AppFog, the platform-as-a-service that pledged to run your applications on (almost) any cloud, is now one cloud down. As of May 2, the company is “turning off” the Rackspace infrastructure option. An email message announcing the change of plans sent April 27 told customers they could no longer create new applications on Rackspace as of that date.
While helping users host applications on five public clouds, was one of Appfog’s “main selling points, ti’s also become increasingly resource intensive to maintain so many instances of our infrastructure,” AppFog CEO Lucas Carlson wrote in the email. He referred users to the AppFog Console which will enable them to clone their application onto new target infrastructure.
Carlson could not be reached for comment MOnday morning, but generally speaking PaaS adoption by business users has been sketchy at best. Many developers love PaaSes because they make development and testing very easy but once the applications are built, many companies prefer to run them in-house, ie. not on a public cloud.
AppFog tried to end-run that argument by allowing deployment on private clouds as well but it’s unclear how well that effort has gone.There has also been angst among companies, including AppFog, that built their PaaSes atop the Cloud Foundry framework. that was true when Cloud Foundry resided under VMware, and remains true since was spun off to Pivotal, which is now selling its own Cloud Foundry PaaS which, competes with third-party PaaSes.
I’ve reached out to Carlson for comment and will update this story when he responds.
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