Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Orchestra.io - PHP Platform as a service

orchestra.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 29 posts

Re: Orchestra.io - PHP Platform as a service

#11

Post by jqueryin »

sbarre wrote: post #6

At roughly $30/month minimum for the "basic" service (that doesn't auto-scale), plus costs for add-ons, you really have to not know what you're doing when it comes to deployment (or just have money to burn), because PHP/MySQL is just about the easiest thing to deploy in the world. But having auto-scaling on your app, I could see this being worth the value if you want that kind of stuff to be managed for you.

While this is very true that there is a steep initial payment curve, many companies can afford to fit this minimal bill considering the cost of running their own dedicated machines. I think it's quite beneficial that there is OOB support for MongoDB, CouchDB, Amazon RDS, ZeroMQ, Gearman, Memcache & Memcached. Assuming some of these queues scale out automatically, there's a huge benefit in reducing the complexity of your application layer if you're trying to do some rapid prototyping for a minimal viable product that still has the balls to scale out if necessary.

Re: Orchestra.io - PHP Platform as a service

#12

Post by EamonLeonard »

justincormack wrote: post #7

I would like to see a security page. It is not clear if your app is isolated in its own microinstance or shared in some way that should be specified.

Thanks for the comment. Security important for everyone.

"Free" is multi-tenant. "Basic" and "Elastic" are isolated.

Some of the restrictions we have in place on "Free" are documented here. https://orchestra.tenderapp.com/kb/system-constraints/system...

I agree, a dedicated security page would be helpful, and is something we'll be creating soon.

Thanks again for your feedback!

Re: Orchestra.io - PHP Platform as a service

#13

Post by davidcoallier »

EamonLeonard wrote: post #10
jqueryin wrote: post #8

If echolibre happens to be reading this, I'm seeing a stylesheet issue on your activation form where the two input boxes for email address and password are extending beyond the login containment box. Screenshot below. http://tinypic.com/r/30mwjrl/7 I'm running FF 4.0 on Fedora 13. Hope this helps =)

Thanks for the heads up! We'll get that fixed :)

Its' fixed :)

Re: Orchestra.io - PHP Platform as a service

#14

Post by sbarre »

jqueryin wrote: post #11
sbarre wrote: post #6

At roughly $30/month minimum for the "basic" service (that doesn't auto-scale), plus costs for add-ons, you really have to not know what you're doing when it comes to deployment (or just have money to burn), because PHP/MySQL is just about the easiest thing to deploy in the world. But having auto-scaling on your app, I could see this being worth the value if you want that kind of stuff to be managed for you.

While this is very true that there is a steep initial payment curve, many companies can afford to fit this minimal bill considering the cost of running their own dedicated machines. I think it's quite beneficial that there is OOB support for MongoDB, CouchDB, Amazon RDS, ZeroMQ, Gearman, Memcache & Memcached. Assuming some of these queues scale out automatically, there's a huge benefit in reducing the complexity of y…

Hosting costs are very minimal these days.

I can provision and configure a dedicated Ubuntu machine at Rackspace Cloud with all those services in about an hour (and I am far from being a sysadmin guru, I just follow the wiki instructions and best practices for security/firewall etc), and it costs me $12/month.

Re: Orchestra.io - PHP Platform as a service

#15

Post by sbarre »

EamonLeonard wrote: post #9
sbarre wrote: post #6

At roughly $30/month minimum for the "basic" service (that doesn't auto-scale), plus costs for add-ons, you really have to not know what you're doing when it comes to deployment (or just have money to burn), because PHP/MySQL is just about the easiest thing to deploy in the world. But having auto-scaling on your app, I could see this being worth the value if you want that kind of stuff to be managed for you.

Agreed, anyone can deploy PHP -- it's not rocket science. Scaling is what Orchestra is all about, but obviously you need to deploy before you can get to that point. A note on pricing -- we're trying to find the right price point / service level offering, that the market will respond to. We've a "grandfathering" policy in place, which we've detailed at the bottom of our pricing page: https://orchestra.tenderapp.com/kb…

That's great to hear. I understand that you guys just launched and you're still figuring things out.

I was just trying to understand the initial value proposition for someone like me (who builds and deploys PHP sites for a living), when the initial cost is 3x what I am used to, and there are additional limitations.

I wasn't able to find it, but do you list application resources anywhere? How much memory do the various applications have access to, how much disk space do I get, etc?

At this point I would probably still roll my own cloud server for prototyping and initial deployment, and look into your scaling service if/when the need arises.

Re: Orchestra.io - PHP Platform as a service

#16

Post by itsnotvalid »

You guys may want to look at this as well: http://sae.sina.com.cn/

Sina App Engine - sort of like Google App Engine's take as a China clone, but it runs in PHP.

This platform (Orchestra) takes another approach, liking managing the ec2 instances than like the app engines that even the instance thing is transparent from the developers. Guess there can be many debates on whether which ones are better approaches.

Also thing to notices on SAE, for non-Chinese readers, SAE has built-in function constraints. That means it's more like GAE in a way that not all the core functions and libraries are available[1] which is obviously security and performance reasons.

It would be interesting to see if any core functions be limited on orchestra.io as well.

[1]http://sae.sina.com.cn/?m=devcenter&catId=39#anchor_f2de...

Re: Orchestra.io - PHP Platform as a service

#17

Post by claylo »

sbarre wrote: post #14
jqueryin wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While this is very true that there is a steep initial payment curve, many companies can afford to fit this minimal bill considering the cost of running their own dedicated machines. I think it's quite beneficial that there is OOB support for MongoDB, CouchDB, Amazon RDS, ZeroMQ, Gearman, Memcache & Memcached. Assuming some of these queues scale out automatically, there's a huge benefit in reducing the complexity of y…

Hosting costs are very minimal these days. I can provision and configure a dedicated Ubuntu machine at Rackspace Cloud with all those services in about an hour (and I am far from being a sysadmin guru, I just follow the wiki instructions and best practices for security/firewall etc), and it costs me $12/month.

This isn't about cost -- it's about scale and trust. When your app gets beyond what one instance will give you, and your customers demand more reliability than Rackspace Cloud is capable of today, you'll want some dudes in your corner who can help you.

Imagine a world where your application has enough traction that you're spending more of your time fixing issues or adding features to please/retain the maximum number of users.

Having been there, when that day comes, you won't be nickel-and-diming. You'll just want some rock-solid guys in your corner who allow you to worry about one less thing.

Re: Orchestra.io - PHP Platform as a service

#18

Post by noodle »

sbarre wrote: post #6

At roughly $30/month minimum for the "basic" service (that doesn't auto-scale), plus costs for add-ons, you really have to not know what you're doing when it comes to deployment (or just have money to burn), because PHP/MySQL is just about the easiest thing to deploy in the world. But having auto-scaling on your app, I could see this being worth the value if you want that kind of stuff to be managed for you.

the cost is about the same as its competitors (phpfog, cloudcontrol). "basic" is for people who've outgrown shared hosting and maybe a small virtual server, not really for someone who has a pet project they need a little space for.

Re: Orchestra.io - PHP Platform as a service

#19

Post by sbarre »

claylo wrote: post #17
sbarre wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hosting costs are very minimal these days. I can provision and configure a dedicated Ubuntu machine at Rackspace Cloud with all those services in about an hour (and I am far from being a sysadmin guru, I just follow the wiki instructions and best practices for security/firewall etc), and it costs me $12/month.

This isn't about cost -- it's about scale and trust. When your app gets beyond what one instance will give you, and your customers demand more reliability than Rackspace Cloud is capable of today, you'll want some dudes in your corner who can help you. Imagine a world where your application has enough traction that you're spending more of your time fixing issues or adding features to please/retain the maximum number…

Yeah I think you missed my point. When starting out, at the point where I am not worried about scale, which means I would be looking at Orchestra's "basic" package (that doesn't scale), I am having a hard time understanding why I should pay 3x more than I would rolling my own server at Rackspace Cloud.

When my app needs to start scaling up a lot (and that's often an "if" not a "when" for a lot of projects), then for sure I agree that a well-managed service backed by talented people is worth every penny.

Re: Orchestra.io - PHP Platform as a service

#20

Post by sbarre »

noodle wrote: post #18
sbarre wrote: post #6

At roughly $30/month minimum for the "basic" service (that doesn't auto-scale), plus costs for add-ons, you really have to not know what you're doing when it comes to deployment (or just have money to burn), because PHP/MySQL is just about the easiest thing to deploy in the world. But having auto-scaling on your app, I could see this being worth the value if you want that kind of stuff to be managed for you.

the cost is about the same as its competitors (phpfog, cloudcontrol). "basic" is for people who've outgrown shared hosting and maybe a small virtual server, not really for someone who has a pet project they need a little space for.

I've got production apps running on the base cloud servers at Rackspace (12$/month) and they run just fine with non-trivial traffic and users. Far from what I would call a pet project.

But to each his own. Again, my whole argument is not about elastic or scaling apps (where I totally get the value), it's about their non-elastic intro package and the value you would get from it (no scaling and limitations on what you can do compared to your own vanilla dedicated box) versus a dedicated cloud server that costs 1/3 of the price.

If they want to bring in customers initially onto their platform (which makes it way easier to upsell to the elastic service when the time comes), they might need to adjust their base pricing a bit to be competitive with similar (non-scaling) offerings.

I say this because unlike other application stacks like Rails, setting up a proper basic hosting stack in PHP is dead simple for a lot of people, so the bar is a lot lower than rolling you own for those other stacks.

Post reply on HN