I've said it in a previous DotCloud post and I'll say it again: <i>If</i> they can pull it off then they'll be golden.<p>But I'm extremely skeptical they can.<p>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.<p>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.<p>Of course all that is doable, given enough man-power. However, after a certain point it's not very <i>automatable</i> anymore.<p>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).
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.
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 :)
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 =)
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.
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?<p>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)<p>Would love to see how this little, nimble start up being chased by a big, fat, bully AWS, fights back.
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.
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?
my initial reaction, as a developer, is that <i>most</i> of what I do <i>is</i> in one language, so I want to use a platform that is a specialist and not a generalist.<p>That said, I'm sure I'll check it out and it does sound intriguing.
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.<p>>“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.”<p>That's from the testimonial of whereoscope.<p>The 'have' been. Shouldn't that be 'has been' ?
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.