago and came away very
impressed - he demonstrated deep level knowledge of a bunch of software I care
about (I particularly quizzed him on Solr and Redis) and managed to convince
me that his team is very sharp when it comes to keeping on top of the
infrastructure elements they support. I think they might be able to pull it
off.

~~~
moe
Yes, I didn't mean to criticize the team. I'm just in the same business
(making my living with what they are trying to automate) and know the hurdles
they are going to meet.

For example, my provisioning system looks nearly identical to theirs. I also
have the central config file to map out roles/services/dependencies, network
relations, and the CLI tools to 'manifest' a layout in the form of server
instances, EBS volumes etc. And finally puppet to beat everything into shape.
I can compose and deploy a production-ready runtime environment with many
permutations of commonly used components in a single day.

The thing is, every seasoned admin builds that stuff over the course of his
career. It cuts down manual labor significantly.

But you eventually reach a point of diminishing returns. Each individual
component has corner cases, special optimization potential, and more than one
valid operation mode (e.g. cluster vs master/slave).

Automating and maintaining(!) _all_ permutations that customers will request
is nothing short of a herculean task. That's why every managed hosting
provider limits itself to a tiny subset of components ("We are experts in X"),
charges significant fees for their services, and refers to specialized
consultants for requirements such as "let's have a hadoop cluster".

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geuis
Solomon and crew were incredibly helpful in providing hosting for us when we
were trying to get into YC this last round. Solomon even took a couple hours
with us to sit in a park near his apartment and give us some guidance on the
day of the interview. These guys deserve all the success they can.

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ericflo
Congrats to the DotCloud guys—if they can crack the language-agnostic cloud
hosting nut, they'll be worth every cent. It's a big problem to tackle though
:)

~~~
bmelton
I've been using it religiously for a little while now, and I've deployed a
couple of Django instances, a Flask project, Wordpress, a Simplemachines
forum, a handful of MySQL databases, 1 postgreSQL instance and memcache.

The only tweaking I had to do for any of it was provide a WSGI script for the
Python, which Dotcloud was able to provide in a tutorial.

It might be a big problem to tackle, but they are most of the way there.

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kineticac
Congrats guys. Dotcloud is awesome, the team is amazing! Even though we
weren't hosted on Dotcloud, Solomon always was willing to help us out. That's
the kind of service that comes from a company that you know will do well =)

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jamroom
Speaking as a current Dotcloud customer, the setup they've created to handle
creating and managing the various components of your "stack" is very cool -
within a week of starting work on our first project hosted on Dotcloud I was
already planning and thinking about how to move ALL of our projects over, as
the flexibility and ease of use is awesome. Right now they are still in beta,
but so far I'm super impressed.

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thebootstrapper
I really like this DotCloud business model. Although i see a competition
directly from Amazon Cloud Formation. What will happen to DotCloud if all the
independent vendors make their software Cloud Formation ready?

There is a difference here, DotCloud making the platform ready for to you vs
the vendor makes the platform cloud formation ready.(Thats AWS they make
others to work for them)

Would love to see how this little, nimble start up being chased by a big, fat,
bully AWS, fights back.

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coreyrecvlohe
Very promising concept. This could be the killer app for the cloud. Good luck!

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g123g
So what is THE advantage of using dotcloud over my own AWS account where I can
configure my servers using libraries like boto or Chef. Using AWS I can go for
Elastic BeanStalk or do the complete configuration myself. Not able to see
what is the benefit it provides.

~~~
jpetazzo
Elastic BeanStalk only does Java so far, or so I guess. Sure, they will expand
- Amazon has an awesome R&D so I don't expect them to stay sitting there. And
if you're daring, you can probably already run JRuby and Jython on BeanStalk,
but YMMV. DotCloud already has Python, Ruby, PHP, Java, MySQL, PostgreSQL,
Redis... The CLI is also quite easier to use than Boto. It doesn't need you to
learn everything about instances, EBS, ELB, etc. for starters :-) Finally, I
like Chef/Puppet, but mastering them takes some time. And most folks prefer
pushing your code with git/hg (Ã la Heroku/Djangy/etc) rather than authoring
AMIs, I was told :-)

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adammichaelc
My concern would be, what do you do if you've built on top of these guys and
then they get bought by a company like Salesforce that will shut down the
service? What are Heroku customers doing post-acquisition, for instance?

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bradleyjoyce
my initial reaction, as a developer, is that _most_ of what I do _is_ in one
language, so I want to use a platform that is a specialist and not a
generalist.

That said, I'm sure I'll check it out and it does sound intriguing.

~~~
6ren
It may be that for small projects, this is mostly a non-issue.

Historically, heterogeneity has been a big problem for a long time. Vendors
want lock in; customers don't. Much of Oracle's early success was about being
hardware agnostic. Similar for Java. All that XML nonsense, that everybody
hates but that has incredibly widespread adoption, was also about inter-op:
it's crap, but it's _ubiquitous_ crap.

Now, I _don't know_ is this is an issue in the cloud. But vendors will want
lock in; customers won't.

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marcamillion
DotCloud guys, if you are reading this, I am not sure if this is a typo on
your main page. It looks like it is, but not sure.

>“Wow. DotCloud have been completely amazing. Their support is second to none.
They've taken this chore that we hated doing—systems administration—and turned
into a magical, fully automated system.”

That's from the testimonial of whereoscope.

The 'have' been. Shouldn't that be 'has been' ?

~~~
nandemo
There is a dialect of English spoken in a certain European country where that
usage is common and correct:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_and_British_English_di...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_and_British_English_differences#Formal_and_notional_agreement)

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pbreit
DotCloud is interesting but I think I'd prefer a set of comparable Fabric
scripts and an AWS account. But that wouldn't be a very good business I
suppose.

~~~
old-gregg
This works well... up to a point when you realize that you're paying someone
close to a full-time salary to manage your ever growing Fabric scripts and an
AWS account.

~~~
moe
That fulltime salary is a rounding error for most companies, especially when
you consider that _you need that person anyways_.

Seriously, I'm making a large part of my living off companies that once
thought (or were told) that they could do without a sysadmin.

If the internet-part of your business consists of more than a static website
(or a wordpress) then, by all means, pay that fulltime salary. Even if you
decide to go fully managed hosting; you absolutely want that to be an educated
decision rather than an educated guess.

And it doesn't end there. A never-ending chain of small decisions is waiting
on every step of the road. Pull that knowledge inhouse (or to a trusted
longterm advisor) as early as you can. Otherwise you will inevitably foot a
much higher bill later in the game.

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6ren
I think at the moment, customers still value performance and reliability over
flexibility and customizability. But it won't always be so...

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gkelly
So when will Dotcloud be hiring?

~~~
shykes
We're actively hiring already :) Infrastructure engineers, frontend dev,
community manager, product marketing. Drop us a line!

