[justinsb]

Very interesting - thanks! I look forward to seeing more open-source contributions from DotCloud.

This does come out of the experience of running FathomDB, so it isn't an ivory-tower project. FathomDB grappled with the fact that traditional relational databases are a terrible match for the cloud, so we've built a new database. When it came to how to run that new database as-a-service, there was so much "undifferentiated heavy lifting" involved that we decided that open source was the way to go here.

So this _is_ the rewrite that comes from the real-world experience of running a production service. And there will be at least one real service, charging real money, and supporting real customers, built on it. But the secret sauce of FathomDB isn't the "aaS" bit of "DBaaS" - it's the "DB". By open sourcing PlatformLayer, we're hoping the community will share some of the work of "the aaS end", but even if not, PlatformLayer will be solving the problem for real.

And if that encourages you to open-source DotCloud, and if that replaces PlatformLayer, we all win. The strange economics of open source!