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Comment by ARothfusz | Hacker News Reader

There's no need to make a hasty decision -- we haven't changed the platform in any way or lowered our support efforts. If you've found that you can count on the dotCloud PaaS for your business (and thank you for that!), then nothing changed today. We're still here for you.

If you feel like you want to get ready for running on another platform, or using Docker as it matures, then I'd suggest the first step would be to move your databases to a neutral third party provider. With that in place, you can still run your code on the dotCloud PaaS, or anywhere else. As Docker and the ecosystem around it mature, there will be many more options.

I work for Docker Inc on the dotCloud PaaS and manage the support. If you have more private questions, you can reach us at support@dotcloud.com

/Andy

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Thanks for the reassurance, Andy. We've chatted a couple of times in IRC and you've always been awesome in my complicated support requests.

Still, my concern isn't about the quality of the dotCloud PaaS going down -- it's pretty high already, and I don't have any plans to move immediately.

Instead, I'm more concerned about the shift in general. You know as well as anyone that software that doesn't get love and care eventually rots, and the blog post explicitly says that the focus is now on Docker and away from the PaaS.

From that, I infer that the PaaS is eventually going to have to go away as is the natural order of things. Since my company depends critically on that piece of infrastructure, I need to make sure I'm covering my bases with an exit strategy if you do decide to turn out the lights on the PaaS, or at least make sure I've thought about what to do as an alternative.

I also hope you guys make a bajillion dollars on Docker. It's really an excellent idea whose time has come.

Hey John, thanks for the kind words! I just wanted to add one datapoint to back Andy's response: the resource allocation to dotCloud has been the same for the last 6 months, and there is no change planned to that allocation as of today. In other words, if you were satisfied with our service over the last few weeks, you are likely to continue to be satisfied for months to come.

I would worry about an exit strategy too if I were in your shoes - but just know that your trust and success as a customer matters more to us than any bajillion of dollars we would stand to make if we betrayed it.

In fact I'm pretty sure we can "make a bajillion dollars" and continue to earn your trust :)

Thanks for doing business with us John! Docker is in part thanks to you.

Wow, its people like this (both comments from docker/dotCloud) that make you really love a service. In fact, I would have put my next side project on dotCloud if the prices weren't steep - but I get that they're for businesses and not for side projects.

I guess DO is good for that stuff (at the very least! - I'm sure they're good in general as well, I've actually been reading/discussing them a lot - mostly for hobby projects though).

EDIT: Forgot about dokku/flynn as a PaaS (plugin?). Also learned about other services in the thread which I'll be looking at.

How the heck can you put a PaaS business on the back-burner while you bet the company on a small piece of software and expect customers to stick around?

It depends on your definition of "back-burner". DotCloud might no longer be one of the most innovative PaaS, adding features left and right like it used to - but there's no reason it can't continue to be a reliable place to host your applications. DotCloud production customers want availability, performance, reliable support, good tooling, prompt bugfixes, and generous advance warning and transition support in the event of a sunset. It's very important to us that they continue to get all these things.

I actually thought "back-burner" was generous:

"While Docker, Inc. will continue to offer PaaS services under the dotCloud brand, we will be devoting the vast majority of our resources towards growing Docker and the Docker ecosystem, and have fundamentally re-oriented our business model towards Docker-related products and services."

Those are not mutually exclusive :)

dotCloud is quite stable and mature, so running and maintaining it at the quality standards of our customers (including support, 24/7 ops, bug fixes, etc.) requires surprisingly little resources. Little enough that we can "devote the vast majority of our resources towards growing Docker" while continuing to offer a quality product.

My argument to support this is that we have actually been doing this for 6 months, and so far there hasn't been any kind of exodus - in fact we have many more paid customers than we had 6 months ago :)

I think this is one of the reasons the public PaaS market is difficult: at the end of the day, past the excitement of developing a new app, people will pay for a reliable service that doesn't get in their way - not for the bells and whistles. It is very difficult to differentiate a paas on features.

The issue is really about the future. Your service is as useful today as it was yesterday or six months ago, but the perceived usefulness of your service a year from now has gone way down. We all appreciate your honesty about the pivot. But how will your customers fare in the long run?

It is kind of a strange situation. You're clearly the leader in hosted Docker PaaS at the moment. However, you're also promoting an ecosystem where all these Docker based startups are springing up, like deis.io. Why won't you be out innovating them? I fear you'll be moving down the stack, and letting others fill the PaaS role. It isn't clear to me how you're going to make money out of Docker (perhaps it isn't to you either).

I say this as someone who was going to be deploying my first Django app in a couple of weeks. I have a dotcloud account, and had messed around a little. That was my deployment plan. However, I spent tonight reading the Heroku docs. It seems at some level you realize you've lost out to Heroku, and have pivoted to this shiny thing that is getting lots of traction. That's great, and I'm sure that is the right path to take business wise. However, it doesn't sound like your current dotcloud customers will get any particular benefits from the great Docker fueled future.

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