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Comment by mkozlows | Hacker News Reader

A look at the PaaS landscape that doesn't mention AWS (Elastic Beanstalk) or Azure is a very weird look.

Why is it getting harder for randos to succeed in PaaS? Because they're competing with Amazon and Microsoft, and that's hard.

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I think beyond it simply being difficult to compete with AWS and Microsoft, the more specific reason is that those providers (plus the smaller ones that are probably also thriving) all support pretty much any language / configuration you can throw it them, so the barrier of entry is too high. For a new PaaS start-up to compete you'd need automate the provisioning and deployment of dozens of different languages out of the gate, or support at least one of these stacks much, much better than any of the existing PaaS too, such that it makes it the obvious choice for that language. WPEngine would be an example of a PaaS that specializes in a single stack better than any of the multi-stack players. Heroku too started off as a PaaS specialist for Ruby on Rails, and now has expanded to supporting many languages and configurations. If you specialize you have a shot at besting AWS or Azure - if your goal is to support all of the existing stacks plus new ones, then forget it.

Not to mention you have to beat their prices too. AWS and Microsoft are expected to keep prices low to keep out competition.

Or are they leveraging their resources to provide a capable service at a lower cost? Two huge players (and other competition) seems like a healthy space, unless they're colluding.

Colluding to keep prices low? Usually it's the other way around.

Not actually arguing that this is what's happening, but they could collude to keep prices low so that the resulting small profit margin doesn't provide any room for newcomers.

Straight out of the Standard Oil playbook actually.

The argument against Standard Oil was that it kept prices low until their competitors went out of business or were cheap to acquire, and then raised prices as a monopolist.

Simply keeping prices low to keep the competition away is just competitive markets working - there's no benefit to consumers in the entrance of new suppliers if they will offer the same product at the same or higher price.

Iirc Walmart was found NOT to be a monopoly because after they depressed prices, they stayed low. Ianal, ymmv on these statements.

I've priced this out and I don't think that AWS prices are "low". I think it would be easy to set up a PaaS and undercut AWS. The challenge to doing that, though, is the need to build software, the cost of marketing it so people are aware of it, etc.

I'm glad someone else said it. I work on Azure, so I thought maybe I was just in a bubble, but the various "Death to PaaS" articles not mentioning Azure or AWS seemed odd. Azure App Service is just one of the PaaS services we have, and we're quite healthy. :)

And no mention of Google AppEngine

No mention of Cloud Foundry or IBM Bluemix?

Something like beanstalk is a great example because it's basically a canned configuration for other AWS services meaning you can graduate to fully custom virtual infrastructure with far less hassle. That's tough for other services to compete with.

I don't know about AWS, but Azure strongly recommends PaaS over IaaS (i.e. VMs).

In my experience you pay a ton more for the same amount of resources when it's PaaS so it makes sense that providers are going to push that over just configuring your own blank VMs.

I think with Azure the costs for basic compute services are about the same, you can run the same code on Iaas (Virtual Machines) or Paas (Cloud Services, App Services) and the costs are the same for equivalent performance.

For more complex products it's probably different, but the value of that is also higher. Just clicking Azure Search and simply start using it is a lot simpler then setting up your own Elastic Search cluster and having to manage it.

Also he didn't mention Dokku!

Anyone who thinks that Dokku is remotely comparable to the offering that Heroku provides almost certainly also forgot to setup something like fail2ban or database backups. Yes, it definitely does help ease the pain, but IMO is not in the same category as actual PaaS solutions.

There is just so much more to maintaining server infrastructure that most people don't see, and that's where services like Heroku shine. Even managing self-hosted PaaS software is hard and not a complete replacement for just paying another company to handle it for you.

Note: I am one of the Dokku maintainers, and my full-time job is Operations Engineer (one of several) at a startup.

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