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Well, let's look at the options: - Run own server. Buy hardware, find colo etc. I guess the advantages of PaaS are obvious here. - Run vps, manage yourself. Req

by roel_v 15y ago

Well, let's look at the options: - Run own server. Buy hardware, find colo etc. I guess the advantages of PaaS are obvious here. - Run vps, manage yourself. Required: somebody to buy/maintain the machine, plus a lot sysadminning. Advantages of PaaS obvious, too. - Run managed vps. Advantages of PaaS become less obvious. Maybe more supported versions, more specific functionality. Or automatic scaling (from tweaking db disk access times to network-level load-balancing); you don't get that with a managed vps. I guess my point is that rolling out your own equivalent infrastructure is far from 'trivial'. Buying machines, worrying about mundane details like amps on the power backbone, setting up and maintaining the server software (lol at the first person - there always is one - to suggest that this can be solved with putting 'apt-get update' or equivalent in cron), or testing various versions of infrastructure software with your app because you don't know if it'll be safe to deploy that update that came out yesterday - I don't use PaaS but I see many advantages for small-time operations (and maybe bigger ones too, maybe I'd trust them more if I had more experience with them).

cheald 15y ago
I understand the benefit of PaaS; I've used Heroku on occassion, and PHPFog seems to be making in the space as well. If you just want an app online, and don't care about how it gets there, and have more money than system administration skill, PaaS is great. My question is more along the lines of "What do I get with Azure+ that I don't get with PHPFog or an existing AWS AMI or a Linode StackScript?" What's the killer feature? It's going to be more expensive (you get to buy a cloud-sized slice of a Windwos license), likely slower than a Linux platform (the benchmarks I've seen put PHP on Windows significantly behind Linux deploys), and so far, it doesn't solve the hard parts of a PHP application deployment. I'm a Rails developer, mostly, and I have Heroku apps, apps running on Linode VMs, apps running on rented Rackspace servers, and apps running on AWS. I've got a lot of experience setting this stuff up and maintaining it, but I still really appreciate the simplicity of Heroku; a dashboard of services and extensions ready to install in a click is awesome. Heroku's killer feature isn't that you don't have to set up RVM and Passenger, it's that you don't have to write bundles of daemon managers, monitoring scripts, rake tasks to manage code deploys and reloads, git hooks, background worker management, and a bunch of otherwise-tedious stuff. The sales pitch for Azure+ seems to be "We solved a problem that only exists on Azure", which just isn't very compelling. So far, it seems like the only target audience for this thing is people who will only deploy PHP apps on Azure and don't have any other options, period, which seems like a really small target audience.
- roel_v 15y ago
  Oh ok then I got your point wrong, no worries.

by roel_v 15y ago

cheald 15y ago

I understand the benefit of PaaS; I've used Heroku on occassion, and PHPFog seems to be making in the space as well. If you just want an app online, and don't care about how it gets there, and have more money than system administration skill, PaaS is great. My question is more along the lines of "What do I get with Azure+ that I don't get with PHPFog or an existing AWS AMI or a Linode StackScript?" What's the killer feature? It's going to be more expensive (you get to buy a cloud-sized slice of a Windwos license), likely slower than a Linux platform (the benchmarks I've seen put PHP on Windows significantly behind Linux deploys), and so far, it doesn't solve the hard parts of a PHP application deployment. I'm a Rails developer, mostly, and I have Heroku apps, apps running on Linode VMs, apps running on rented Rackspace servers, and apps running on AWS. I've got a lot of experience setting this stuff up and maintaining it, but I still really appreciate the simplicity of Heroku; a dashboard of services and extensions ready to install in a click is awesome. Heroku's killer feature isn't that you don't have to set up RVM and Passenger, it's that you don't have to write bundles of daemon managers, monitoring scripts, rake tasks to manage code deploys and reloads, git hooks, background worker management, and a bunch of otherwise-tedious stuff. The sales pitch for Azure+ seems to be "We solved a problem that only exists on Azure", which just isn't very compelling. So far, it seems like the only target audience for this thing is people who will only deploy PHP apps on Azure and don't have any other options, period, which seems like a really small target audience.

roel_v 15y ago
Oh ok then I got your point wrong, no worries.