As a very happy user of PiCloud, I'm sad to see it go. It is a shame they had such A-list VC's (Andreessen Horowitz, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, and Greylock Partners), who don't have an interest in just a good solid business. They only wanted a huge, home run.<p>I've been looking around for a good replacement, and there is a gap. PiCloud really had three components. The first was an ability to run code with arbitrary dependencies with no more than a second start up time. PiCloud called them environments. This is really the same problem Docker is addressing. Both were using LXC and AUFS to solve the problem. Unfortunately, Docker-as-a-service is very early days. People like orchardup.com are getting there, but so far only have hourly pricing. There is enginedock.com which has per minute pricing, but is it super early on. I'm in a "Docker gap", where these services are really not at the same level that PiCloud was.<p>The second was the nice Python API, RESTful interface, and the command line interface for triggering off jobs, querying when the finish, and getting the results. That part will presumably be open sourced, but it is really all tied in to the hosting portion.<p>Then the third level is to have a bunch of machine you can load balance across, to allow per second pricing on AWS. They had such lovely high memory, high CPU machines to run on. The split up some of the biggest EC2 cluster instances, and you could run each process on your 1/8 share. The nearest current replacement is iron.io's IronWorker. However, they only have 320MB per job, which doesn't work for my application. Also Heroku workers are billed per second, but they only have up to 1GB of memory. I'm hoping that this (new?) entity Multyvac can serve that role successfully. Hopefully, they'll tell us more detail on this soon.<p>Anyway, best of luck to the PiCloud team. You were great. Especially Aaron who did much of the tech support. Thanks.