Been developing on DotCloud for a month or two now, and minus a couple very minor hiccups it's been fantastic. Some things I'm really looking forward to though:
* Pre-install hooks in addition to their post-install ones (to, for example, move file x, push update, move it back)
* Some kind of admin panel with usage monitoring
* Pricing announcement (would help to plan for the future, since I plan on deploying with DotCloud too obviously)
* An API for accessing the DotCloud commands programmatically from a service, to do things like 'dotcloud alias' within an app
Actually, that's about it. It'll be nice to see some additional service types stabilize (particularly mongo & memcache), but other than the above it's really been an amazing platform to work with, and the functionality/simplicity balance is very well thought out.
pricing is my major concern and the only reason i'm not throwing sites onto dotcloud. i don't want to migrate stuff to dotcloud and then have to migrate it back again if pricing doesn't work for me.
Here's a funny story. DotCloud's early prototypes were in fact very similar to Cloud Foundry's "paas-in-a-box" project. We even open-sourced large chunks of it.
We eventually had to drop that design because, beyond a certain scale, it gets in the way of the user experience - in a major way. I think all major PaaS providers will agree with me.
You have to chose your priorities. Ours is to make developer's lives easier. We axe everything else.
Who's your customer, the guy using your service, or the guy installing your appliance?
Think of the difference between Google.com and the Google search appliance. One profoundly changed how people interact with the Internet. The other is an extra feature which came years later. What would the World look like today if Sergei and Larry had started with the search appliance?
Here's a quick "complaint" feedback about the signup process, then: don't erase my strong password I took 15s to type in (twice) if you reject my invitation code and I have to find another one. It's a strong incitation to use a weak but easy-to-type password instead.
(not really a problem to me just yet, but it resonates wrong with the password strength warning on the same page)
The problem with PaaS and cloud hosting in general is price. Most experienced hackers are used to managing hardware, so why not stick with dedicated or colo and retain affordable scalability?
* Pre-install hooks in addition to their post-install ones (to, for example, move file x, push update, move it back)
* Some kind of admin panel with usage monitoring
* Pricing announcement (would help to plan for the future, since I plan on deploying with DotCloud too obviously)
* An API for accessing the DotCloud commands programmatically from a service, to do things like 'dotcloud alias' within an app
Actually, that's about it. It'll be nice to see some additional service types stabilize (particularly mongo & memcache), but other than the above it's really been an amazing platform to work with, and the functionality/simplicity balance is very well thought out.