PiCloud has joined Dropbox

I had been working seriously on converting a financial application to run on PiCloud. It's mid-November. In the hundred days until they cease operations, I would have had to deal with 10-K filings for my clients and scramble to get the hell out of there, just in time for Q1. What an absolute mess that would have been.

No other time would have been much better, and I know there's an API compatible replacement in the works, but I've been there, and I'm sure something would have freaked out.

Whatever happened to having some kind of reasonable transition period where the buyer continues to support all of its clients? PiCloud, your product was really neat. DropBox, I really wish you wouldn't just hit it and quit it.

I've been looking around for a good replacement, and there is a gap. PiCloud really had three components. The first was an ability to run code with arbitrary dependencies with no more than a second start up time. PiCloud called them environments. This is really the same problem Docker is addressing. Both were using LXC and AUFS to solve the problem. Unfortunately, Docker-as-a-service is very early days. People like orchardup.com are getting there, but so far only have hourly pricing. There is enginedock.com which has per minute pricing, but is it super early on. I'm in a "Docker gap", where these services are really not at the same level that PiCloud was.

The second was the nice Python API, RESTful interface, and the command line interface for triggering off jobs, querying when the finish, and getting the results. That part will presumably be open sourced, but it is really all tied in to the hosting portion.

Then the third level is to have a bunch of machine you can load balance across, to allow per second pricing on AWS. They had such lovely high memory, high CPU machines to run on. The split up some of the biggest EC2 cluster instances, and you could run each process on your 1/8 share. The nearest current replacement is iron.io's IronWorker. However, they only have 320MB per job, which doesn't work for my application. Also Heroku workers are billed per second, but they only have up to 1GB of memory. I'm hoping that this (new?) entity Multyvac can serve that role successfully. Hopefully, they'll tell us more detail on this soon.

Anyway, best of luck to the PiCloud team. You were great. Especially Aaron who did much of the tech support. Thanks.

I am very close to launching Predictobot.com, which uses PiCloud for all of its computation. I spent last week moving to Heroku after DotCloud's pivot, and now I'll need to replace PiCloud. The web sure is a stable place.

This is an interesting variation on this round's "boomlet". So in the previous dot.com boom there were lots of companies who didn't have revenue so they appeared, until the cash ran out and then fell back to earth. Now we can start a company with much less money, but they go poof in an aquihire when things go squishy.

So was it a pricing issue? or a customer acquisition issue? How is it that so many of these companies get into this squeeze? Is it a chicken -/- egg thing where you can't price it to be self sustaining until you get critical mass? Or is it that Amazon, Google, and Microsoft are just sucking all the oxygen out of this space?

I use Picloud for my CS PhD research, I hope to be able to continue with Multyvac or the open-source version.