AppFog Now Part of Savvis Cloud | Hacker News Reader

AppFog Now Part of Savvis Cloud

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That's too bad. CenturyLink is a horrible company to deal with. Heroku provides enough functionality for what I need, thankfully.

Let's hope they don't kill what is an otherwise great product.

I'm hoping they bought AppFog for the right reasons, because they want to add resources to accelerate it's market share (and of course profit). This would be good for us and PAAS in general.

But if they just bought it so they can play around with "cloud" and seem hip and cool to shareholders then let it wither on the vine, we all lose a little.

PAAS is where we're going next, any many already have. AppFog has done a great job of pushing out features and keeping the community competitive.

Hi, this is Lucas, founder and CEO of AppFog.

I would not have picked CenturyLink if they didn't intend to add resources and accelerate us. I am thrilled about this combination, there is so much cool stuff CenturyLink can do with us, it is not even funny. Expect a lot of fun announcements in the near future.

That's good to hear. I've followed AppFog for quite a while now. I've seen a lot of passion and forward thinking stuff come from you folks, so I'm definitely hoping for the best.

Said absolutely every company ever acquired and neglected.

I sure hope that it's gonna accelerate a solution to the one big problem I have with AppFog ... lack of persisent storage. According to the roadmap it should have high priority but it's been a while since I heard anything about it.

No offense, but that's pretty much what every acquisition ever hopes for... and then they find out after the 'no interference' clause in their contract expires you start getting 'Input' from the new ownership.

I hope for your guys sake this doesn't happen though!!

Hello Lucas, after doing a quick web search for CenturyLink it is easy to believe that adding PaaS makes sense to expand their business. Good luck!

I just logged in to my old AppFog account and will give it a try.

At the risk of sounding trollish: isn't the acquirer (Savvis aka CenturyLink) a major US telco who is pretty friendly with the NSA snooping (and who somehow also acquired Qwest which resurfaced a few times through the NSA maelstrom)?

Yes. Their previous CEO, Joseph Nacchio, was in prison for not cooperating. Heard he's been moved to a halfway house? Not sure on that though.

You're thinking of Qwest.

It's arguable that Nacchio's non-compliance caused Qwest to sell to CenturyLink, but it isn't fair to say that Nacchio was the CEO of CenturyLink.

Since the PRISM news broke people are starting to associate cloud with a place to get spied on. It's no different than a web host. If they want your info, they'll get it and whether you us a cloud service won't be the deciding factor.

I was merely outlining that the acquirer hasn't displayed a pattern of being very interested in defending the privacy of its users. There's a difference between complying with the law and what the big telcos have been doing.

Would it be possible to easily grab the data from a running dedicated server without interrupting service to the user?

I have played with AppFog, but nothing serious. In any case, I like using PaaS products and more completion should make pricing fair.

Off topic, but what I would like to see is more low end for resources, but high end in services PaaS offerings: low memory and bandwidth, but: never get swapped out so loading request times become an issue, and inexpensive SSL support. I have some fun projects that may get less that a thousand requests a day but that I would still like no swaps and SSL for.

Savvis was pretty fun to work at back in the day. The CEO was a bit of a mess: http://blogs.riverfronttimes.com/dailyrft/2008/09/businessma...

Ssvvis. Now, that's a name I've not heard in a long time...

Seeing it, brought back memories that I rather repress for rest of my life :p

Okay, it wasn't that bad but it sure brings back the first bubble era. It's amazing how amazon was able to figure out this business and they're were just a book seller.

What's a bit amusing is that when I was at Savvis just before CenturyLink acquired them, the snarky comment was that they only offered the fog, because it hadn't quite taken off yet. Also, despite that #1 Gartner assessment, it certainly doesn't mean that it's got #1 market share for their sector either (Terremark was acquired by Verizon and I'd bet a lot of money they're making more than with Savvis' cloud services).

Savvis was a pretty fun place to work back in the day. The CEO had some issues though, probably why it was fun. http://blogs.riverfronttimes.com/dailyrft/2008/09/businessma...

http://pastie.org/8043348

^the email I received

I miss PHPFog. It was so much struggle getting AppFog to work for a simple CakePHP app that I actually gave up even though I had a $100 free package. With PHPFog you could deploy with git which was awesome but in AppFog they replaced it with their own af tool which was subpar. They also removed support for persistant file storage.

What are your opinions on Pagodabox?

Not used it. Would you recommend it?

I've gotten wordpress and a couple of other projects running on it, and it does have a free option you can try out. But it's also the first such service I have tried so I can't compare it to others.

But I can say they've been courteous and helpful with trouble tickets.

Not used pagodabox directly, but they had a techie give a overview of some of their tech to our PHP group last year (via Skype), and he went above and beyond what was called for in answering questions in detail.

I found their pricing to be a bit high compared to other providers such as Engine Yard.

Huh, well that's a nail in the coffin of that company.

Hi, this is Lucas, founder and CEO of AppFog. Just wanted to address this up front.

CenturyLink is committed to taking our PaaS offering to the next level through significant investments. AppFog is going to evolve rapidly, both for the public and private cloud. For our public cloud developers, this means more infrastructure options, increased levels of support, and accelerated launches of new features that our community has been asking for. We will soon be adding high-speed Savvis infrastructures options for deploying apps, including paid-only infrastructures with better reliability and performance. And for our private cloud developers within enterprises, we will soon be delivering AppFog-in-a-Box, a self-service private PaaS offering baked into Savvis’s cloud offering, a Gartner #1 Leader.

We have found a great partner in CenturyLink. CenturyLink is the 3rd largest telco in the United States, providing fiber networks to business around the world. Savvis, CenturyLink’s IaaS, is a great complement to AppFog so that as you scale your applications past the boundaries of AppFog, you can start adding high-speed IaaS resources quickly and easily.

CenturyLink is going to be an accelerant for us and I am proud to prove you wrong. :)

Keep up the great work!

Good to hear the positive plans currently. It's hard to separate the image of CenturyLink away from a small and agile customer-focused PaaS provider. Hopefully the benefit they provide to you is financial and infrastructure and not in corporate bureaucracy, shitty service and worse customer service that CenturyLink excels at currently.

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