luc_perkins

I'm not sure what it would mean for them to move the tech industry into their political machine. Could you clarify?

I agree pretty strongly. I read, for example, that the Obama campaign expanded the Democratic Party's voter database by something like a factor of 10.

I totally get that, and no markup above and beyond AWS pricing seems like the way to go.

But the problem is that AWS pricing itself is not completely transparent. It's based on usage, which means that the bill at the end of the month can end up being an unpleasant surprise, as it has been for lots and lots of AWS users over the years. Who can know in advance what their usage figures will be?

RAM-based pricing means that the bill at the end of the month literally cannot be a surprise. We have four available plans, and monthly bills map directly and seamlessly onto those plans.

We run on AWS (among others) but WE pay AWS, not our customers, because we think that part of the mission of PaaS is to shield customers from the many disparate pricing models on different IaaS providers. Want to run on Rackspace via AppFog? Same price. Want to run on HP? Same price. Azure? Same price.

PaaS needs to abstract hardware away completely, even monetarily. Paying IaaS providers directly is not the way to do that.

The problem with BitNami Cloud is that they are AWS only and the pricing model is highly opaque. You pay once for Bitnami and then AGAIN for AWS. According to AppFog's pricing you pay only one source, namely us and never Amazon or Rackspace or HP or anyone else, and pricing is solely RAM-based, which means that it's next to impossible to incur costs that you don't actively choose.

You're right. I think people need to give AppFog a chance.

Once they do something like, for example, cloning an app in Singapore and re-deploying it in Ireland in less than a minute, they'll see the value in what we've built.

AppFog does not currently support persistent file systems, but we're working hard on adding this feature. In the meantime, we strongly recommend Amazon S3 as a persistent file store.

AppFog is absolutely NOT being discontinued! We are incredibly proud of what we accomplished with PHP Fog, but we think that the AppFog is the true future of PaaS: polyglot and poly-infrastructure. We simply don't think that single-language PaaS on a single infrastructure is the future, and we're working on rolling all of the functionality from PHP Fog into AppFog, where you'll be able to deploy Node, Java, Python, Ruby, and other runtimes and deploy to a variety of infras.

AppFog is absolutely thriving right now and will be around for quite some time, we assure you.

Please note: this is the first in a series of tutorials. This tutorial in particular is devoted solely to migrating application code. Tomorrow, we will post the first of two data migration tutorials that will walk users through the data migration process.