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NodeSocket founder here. Indeed PaaS is an extremely tough market with tons of external competitive pressures. Right now there are two major strategies. The fi

NodeSocket founder here. Indeed PaaS is an extremely tough market with tons of external competitive pressures. Right now there are two major strategies. The first is the notion of a 'polyglot' platform (Heroku, DotCloud, CloudFoundry) which is multiple languages/databases. The second, and our strategy, is focusing exclusively on a stack (node for us) and building tools and systems which work exclusively for the stack. Essentially, I believe it comes down to company resources which strategy to choose. When Heroku started they focused exclusively on Rails, and did it really well. Not until recently after growing the team and dominating the rails hosting market, did they make the huge shift to polyglot. Finally, recently, there is a new emerging strategy which I am really excited about, which is even more focused. Real-time javascript frameworks, with hosting bundled into the platform. Examples of this are Meteor and FireBase. Certainly there is some preliminary evidence, that these may be the future.

shuzchen 15y ago
Not to knock on your service/business-plan, but I can't imagine how focusing on a particular stack gives you any advantage. To me, the bare PaaS offering includes not only the bits that run the app (nodejs workers in your case) but a datastore (minimum one choice each from RDBMs or kv-stores), a backend cache, and a front-end cache or load-balancer. At this point, I imagine your PaaS infrastructure is already plenty 'polyglot', and it seems to me that adding additional tool support wouldn't complicate the backend more. Of course, I do grant that manpower can be a limiting factor. (I do also grant that I may be a naive armchair theorist spouting hot air) I'm interested to hear what you feel your business advantage is. Is it branding (e.g., someone wanting to host a nodejs project is more likely to head your way), or does the focus really give you a lead in the arms race against the 'polyglot'-er services.
blahbap 15y ago
I wonder if PaaS is just an intermediate step towards frameworks that abstract away the whole serverside logic and database.

shuzchen 15y ago

Not to knock on your service/business-plan, but I can't imagine how focusing on a particular stack gives you any advantage. To me, the bare PaaS offering includes not only the bits that run the app (nodejs workers in your case) but a datastore (minimum one choice each from RDBMs or kv-stores), a backend cache, and a front-end cache or load-balancer. At this point, I imagine your PaaS infrastructure is already plenty 'polyglot', and it seems to me that adding additional tool support wouldn't complicate the backend more. Of course, I do grant that manpower can be a limiting factor. (I do also grant that I may be a naive armchair theorist spouting hot air) I'm interested to hear what you feel your business advantage is. Is it branding (e.g., someone wanting to host a nodejs project is more likely to head your way), or does the focus really give you a lead in the arms race against the 'polyglot'-er services.

blahbap 15y ago

I wonder if PaaS is just an intermediate step towards frameworks that abstract away the whole serverside logic and database.