Comment by pbreit

13 years ago

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?

4 comments

pbreit

shykes 13 years ago

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.

pbreit 13 years ago
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."
- shykes 13 years ago
  
  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.
  
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