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Comment by jsarch | Hacker News Reader

Fantastic idea; wish I had thought of it. I'm very curious to see how efficient your "glue" code is between the components. It's one thing to have a modular hands-off system, it's often another to have that system perform reasonably well. What level of system administration do you expose/hide to the developer? How do you plan to make money?

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Our focus is on giving control a developer needs: how do I install language-specific packages? How do run my tests? How do I pass settings to my app? How do I run that custom build command?

We don't offer root access. But we're working on customization tools that will make you forget you ever had to ssh into a server directly.

As for pricing: we're already charging a few test customers, and will expand paid plans to all beta users very soon.

If I understand correctly, your basic assumption is that a developer only needs access to the configuration options. Essentially, a developer isn't going to hack the code, they just modify the package configuration as needed. I think this would be a fair assumption and targets a huge number of users looking to leverage the cloud.

As for pricing, looking back, I realize that my question may have been a bit blunt and offensive. What I was really curious to know was whether you were going to be charging "per instance", "per hour", "per instance-hour", "per package", etc. For example, is Apache+MySQL on a single machine (if that's possible) less expensive than Apache on one machine and MySQL on another? What about compared to Nginx+Cassandra? (FWIW: You don't have to answer this directly if you want to keep the cards close while in testing...)

None the less, I wish you the best. (signed up for a beta.)

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