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Comment by cardmagic | Hacker News Reader

This is a great article exploring what some technology behind PaaS might do, and also a great start, but falls short of true PaaS functionality.

* Many PaaS offerings (like AppFog) are not like shared hosting at all, only the free offering hosts people multi-tenant, when you pay you get dedicated VMs

* The platform in platform-as-a-service means it connects you to fully managed services (on Heroku there are all the add-ons as well as Postgres, on AppFog there are add-ons and MySQL).

* One of the most compelling parts of PaaS is that it is managed by someone else so that you don't get a call at 3am when it is broken

Moreover, if you were to run a PaaS on your own, it would make more sense to try Cloud Foundry which has specifically addressed at least the services aspect of the above comments.

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I think you missed the "private" and you jumped a bit fast.

1. Everything is running on dedicated hardware.

2. The system provides MongoDB, PostgreSQL too, it is just managed by us because we need this level of control to put PostgreSQL on SSD and special high CPU instance for scientific computations. Cf point 1.

3. Hosting services for the past 10 years, crossing my fingers, I have never been called in the middle of the night. But yes, the risk is there.

For Cloud Foundry, I don't know it, our solution is extremely light on resources we have full control of it and we are extremely happy with. We can hack/extend as we want and all in all, it is very few lines of code and I personally love simplicity.

Update: Ok, you are from a "Fog" provider, now I understand the defensive tone of your post. Do not worry, the goal of this note is to share what we do and give people willing to go this way some inspiration. Not trying to compete with you :)

I was mainly responding to the "Connecting the Dots, What is a PaaS?" section which I thought was the weakest part of your article. Otherwise well done.

Ok, I understand your point of view. But if you look at the current high quality shared hosting offers, you have managed dedicated MySQL instances included and many of such add-ons.

Anyway, we created this PaaS because it brings us real benefits and a competitive advantage. For our case (not the usual one as we need to run scientific computation with specific hardware and software) it is better to have full control of our hardware. We are outliers and most of the people would be better going with a good PaaS provider.

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