

The new sandbox: open-source and self-hosted - zimbatm
http://blog.dotcloud.com/new-sandbox

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tga
I'm sad to see their free sandboxes going away, they were a good option for
deploying Django for small, non-commercial projects or tests. The experience
was better than Heroku (rsync deploy, reasonable database limit, ssh shell)
and the docs were alright.

From the free options I've seen so far, AppFog comes closest, but last time I
tried them the Python/Django documentation was pretty sketchy and the build
process had some issues.

What are some other good free (tier) PaaS options out there?

~~~
deanclatworthy
Appfog no longer allows custom domains on new free accounts, and bandwidth is
down to 5GB from 50GB. It's good for testing, but little else.

~~~
tga
Not that I wouldn't like more, but I'm perfectly happy even with those terms,
they still mean I can deploy as many experiments and prototypes as I want.

I wouldn't expect to run a production application with 50GB/month traffic for
free (unless it was some kind of great free service itself, and then you can
probably talk it over with them).

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acjohnson55
Since my comment on Dotcloud's blog post hasn't been approved, I'll repost
here. Mind that this was addressed to Dotcloud...

First of all, I want to congratulate you guys on what you’re doing for the
community by open-sourcing these projects. I have hope that it will lead to
faster extension of the options provided by the already-slick configuration
scheme to better support new variations on deployment strategies, as well as
better documentation.

That being said, my days as a Dotcloud customer may be numbered. Back when I
was evaluating PaaSs to use for my commercial project, I chose Dotcloud
because I could be free to experiment and test using the Sandbox. While we use
a Live application for our production deployment, my company still relies on
the Sandbox for staging and one-off tests.

I have since run into a couple pain points using Dotcloud’s services. The
first of these is the fact that your Postgres service cannot be easily scaled.
Dotcloud support themselves recommended that I use Heroku’s Postgres hosting
as an alternative. This seems to be just one step down the slope of
potentially migrating our whole stack. The second pain point is that the
instance-based model is not amenable to running New Relic for monitoring. This
is not a problem specific to Dotcloud, but again, Heroku is outflanking you by
integrating New Relic pricing directly into their basic pricing model. This
provides for much more predictable and bounded billing–super important for my
company in our bootstrapping stage.

While I certainly understand that the Sandbox flavor must come at a
significant cost to your company, the fact that it’s phasing out is a
significant reduction in value for mine. I’m sure this wasn’t an easy
decision, but I hope you understand that this is a strong push toward testing
out my deployment on your competitors’ services so I can evaluate the
pros/cons of bailing. I hope you’ll consider this as just one customer data
point.

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zimbatm
Their new strategy is to decommission the free plans and re-invest in building
open source instead.

It's not really clear how to self-host and how to transition from self-hosting
to their platform if the need arises.

~~~
thibaut_barrere
The sandbox was a good incentive to try DotCloud out and keep a healthy
staging server etc.

But I suppose the freemium model (I understand it's a kind of freemium) costs,
again, too much in this case.

~~~
kmfrk
I'm sure they have the numbers to support decision. It's never a one-size-
fits-all, unfortunately, and I think I'll stop using dotCloud at this point.

Not that I want to make the impression that there are any obvious alternatives
for a fairly easy Django deployment experience.

~~~
thibaut_barrere
As someone who is going to launch a SaaS all-paid (no freemium), I can
certainly understand their decision :-)

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memset
I think this is great, with one request: I would love to be able to use the
same dotcloud toolchain to deploy to a local VM (or, container, I guess.)

Something like `dotcloud local push`. This way I don't have to mess with
chef/vagrant/etc for my staging environments: I can simply use my dotcloud
configurations for both local and production deployments.

It would be sad if I had to create one deployment system for testing
environments, and something entirely different for production - because by the
time I set things up for tests, I might as well use that same tool chain for
prod!

I don't mind that the free tier is going away - because for me, it has been
less about the "free" and more about the "easy to throw a stack together".

Exciting times!

~~~
acjohnson55
That's a really good point. If it were really, super painless to set up a
local Dotcloud "Sandbox", it would alleviate a lot of the pain of the loss of
the free Sandbox. But it's gotta be as easy as it used to be. For me, this
means that there should be a zero-config Homebrew package for Mac and a zero-
config Apt package for Debian/Ubuntu.

If this existed, it would be really easy to convert self-hosting customers to
the paid service for scalability and support, and maybe some of the Dashboard
tools. But considering this could be months away, I really wish the Sandbox
were sticking around for a while...

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andypants
Does anybody else feel that less than 3 weeks is not enough advance notice
before permanently destroying applications?

~~~
thibaut_barrere
It's even shorter: 4 days before you cannot update your staging server if you
have one. The people who forwarded me this announcement were really surprised
about that (they use sandboxes as staging server).

~~~
shykes
DotCloud CEO here. You're right, that does feel too short. We're going to
extend the grace period.

~~~
nfriedly
You probably want to update <http://docs.dotcloud.com/guides/flavors/#sandbox>
too so that it doesn't give the impression that this is a service you still
intend to offer.

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robertfw
How does this affect the ability to run staging vs production environments? We
had been looking at using dotCloud thanks in large part to the ability to run
as many staging environments as we needed on the same infrastructure.

With that said the possibility of using the open source variety - bringing
along with it the ability to use it outside of US East - sounds pretty
promising.

~~~
shykes
A lot of dotCloud customers use paid apps for staging because it more
accurately reflects production and makes for zippier demos (Live apps get
faster machines).

You can keep it scaled to a minimum (but still >1 containers to catch scaling
bugs) and destroy it after your tests.

------
dbrian
Their prices seem really high. 1 instance with 1.7GB RAM is $233/m vs $44/m
for Amazon EC2. What an I missing here?

~~~
acjohnson55
Dotcloud is built on top of EC2 to provide super painless configuration and
management. If you want to manage your whole stack, EC2 is not a bad way to
go, but for early testing and deployment with modest hosting needs, it's a
cheap way to avoid a lot of sysadmin work. Particularly if you haven't done it
a whole bunch of times before. There are a whole bunch of folks that provide
this type of service, it's called "Platform as a Service".

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kapilvt
Wow, that's pure awesome, and ballsy.

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nwmcsween
I highly dislike how docker is structured, LXC itself is a somewhat mess of
enterprisism and slathering on more abstractions on top of it makes it even
more so. Look at <http://criu.org> for a more modular approach (a sandboxing
interface would still be needed) and IMHO what is needed is a sane library to
abstract sandboxing (not libvirt) and another for resource limiting (which
includes hardware)

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groovecoder
Seems like a typical "pasture-source" play - when something gets too hard to
maintain, put it in the open-source pasture to let it live or die however it
might.

~~~
amackera
Except that they still use all of the technologies that they are open
sourcing! They benefit from any fixes & features.

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mehdim
Is this a fail about the business model of dependant Paas? IMO open source is
not an "alternative" business model, but a complete model (see Redhat, Talend
etc...). I don't know open source PaaS that made money then big companies...
Curious to see if they will monetize with open source what they couldn't
closed source...

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dabeeeenster
I wonder how simple this is going to be getting set up and running. Non-
trivial, I would have thought?

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goldfeld
So how long before BitNami announces something clever related to dotCloud?

~~~
ridruejo
There is some overlap with our LAMP/Django/etc. stacks, but we are much more
focused on the application layer. We like the dotCloud guys, they are nice
people and very smart. I am sure they will figure out a model that works for
them. It is always difficult to get it right the first time. The PaaS business
is tough though, because you are competing with the underlying platform
providers in a very direct way.

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kmfrk
dotCloud (YC '10). :)

