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Comment by cardmagic | Hacker News Reader

A thousand words, or 30 seconds start to finish of deploying a Ruby app yourself on AppFog - https://console.appfog.com/signup

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I registered as you suggested. I agree that getting productive in 10-15 minutes is great, but the setup time, at least for me, even if it takes a whole day, is a negligible overhead in my life as a programmer. Currently I run multiple servers on Amazon and as someone that programs in more than two languages, I drop an instance of whatever I am working on (Ruby, Java, Django as examples) and they really do not take much time at all. I am sure this post shows my age, but I am trying to understand the real value a service like Appfog provides.

Also may I ask how do I setup ssh trust and how do I access the command prompt.

AppFog handle things like software updates, scaling beyond one machine, DDoS attacks, all those kind of things.

You ask them to deploy a (for example) MongoDB service, they do it, and they are responsible for the operation of it.

The idea is to reduce the amount of day to day (or more likely month to month) work involved in doing things like security patches, upgrading infrastructure, etc, that suck up a lot of time, especially for people who don't have experience in building load balancers and so on.

That is true, but what appfog (and the other PaaS providers) do not give is the ability to tweak service[1] configs even to a limited degree. Not needing to worry about Mongo or MySql setup is great, but for all of my non trivial use cases, I have had to adjust configs at least a little.

[1] Cloud Foundry(and by implication AppFog) differentiate apps from services, where services are backend infra like databases.

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