Out of ignorance & interest, if I'm familiar with the technologies I want is...

randall · on April 26, 2011

I've been experimenting with DotCloud (about to push my first site live soon) and I've found it's pretty freaking awesome. It runs on AWS, so basically it's outsourced sysadmin-ing. Give the guys some time and I think DotCloud will be the best platform. Given they just raised some funding, if they get their feature set right, it should work out pretty well.

beck5 · on April 26, 2011

thanks, it will be interesting to see what the prices are and if its worth it (probably). The lack of control can be a bit scary.

jpetazzo · on April 26, 2011

Hi, DotCloud'er here - so take my comment with a bit of salt :-)

Regarding "lack of control", we do our best to address that, in multiple ways.

1. We don't require DotCloud-specific changes to your apps; if you install your Python dependencies with pip or easy_install, dropping a requirements.txt file at the top of you app will be enough to get them installed automatically when you push your code to DotCloud. Of course, if you are used to install Python stuff with other ways (apt-get install, or funky PYTHONPATH tricks), you will have to change that. But moving your dependencies to requirements.txt is not DotCloud-specific, and if you take the time to do it, your app will certainly run better, not only on DotCloud, but on other environments as well. Same thing for the wsgi.py wrapper: once you have done that, you app will run like a charm on any other WSGI-compliant hosting. We think it's a big win, but we won't fight to the death to convince you otherwise ;-)

2. We give a "fair amount" of control on your DotCloud services: SSH, crontabs... But you don't get root access. Why? Well, what if you deploy a Python+WSGI service, and then "sudo apt-get install redis mysql-server irb1.8"? If we want the scaling/monitoring/etc. to be working, we need to set some rules. However, if you need custom stuff, we will always do our best so you can get them.

3. There's the famous "I'm too scary to put my data in the Cloud" (especially after last week's EC2 outage); we address that by giving you many ways to setup automatic backups of your data. For instance, we have a tutorial explaining how to setup MySQL/PostgreSQL backups and ship them to a 3rd party server using FTP/SCP.

We are perfectly aware that many of you out there can do what we do with Puppet/Chef/#{my_fav_devops_tool}, but there are even more people who would rather get straight to the code, and we want them to be as happy and productive as possible!