Next to Vim, I've never had any product, or startup, affect how I do real world work as much as dotcloud does. If you like EC2, pip, virtualenv, and don't like deployments, or system administration, or tuning memory settings, then dotcloud is the platform for you.
For as much as people love Heroku, DotCloud offers everything I liked about Heroku, and extends those conveniences to almost every platform I've ever worked with.
If I were in the venture capital business, I genuinely couldn't think of a better place to put 10 million.
With a round that big, it looks like Dotcloud is going to buy their own hardware and become a full bore hosting company, which is fantastic, if it can convince people to move out of the EC2 slum.
Either that, or the founders took too much money and diluted themselves beyond reason.
I'm always intrigued by services that rely on an infrastructure layer you don't control.
For example - you are betting that, say, AWS will put in both the best of breed hardware for your particular service - and that also they will manage it, set it up correctly / to your needs, and adjust to your requests.
Yet as a small player - you likely have little negotiating power with them, so how much visibility do you have to their implementations?
Further, there are HW caching and high speed memory layer technologies (FusionIO, Violin memory) that services like yours can greatly benefit from - yet you may not have any option to use such technologies due to reliance on a hosting vendor relationship.
What are your thoughts here?
I think that a hybrid model could be deployed where you define an architecture that is the best for your company and that takes advantages of the strengths of hosting -- for example - you don't want to maintain all the switching, routing and potentially storage gear - but maybe you could define the cache layer and install an maintain that with all your traffic routing through it which front ends to the more traditional offerings of EC2/AWS?
Thanks for your reply. If you're not going to buy your own metal, then with that much cash, you're probably going to hire an army of systems administrators to be oncall for your customers, eh?
All of AWS, really. My experiences with EC2 were abysmal: unpredictable CPU and disk performance, uselessly slow disk I/O, instances dropping off the face of the earth at least once a week.
Reddit's recent downtime is a good indicator of how sloppy AWS as a whole really is.
It's cool that Netflix pulled that off, but it seems like a company (like Dotcloud) that could prevent you from building infrastructure on top of infrastructure would be a boon.
As a high-profile EC2 client, I imagine Amazon gives Netflix tons of "complementary" support. A Netflix failure on EC2 would be a big black eye to Amazon PR.
the outages@outages.org mailing list says that Netflix was down today. I don't know if it's ec2 related or not... I was actually hoping someone might have details.
For as much as people love Heroku, DotCloud offers everything I liked about Heroku, and extends those conveniences to almost every platform I've ever worked with.
If I were in the venture capital business, I genuinely couldn't think of a better place to put 10 million.