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.
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.