I Want to Run Stateful Containers, Too
I agree with the author that writing your own snowflake PaaS is a mistake. I work at Pivotal on the fringes of CloudFoundry; OpenShift Origin is a competing system. Either way, you should be using a full PaaS instead of rolling your own.<p>But this is the bit that surprises me:<p><pre><code>    They get you hooked for free and the next level 
    is $1,496 per month… wtf! MongoLabs is little 
    better.
</code></pre>
$1500 per month, versus weeks of engineering time spent tinkering with and upgrading and bug-fixing and trouble-shooting and security-patching a hand-made solution is a <i>fantastic bargain</i>.<p>Supposing the author was running on Pivotal Web Services. It would&#x27;ve taken less time to add a MongoLab service (about 2 minutes, 3 if you include a re-stage) than to perform the CloudFormation calculation (say, half an hour, resulting in no running software).<p>PaaSes like Heroku, Cloud Foundry and OpenShift are feature-complete for the cases that application engineers and operators care about. If you roll your own you&#x27;re directing effort to something that doesn&#x27;t provide user value.<p>If I walked in on someone at a regular dev company rolling their own operating system for a web service, I&#x27;d be surprised. Writing their own programming language? I&#x27;d be skeptical. Oh you built a new HTTP server? <i>Why?</i> Outside of a research environment, why are you doing that?<p>And so it is with PaaSes. The marker was passed years ago. We don&#x27;t need to go on these spiritual quests any more.<p>Disclaimer: I work for Pivotal, which donates the majority of engineering effort on Cloud Foundry. I&#x27;m actually in Pivotal Labs, the agile consulting division, which is where I morphed into a lay preacher for just-using-a-PaaS-dammit.