Ron Conway, Chris Sacca And Others Invest 800K In Dotcloud (YC S10)
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
But I'm extremely skeptical they can.
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.
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.
Of course all that is doable, given enough man-power. However, after a certain point it's not very automatable anymore.
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).
For example, my provisioning system looks nearly identical to theirs. I also have the central config file to map out roles/services/dependencies, network relations, and the CLI tools to 'manifest' a layout in the form of server instances, EBS volumes etc. And finally puppet to beat everything into shape. I can compose and deploy a production-ready runtime environment with many permutations of commonly used components in a single day.
The thing is, every seasoned admin builds that stuff over the course of his career. It cuts down manual labor significantly.
But you eventually reach a point of diminishing returns. Each individual component has corner cases, special optimization potential, and more than one valid operation mode (e.g. cluster vs master/slave).
Automating and maintaining(!) all permutations that customers will request is nothing short of a herculean task. That's why every managed hosting provider limits itself to a tiny subset of components ("We are experts in X"), charges significant fees for their services, and refers to specialized consultants for requirements such as "let's have a hadoop cluster".
As you point out, beyond a certain point your needs will be specific enough to justify serious customization by the Basho and Clouderas of the world. We don't replace these guys. In fact we plan on facilitating integration with them, so that you don't have to chose between a well-oiled dotcloud stack and that 1% of customization.
As for how scalable and automatable our business is - don't worry about us. Having been in your shoes before, I can tell you with great certainty that dotcloud is much more than a bunch of custom AMIs, chef scripts and clever role-based provisioning scripts.
Our goal is to make you, an expert at these power tools, happy to use us instead, because it's so much freakin simpler. And don't worry, we will add all the customization hooks you need. We're taking one step at a time.
Thanks for reading! Solomon - dotcloud co-founder
The only tweaking I had to do for any of it was provide a WSGI script for the Python, which Dotcloud was able to provide in a tutorial.
It might be a big problem to tackle, but they are most of the way there.
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)
Would love to see how this little, nimble start up being chased by a big, fat, bully AWS, fights back.
(Unless of course your time to do that is worth more than what their service would end up costing you.)
That said, I'm sure I'll check it out and it does sound intriguing.
Historically, heterogeneity has been a big problem for a long time. Vendors want lock in; customers don't. Much of Oracle's early success was about being hardware agnostic. Similar for Java. All that XML nonsense, that everybody hates but that has incredibly widespread adoption, was also about inter-op: it's crap, but it's ubiquitous crap.
Now, I don't know is this is an issue in the cloud. But vendors will want lock in; customers won't.
>“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.”
That's from the testimonial of whereoscope.
The 'have' been. Shouldn't that be 'has been' ?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_and_British_English_di...
I, however, don't know very much about being a sys admin and I certainly wouldn't want to be put in charge of maintaining any production server.
That's what DotCloud is for. I have a beta account with them and its been working out great so far.
I've told a few people that we run on Heroku and had them respond "Really? Isn't that expensive?" When I explain that we have a whole bag of add-ons, several dynos, workers, etc, and our 6 months of expenses are still roughly a week's worth of man hours, they realize that it's actually quite inexpensive.
Seriously, I'm making a large part of my living off companies that once thought (or were told) that they could do without a sysadmin.
If the internet-part of your business consists of more than a static website (or a wordpress) then, by all means, pay that fulltime salary. Even if you decide to go fully managed hosting; you absolutely want that to be an educated decision rather than an educated guess.
And it doesn't end there. A never-ending chain of small decisions is waiting on every step of the road. Pull that knowledge inhouse (or to a trusted longterm advisor) as early as you can. Otherwise you will inevitably foot a much higher bill later in the game.