AppFog Wants To Do For Developer Platforms What Google Did For EMail | Hacker News Reader

AppFog Wants To Do For Developer Platforms What Google Did For EMail

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39 pointsturoczy36 comments

Im really not sure about the pricing model. Here are a couple of points:

There are tons of people looking for $5 vps that have like 500mb on ram. Your pricing structure will be like a magnet for those type of people. I dont think may of those people will upgrade to a $100 a month plan though.

As with the point above, you are relying to heavily on the people who have bought into the system at the free plan and now have to migrate. If I were to go onto one of the paid plans I would feel bad knowing most of the money im spending is going to provide a free service tier.

50Gb data transfer limit 0_0. Its 2012, bandwidth is dirt cheap and 50GB really is not that much. Especially if the person is paying $100+ per month. If someone is using more than 2GB of ram they are most likely using more than 50GB of incoming/outgoing data.

Edit: I signed up to test it out and while it says unlimited services (free plan) once you signup it limits you to 10.

Edit2: Turns out you need to have some ruby knowledge to get started (even if they offer a ton of languages). Since I dont I will have to postpone playing with it till the weekend where I can dedicate some time to playing with ruby.

As a $5-VPS-with-512MB-of-RAM user, I would agree that us folks aren't the kind that want big upgrades. I use it to host a personal site, an informational site (http://websocket.us/) and that's about it. I'm not out there to build huge cloud apps.

I don't know any Ruby beyond absolute basics, and definitely didn't need to use it to get started.

If you're using OS X or Linux, just run these 3 commands in a Terminal:

sudo gem install af af login af update [appname]

to upload your app.

See here for more details http://blog.appfog.com/getting-started-with-appfogs-command-...

But you can get started with things like Wordpress or Drupal without touching the appfog client, see here for a list of "jumpstarts"

http://docs.appfog.com/getting-started/jumpstarts

FYI, it's $0.15/GB for additional data transfer: https://groups.google.com/d/topic/appfog-users/UtTmKrxSTYA/d...

It doesn't matter, even if the bandwidth was free. It is not stated anywhere so a potential customer will see that number and be less likely to buy the plan even if it is the smallest limitation.

I'm seeing a lot of comments talking about "just get a {VPS, dedicate box, Amazon, etc...}". I think people are missing the point. AppFog is trying to take all the "hard" work out of SysOps. Think Chef on crack, you are paying for their pre-configured infrastructure from the top down.

Their idea is provide a powerful, scaleable platform quickly and easily. Their mentality is called NoOps (http://blog.appfog.com/what-is-noops-anyhow/). It's a cheesy marketing term, and pissed a lot of people off, but it's pretty spot on for what their service offers.

https://console.appfog.com/pricing

2GB RAM FREE | 4GB RAM $100/month | 16GB RAM $380/month | 32GB RAM $720/month | More if you contact AppFog

Scaling your app is free, choosing multiple infrastructures is free, custom domains are free, fastest available servers in the infrastructures

on the other hand, ovh offers dedicated servers for:

16GB RAM £70/month

24GB RAM £100/month

24GB RAM £180/month

64GB RAM £260/month

http://www.ovh.co.uk/dedicated_servers/

That's so far from a like for like comparison that I can only think you've not read what AppFog is offering...

AppFog's service extends across different infrastructure providers

Dropping into the IaaS world for a minute, is this as common as it seems me to be?

Personally, I run servers over number of cloud providers, and then have a few VPSs around too, plus some servers at home, and lots of people I know are the same.

Is this a common thing people do?

I've been thinking about doing a dashboard type app to display/manage servers across providers.

What tools are people using at the moment for this kind of thing?

(I'm actually running a very short survey on this at the moment. I'd love it if people would do it - happy to share the results here: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/LDNZFG3)

It may be a common thing individual developers that play with everything do. I doubt it's common for businesses to deploy production apps across multiple clouds. Unfortunately I don't think that survey will be able to answer that either way.

It's interesting.

I've been running that survey for a little while, with a non-HN audience. More than 50% use more than one provider, and people managing more than 10 servers (who I presume are doing it for a business) don't seem any less likely.

(Thanks for all the answers BTW. I especially liked the OrionVM vs Ninefold comparison someone did in a comment - I'm from Australia, and for various reasons are reasonably familiar with the offering available. Alex from OrionVM is on HN, too)

"Page Could Not Be Loaded

We're very sorry, but the page could not be loaded properly. This should be fixed very soon, and we apologize for any inconvenience.

Debug Info:

Status: 503 Response: Service Unavailable XID: 1889032339

AppFog"

Uhh, scaling issues?

Just curious - How is this different than buying a server from Amazon, and sticking Ruby (or whatever it is that I need) on it and using it? Does the incremental value provided by Appfog lies in the fact it abstracts this get-meself-a-server-from-amazon part? Genuinely curious and hence asking.

A thousand words, or 30 seconds start to finish of deploying a Ruby app yourself on AppFog - https://console.appfog.com/signup

I registered as you suggested. I agree that getting productive in 10-15 minutes is great, but the setup time, at least for me, even if it takes a whole day, is a negligible overhead in my life as a programmer. Currently I run multiple servers on Amazon and as someone that programs in more than two languages, I drop an instance of whatever I am working on (Ruby, Java, Django as examples) and they really do not take much time at all. I am sure this post shows my age, but I am trying to understand the real value a service like Appfog provides.

Also may I ask how do I setup ssh trust and how do I access the command prompt.

AppFog handle things like software updates, scaling beyond one machine, DDoS attacks, all those kind of things.

You ask them to deploy a (for example) MongoDB service, they do it, and they are responsible for the operation of it.

The idea is to reduce the amount of day to day (or more likely month to month) work involved in doing things like security patches, upgrading infrastructure, etc, that suck up a lot of time, especially for people who don't have experience in building load balancers and so on.

That is true, but what appfog (and the other PaaS providers) do not give is the ability to tweak service[1] configs even to a limited degree. Not needing to worry about Mongo or MySql setup is great, but for all of my non trivial use cases, I have had to adjust configs at least a little.

[1] Cloud Foundry(and by implication AppFog) differentiate apps from services, where services are backend infra like databases.

I think AppFog needs to figure out their branding, with regards to how AppFog and PHPfog are perceived.

Is AppFog the parent company and PHPfog is a product of that company? Are they two separate brands/companies?

We're using PHPfog for our MVP of matchist (matchist.com). Does the new AppFog free plan apply to PHPfog too? I sure hope so, otherwise we just got screwed by this.

I think they need to be a bit more clear about this.

AppFog is the parent company. PHP Fog and AppFog are the two PaaS products that AppFog the company make and sell.

Does this give me one VPS that I can resize up to 2GB without paying for?

Can I launch multiple VPSs that are up to 2GB?

If you are trying to say its not a VPS, I don't believe you. I bet it is at least built on some kind of virtualization. What is it exactly?

AppFog is a PaaS built on various IaaS virtualization platforms (AWS, Rackspace, Azure, etc.), not a VPS.

I'm sure all cloud hosts are built on virtualization...

Just think of cloud hosting as the next generation of VPS hosting.

It's not in itself a VPS no, it's an "application environment", that's self contained and runs inside the Linux operating system. You can have multiple applications running over multiple instances, and Appfog handle all the deployment, scaling, and back-end management.

Those Linux instances are hosted on one of multiple providers (your choice), for example Amazon, Rackspace, HP Cloud, etc.

I didn't ask if it was in itself a VPS. You know what I asked.

Thank you for giving me a little bit of an idea.

So basically, AppFrog launches VPSs with their own images on Rackspace or AWS for you, which you don't access directly. So back to my question.

Is there a button I can press to say that I want another 'instance' (= VPS)? If I press that button twice, can I get two 2GB instances? Or is there no way to ask for another instance directly, instead I deploy another app, and it will always just resize the instance up to 32GB at which point then it would finally deploy a new VPS?

I understand that hand-waving and magic is the way that you sell a 'cloud service'. I need more details about the mechanics of using it and also specific information about the implementation in order to evaluate it, however.

I mean not to be a dick, I think the idea of starting with 2GB of RAM for free is freaking amazing and the right direction to go.

Yeah you can explicity launch multiple instances at your own control, each one uses the same amount of memory - so you could launch 10 instances with 200MB of RAM, or 1 instance with 2GB of RAM.

It's definitely worth signing up for, I've been using it for a couple of months and overall I've been impressed, though they still have too many glitches for me to be entirely happy deploying an important application to it.

I tried phpfog free for a while, I had very basic codeigniter setup and noticed the mysql queries where much slower than a regular shared hosting. I guess the free account works as a dashboard demo?, not sure.

This is nice, but i hope FREE lasts....

They're going to be explaining the business model tomorrow on their blog: https://twitter.com/appfog/status/228380656407826432

Right here: http://blog.appfog.com/if-paas-is-expensive-and-slow-why-not...

This is going to change the PaaS game!

They claim to support .NET. But after sign up and creating an app in "Step 1: Choose an application" i can not select any .NET "Application".

So their .NET Support claim is essentially a lie ?

It seems, from their past blog posts, that some advertised features are in "private beta" still.

Not a lie, but definitely a misrepresentation of their true offerings.

Claiming support for a language on your front page does not mean "in private beta". It means you actually support that language.

AppFog wants to make developer platforms load slowly and be so disorganized and haphazard that you can't tell what's going on... great.

People need to spend some time understanding their architecture before just blindly moving into a PaaS provider. There are pitfalls and I bet we see some startups go the PaaS route then pivot later on.

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