AppFog Pricing Released | Hacker News Reader

AppFog Pricing Released

console.appfog.com

90 pointspaukiatwee75 comments

I would be very interested to know how their entry level plan is free and yet generous.

I want it to be true, I want the numbers to work for them. I have a small site that does 70GB/month and this would somehow beat shared hosting (dreamhost in my case) at only $3/month for the extra 20GB. Yet this is even more generous than their phpfog offering.

One thing I did not notice was any mention of disk usage. Either way I'll at least test them. I've been wanting to try out PaaS for a while.

Because once you invest your time in their free plan, then you'll use them for every other site you have too. Heroku did this to me and so far it's worked out well for us both.

There's no mention of disk usage because it doesn't matter and has no effect on price. Pricing is based solely on RAM usage. The thing is, economies of scale in the infrastructure space have made this kind of pricing model extremely feasible on the PaaS side.

I think the answers are here: http://blog.appfog.com/if-paas-is-expensive-and-slow-why-not...

This could be quite a game changer. Other than the generous free allowance, the other big difference compared to Heroku is that it allows you to select the infrastructure you launch on, including three different global regions for AWS (Singapore, Ireland, Virginia).

By providing an alternative for Heroku's high prices and the "region-lock" (latency is always a big issue for potential customers), AppFog seems set to be a strong competitor. More competitors in these spaces are always welcome! =]

It would be game changer, since it provide other regions like Singapore, which is very welcome for huge potential Asia customers.

Yes. There are also plans to expand to Amazon-Tokyo and Rackspace-Hong Kong

I recently read that Heroku was considering going multi-region.

They might indeed do that. We'll see. Meanwhile, AppFog will be up and running on dozens of data centers by the end of 2012. Those currently available are just the beginning.

After signing up I got this text:

   Unlimited apps within 2GB RAM
   10 each with 100 MB limit

So it seems that each app can only use 100MB. It could be an example of course, but in that case they should make it more clear

I think it's talking about database storage there, but it would be silly to say unlimited apps as long as you don't have more than 10.

EDIT It looks like there is a limit of 10 'services'.

This is incorrect.

You have a minimum of 100MB of RAM from each app. That gives you 10 apps (total: 2 GB)

But If you have only 1 app, you can increase the memory quota for that instance to 2 GB.

You're right. It was just a bit confusing to see it with no context.

The service looks good. Hopefully they will add Redis at some point.

In the main page Redis is cited, it looks like they are based on Vmware's CloudFoundry, where I suppose Redis is a first class citizen

Support for Redis is indeed on the way and a very high priority

Doesn't work.

Created a new App & yet that newly created app doesn't exist in dashboard. Tried creating app Multiple times, but same result. Screenshots: http://i.imgur.com/Z8Krw.png http://i.imgur.com/wocw7.png

I would wish them luck!

True, there are still glitches to be worked out. We just entered general availability a few days ago. I would encourage you to give it another shot. Errors of this sort tend to arise somewhat randomly.

Tried again, that error is gone but now I get another error. opening the app url in browser generates a '404 - page not found'

Further, trying to update the app using 'af update' generates following error --> Starting Application 'appname': ..........................Error (JSON 503): <?xml version="1.0" encoding="u...

seems like you have lot of bugs waiting to be fixed ;)

Interesting, at amazon's regular prices that works out to about $12/month in services they are giving away (assuming 3 year reserved servers), but they'd have to cram 34 clients on to a server. But now you're splitting 26 EC2 compute units 34 ways ... thats less processor power then a Micro.

Without the extremely aggressive throttling of a Micro instance, too; which means that one greedy app can bring everyone to a crawl.

We are looking the gift horse in the mouth. It's free.

Yes, you will hit the limitations of the free plan very quickly indeed, at which point you should start paying.

The idea of these free plans is to let tire-kickers try out the system. They don't have to pay to test drive the UX and deployment mechanisms, which are the value-added features that sell a platform like Appfog. They don't have to pay for low-traffic prototypes. They can launch a whole set of minimum-viable sites on free hardware and then upscale one within a few minutes of any traffic spike (in theory, anyway). And it empowers marketing maneuvers like getting an entire programming class of 25 people using your platform for a one-day class.

(I'm not sure I love the above business plan, to say the least, but that's the idea, and thanks to Heroku it has become the standard.)

I think that that's a good description overall, although I would add that the free plan allows deployment to all currently available IaaS and hence to do things like run analytics on the different infras to see what works best. But I would push back a little bit by saying that you can run apps getting some pretty legit traffic for free. It needn't be just "Hello world" or sandbox apps.

I think that can be solved with cgroups.

Free plan is too good to be true, it reminded me of Google Apps, their free plan started with unlimited users and they ended up with only 10. let's see how long they can afford this generosity,

The sister concern: phpfog charges [5$ a month for custom domains](http://appfog.com/products/phpfog/pricing/) on the same tier. I would guess they'll have to eventually pull a switch on that.

I once tried to setup Symfony2 framework in PHPFog which is sister concern of AppFog. It did not went nicely. As Symfony2 generates classes in cache folder adding permission to that folder was tricky. Also have to clear the cache to push new changes. Dotcloud is better on this case. It gives shell access to both web server and db server.

After migrating a Java application that ran on EC2 to AppFog over the weekend, I wouldn't recommend running mission-critical apps on their infrastructure yet. A few things that I ran into

- After EC2 East was slow like molasses, I switched over to EC2 EU which was still speedy

- That caused their CLI tool to fall on its nose when trying to tunnel to the database (right now the bridge always gets installed in EC2 East). Fixed with a simple patch in the Ruby source

- Looks like the backend connector in nginx won't connect to your app if you have Basic-Auth on your root index

- Later MySQL became unavailable with "Host '10.0.47.186' is blocked because of many connection errors; unblock with 'mysqladmin flush-hosts'". No connection limiter between different apps?

I think AppFog is offering a great value should they be able to iron out all the kinks. I'm crossing my fingers that this will happen quickly.

This is the one of the cheapest PAAS I've ever seen. How about the performance?

Interestingly, database sizes seem to be lesser than RAM sizes in all the plans.

Isn't that the exact opposite of what is needed in the real world?

I emailed them about this and they suggested placing my data in RDS or hosting it outside of AppFog in some other way and running only my app servers with their service.

Custom domains are free too.. I am pleasantly suprised

giving away a lot. Not bad. a good move to get some attention.

You could say that. But it should be noted that what is currently free will always be free.

What about reliability. A multi-az paas would dominate heroku at any price.

Anyone know about reliability?

dotCloud (http://dotcloud.com) is a paas that is natively multi-az. You can use that feature to reliably deploy ruby , php, nodejs, python, mysql, mongo, redis etc. It also has real support and a sustainable business model.

(disclaimer: I work there)

AppFog has "real" support (including live chat with all plans, including free plans). And the business model will prove to be quite sustainable (and bundled with a readily comprehensible pricing model).

"Java, .Net, Ruby, Node, Python, PHP, etc."

Does that "etc" include Clojure and Scala?

How about Railo or OpenBD? Please.

"MySQL, Mongo, PostgreSQL, etc."

I'd like to know what that "etc." stands for.

The "etc." simply means that we're looking to expand the number of database options over time beyond this list

Rather than saying "etc." which makes it look like there are additional databases you currently support but are not listed, why not change it to "and more on the way" which clearly communicates what you mean?

PostgreSQL does not seem to be available, despite their ad copy. Googling reveals that it's been in beta and they seem to be expecting to roll it out soon.

Since Clojure and Scala both compile to Java bytecode, I would assume so.

I would hope so. Perhaps they should call those out to make it clearer?

No Documentation on how to use Java.

Googling for AppFog Java gave back broken 404 links to github.

Java documentation is on the way soon

Tomcat, Jetty, or GlassFish?

Heroku Java deployment is "unusual" and there are many Java developers out there that prefer WAR/EAR that complies with JEE5 (legacy purpose) or JEE6. If you can achieve that, get ready for massive users, I know there are people who don't like GAE model for various reasons.

Basically: make it like Jelastic and don't limit it like CloudFoundry (no EJB 3.1, etc etc).

JavaEE deployment model is preferable over some "weird" setups.

I'm not much of a Java person myself, but our dev team has told me that the WAR + Tomcat route tends to work best on AppFog, at least at this point in time. This is also our recommended way of running other JVM-based languages.

Your dev team is spot on. The Java market does not have a solid Cloud Platform so far because most vendors go their own way to support Java (Heroku and CloudFoundry are the example of going their own way).

The only Java-friendly PaaS so far is Jelastic simply because they support GlassFish and Tomcat utilizing standard deployment model. But Jelastic does not provide the infrastructure (data-center or AWS, whichever), they partner with hosting providers, which I think is not a great move.

If AppFog can come up with a more standard/sane Java PaaS model out there, you guys can win that particular market.

If I may suggest more:

1) Tomcat 7 instead of the older 5 or 6.

The JavaEE landscape has changed significantly from J2EE 4 to JEE 5 to JEE 6 in which each major version moves toward _way_ less code and reduce XML/settings/configurations to a very minimum.

2) TomEE (if possible, or as "add-on"/next-level offerings)

Tomcat 7 implements a subset of JavaEE 6 (known as the "web-profile": Servlet[controller], JSP[template], JSF[view/controller], Dependency Injection, JPA[orm])

Enterprises who are still in love with EJB 3.x need TomEE.

3) Maven for deployment (feature/option)

Use Maven for deployment.

[full disclosure: I work for Red Hat]

Try openshift.com, has full Java EE server with both free and supported options.

When choosing Rackspace + Ruby Sinatra I received this result: Sending...

Registering App Details...

Validating

Uploading App

500

Things are not that 500 red number seems like an error code to me which doesn't provide me with much information.

Try going into the console and seeing if the app is running anyway. Sometimes 500 errors spring up superfluously, even when things run fine. A small hiccup that we're working on aggressively.

Sinatra really isn't working.

We worked hard on Sinatra support this past weekend. Give it another shot. I've deployed multiple test Sinatra apps painlessly today, which was admittedly far less painless last week.

Same response with the Rackspace + Python setup. App is showed up in dashboard but I couldn't start it. Created domain returns a 404 page.

Can someone explain the concept or value of multiple instances on this? If an app is getting hit pretty hard can you just turn on another instance, albeit with less ram? Do you have to write your code in such a way to support it being run on multiple instances? Are there certain types of apps that are CPU intensive and RAM light, making the many instance/not much ram trade off a good idea?

I couldn't totally understand pricing model. You can get only twice of free plan when you agree to pay 100$ a month. Hetzner still seems logical, if you have enough passion to learn little bit server administration. http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produkte_rootserver/ex5

Hetzner is simply not a platform-as-a-service. It might be a good deal for a server, but that's not what you're paying for with a PaaS like AppFog. What you're paying for is application lifecycle management, from deployment to scaling to cloning to re-deployment on a different infrastructure, to adding services (like Mongo, MySQL, etc.) at the click of a button.

Serverraum alleine = etwas ganz ganz ganz anderes.

Agreed. As I write if you have will to learn Linux server management, you can easily achive what it offers. I can use PaaS if the price as low as not worth to do server administration. With same price point, I can have a real hardware with 12x more RAM and 1.5 TB disk cap and I can also add a skill to myself which is a good thing for long-term. Nowadays adding a service to your infrastructure is just an apt-get command. Deployment is easy as a git push. I totally understand who don't want to deal with terminals, config files etc. But as I said for me it is far from useful.

No integrated git-push deploy (I know you can use a gem with an extra instance to do that, but still). No SSH into your app. No custom app. Extra runtimes are there, but old (Erlang, for example), and no idea how to use them.

Other than those, it's a very good PaaS.

The AppFog command line tool is very straightforward and even somewhat Git-like: http://docs.appfog.com/getting-started/af-cli. If the "af" gem is installed, "af push" is the equivalent to a "git push." You're right that it's not the same thing, but it's pretty handy.

Extra runtimes (newer versions of Erlang, plus Perl, Go, etc.) will become available over time. They're high priorities for our dev team, as are Redis, Memcached, etc.

What do you mean by "no custom app?"

Regarding git vs af, if I could use the git already installed in my computer, and by simply adding my SSH key into AppFog system, I could avoid using `af` gem and Ruby altogether. Otherwise, I would have to install Ruby just for this purpose. But this is just personal taste.

Other PaaS such as Heroku or OpenShift allows you to set up a custom app. For example, you can create your own app type in Heroku's cedar stack with buildpacks, or the DIY app in OpenShift with supports for hooks.

Erlang probably isn't on the top of the priorities list, but I'm looking forwards to it.

Build packs and GitHub hooks are also on the roadmap

Am I reading this right? I can start 16 instances of my app (with 128MB RAM each)? For Free?

Yes that is right, altough if you really need 16 instances then I would assume you would hit the 50GB quite easily.

50 GB data transfer limit ($0.15/GB for additional resources)

This looks like a potential moneymaker.

No where on this page does it REALLY explain what this product actually does. Marketing/copy fail. Even the about page you have to click around to find is more about their funding than what I gain from this product.

Let me help you out: http://www.appfog.com/

Clear as can be.

Been using a lot of Dart lately, so I'm wondering if I could get a Dart VM running on AppFog. Since it's based on Java, there shouldn't be a problem, right?

No Perl support. But, it looks like it's a Cloud Foundry thing:

http://cloudfoundry.org/search?q=perl

We don't have an ETA just yet, but Perl support is definitely on the way!

Does not seem to support SSL, which might be a bit of a dealbreaker for many.

Any plan for SSL? And Apache Solr as a Service?

Yay. lets begin the exodus (from other service provider free plan)!

So how do you handle SSL for custom domain names?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com