We get this all the time. Yes, Riak and Cassandra require intimate domain knowledge. The question is: what's the most efficient way for you to consume that know

We get this all the time. Yes, Riak and Cassandra require intimate domain knowledge. The question is: what's the most efficient way for you to consume that knowledge? Hire a full-time expert for each? Or use the battle-tested Riak setup that our Riak expert maintains for thousands of developers? As you point out, beyond a certain point your needs will be specific enough to justify serious customization by the Basho and Clouderas of the world. We don't replace these guys. In fact we plan on facilitating integration with them, so that you don't have to chose between a well-oiled dotcloud stack and that 1% of customization. As for how scalable and automatable our business is - don't worry about us. Having been in your shoes before, I can tell you with great certainty that dotcloud is much more than a bunch of custom AMIs, chef scripts and clever role-based provisioning scripts. Our goal is to make you, an expert at these power tools, happy to use us instead, because it's so much freakin simpler. And don't worry, we will add all the customization hooks you need. We're taking one step at a time. Thanks for reading! Solomon - dotcloud co-founder