Flynn is particularly appealing to companies that need to completely control their own infrastructure. In the same sense that git being open source helps, not hurts github, I think there's limited crossover between the users of Flynn and DotCloud customers.

Who in their right mind would pay $0.288 per hour (a little over $200 per month) to dotCloud for roughly the equivalent of an EC2 small instance, when with just a little extra time spent up front, they'll be able to fire up an AMI of Flynn and pay less than a quarter as much per month?

> Who in their right mind would pay $0.288 per hour (a little over $200 per month) to dotCloud for roughly the equivalent of an EC2 small instance, when with just a little extra time spent up front, they'll be able to fire up an AMI of Flynn and pay less than a quarter as much per month?

People who value a little extra effort at startup as being a cost that is more than $200/month over the life of their use of dotCloud.

There's a lot of cases where that could be true, especially if the extra effort and moving to a different platform is deferred, rather than permanent. There are many times where doing something now (that isn't necessary for immediate goals, but is useful for long-term savings) has greater opportunity costs than doing it later. (Lots of times when the reverse is true, as well.)

Me, for one. I CBF diddling around with firing up AMI's and dealing with everything myself anymore. A lot of developers are like that, too.

Is the convenience of not having to do the extra initial setup and occasional maintenance really worth the substantial markup every month?

Yep. You are truly underestimating how lazy I (and others) can be. And besides, being able to have support to turn to is quite a bonus: I don't want to be the support guy for this sort of stuff.

Who in their right mind would pay for a dedicated server monthly when with just a little extra time spent up front, they'll be able to buy an inhouse server and pay less than a quarter as much in the long run?

You see where I'm trying to go with that?

Not quite. Buying server hardware requires a substantial up-front monetary commitment. Once we have a good self-hosted PaaS package like Flynn, setting up an instance on an IaaS provider should (in theory) require a very small amount of time.

It seems to be working well for people paying for EC2 instances when they could be racking the hardware themselves. Having APIs, support, and a dedicated team handling the infrastructure is worth paying for to plenty of people.

You're asking who would pay more for dotCloud vs. DIY on Amazon who themselves have a huge markup on their servers against traditional hosting?

I compared to EC2 primarily because it also has hourly pricing.

If I compared to DigitalOcean instead, then DotCloud would look even worse -- about 10x more expensive.

Correct. So who would pay for x when y? Everyone who wants x, not y.

Not sure I completely agree with this. I don't know what your internal discussions were, but at least one of your competitors has an 'enterprise' option in which they give you your own version of the toolkit. Sadly among this was that they stopped with their open-source contributions to the Cloud Foundry community (Their last update appears to have been over two years ago https://github.com/cloudfoundry/vcap/pull/105).

I'm not complaining that an alternative to Cloud Foundry is going to exist, but I'm still a bit surprised.

Selling an on-premise "Enterprise PaaS" is one of the ways Red Hat is monetizing OpenShift.

https://www.openshift.com/products/enterprise

Indeed and Cloud Foundry has 'enterprise' forks as well (Stackato: http://www.activestate.com/stackato/compare-with-cloud-found...). Essentially I think there's a huge market here and all I see for DotCloud from this announcement is at least some potential scavenging of their core users.