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Comment by cheald | Hacker News Reader

I'm having trouble understand the value-add here. PHP is so dominant specifically because it's so easy to deploy - it's everywhere, and requires next to nothing to have a working installation up and running. There's no compelling reason to run PHP on Windows over Linux (and a bunch of reasons not to). The one feature that might sell me is a Heroku-style "addons" system, with things like Memcached, Redis, error aggregation and reporting, logging, and the like all ready to deploy at the touch of a button, but there's no mention of anything like that.

So, sell me. Why would I pay a premium for Azure+ when I can roll out my own equivalent infrastructure trivially, or use the existing competitor?

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Well, let's look at the options: - Run own server. Buy hardware, find colo etc. I guess the advantages of PaaS are obvious here. - Run vps, manage yourself. Required: somebody to buy/maintain the machine, plus a lot sysadminning. Advantages of PaaS obvious, too. - Run managed vps. Advantages of PaaS become less obvious. Maybe more supported versions, more specific functionality. Or automatic scaling (from tweaking db disk access times to network-level load-balancing); you don't get that with a managed vps.

I guess my point is that rolling out your own equivalent infrastructure is far from 'trivial'. Buying machines, worrying about mundane details like amps on the power backbone, setting up and maintaining the server software (lol at the first person - there always is one - to suggest that this can be solved with putting 'apt-get update' or equivalent in cron), or testing various versions of infrastructure software with your app because you don't know if it'll be safe to deploy that update that came out yesterday - I don't use PaaS but I see many advantages for small-time operations (and maybe bigger ones too, maybe I'd trust them more if I had more experience with them).

I understand the benefit of PaaS; I've used Heroku on occassion, and PHPFog seems to be making in the space as well. If you just want an app online, and don't care about how it gets there, and have more money than system administration skill, PaaS is great. My question is more along the lines of "What do I get with Azure+ that I don't get with PHPFog or an existing AWS AMI or a Linode StackScript?" What's the killer feature? It's going to be more expensive (you get to buy a cloud-sized slice of a Windwos license), likely slower than a Linux platform (the benchmarks I've seen put PHP on Windows significantly behind Linux deploys), and so far, it doesn't solve the hard parts of a PHP application deployment.

I'm a Rails developer, mostly, and I have Heroku apps, apps running on Linode VMs, apps running on rented Rackspace servers, and apps running on AWS. I've got a lot of experience setting this stuff up and maintaining it, but I still really appreciate the simplicity of Heroku; a dashboard of services and extensions ready to install in a click is awesome. Heroku's killer feature isn't that you don't have to set up RVM and Passenger, it's that you don't have to write bundles of daemon managers, monitoring scripts, rake tasks to manage code deploys and reloads, git hooks, background worker management, and a bunch of otherwise-tedious stuff.

The sales pitch for Azure+ seems to be "We solved a problem that only exists on Azure", which just isn't very compelling. So far, it seems like the only target audience for this thing is people who will only deploy PHP apps on Azure and don't have any other options, period, which seems like a really small target audience.

Oh ok then I got your point wrong, no worries.

I think the upside for a PHP PaaS is the existing market of commercial & open source deployable PHP application packages. A sort of app store could be created where vendors package their application with some special hooks for the platform. Obviously this would have to be bootstrapped, but I'm sure you see where I'm going with this.

Why would I pay a premium for Azure+ when I can roll out my own equivalent infrastructure trivially, or use the existing competitor?

Because "you" have another reason to use Windows and would like to offer a PHP front-end for it. What other reason? Expertise, another application, etc.

If it's not capable of dynamic scaling, they've missed a trick.

Sure, and I'd expect any PaaS to have dynamic scaling. The question is, though, how many people really need a dynamic scaling PHP service? In your average web app, you're far more likely to bottleneck in the database before the application requests queue (and the DB is significantly harder to horizontally scale), and if you do need more application CPU, it's generally as easy as "put multiple VMs behind a load balancer". You can even auto-scale with AWS using existing toolkits.

Heroku made its mark because Rails deployment is (or was, anyhow) a lot of work if you don't know what you're doing, and they simplified it to as-easy-as-PHP deployment. PHP just doesn't have the same barrier to entry.

Deploy from git sounds like a nice touch.

Deploy from git sounds like a simple "git pull" being run by cron every minute. Am I missing something?

Git supports hooks, so you could write a script to push a branch out to a server whenever a commit is made. That would be more sensible than running 'git pull' in a cron job.

From their features page (http://cloud.webspecies.co.uk/features):

"Pulling code from a repository

You can configure a Git repository we are going to pull code from every minute or so. Once we find new commits they are going to be automatically deployed to the cloud."

... so it sounds like they did not take the sensible route either ;)

Sounds more like a "cap deploy" to me.

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