PiCloud has joined Dropbox

Re:PiCloud has joined Dropbox by cschmidt on Sunday November 17, 2013 @11:42PM (#6752579)

As a very happy user of PiCloud, I'm sad to see it go. It is a shame they had such A-list VC's (Andreessen Horowitz, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, and Greylock Partners), who don't have an interest in just a good solid business. They only wanted a huge, home run.

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.

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Re:PiCloud has joined Dropbox by shykes on Monday November 18, 2013 @01:08AM (#6752876)

Hey Craig, speaking on behalf of the docker project: we are busy filling the "docker gap" you speak about. There are currently many businesses aspiring to offer infrastructure to docker users. What we're doing is giving them a way to integrate directly into docker itself, so you can "docker run" straight to the provider of your choice, either from the docker command-line or remote API. All with minimal risk of lock-in.

You might also be happy to learn that some of the talent behind Picloud is now part of the Docker team itself :)

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Re:PiCloud has joined Dropbox by cschmidt on Monday November 18, 2013 @09:04AM (#6754318)

Hi Solomon,

There are tons of companies that are working on Docker based solutions to my problems. In six months, or a year, there will be plenty of great ways for me to use Docker. The only problem is that PiCloud shuts down on February 25, so I'm in a bit of a hurry. Today, I'm in a gap, and there isn't a great replacement. Specifically I'd need:

* Per second pricing (per minute would be Ok). This makes parallelism "free"

* Large instances with big memory and CPU

* Ideally on AWS (My data is on s3, and it would be good to avoid bandwidth charges).

Nothing seems to fill these requirements yet. Any of you Docker startups out there want to help me out? Any pointers would be great if I'm missing something.

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Re:PiCloud has joined Dropbox by aidos on Monday November 18, 2013 @05:34AM (#6753661)

I want to echo your sentiments. We use it for our business and since Aaron told me a few weeks ago that picloud was closing down as a service I've been wondering what to do about it.

The docker gap is one part of it. For me I only really need one environment though (I have a customised one I run on picloud) so that's not the major concern. The bit that wasn't as obvious to solve is moving the python library dependencies from the client to the server. I looked into libraries to handle this but I couldn't find anything obvious. All the other processing libraries use a model where you need to have the code you want to run up on the remote machine before you start.

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Re:PiCloud has joined Dropbox by colbyaley on Thursday November 21, 2013 @05:56PM (#6778129)

I recommend checking out CPUSage. They offer a very similar service that's language agnostic. They're pretty early on AFAIK, so they still have a few kinks to work out, but i've found it to be pretty solid.

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Re:PiCloud has joined Dropbox by DonGateley on Monday November 18, 2013 @02:41PM (#6756416)

I'm curious why you think it won't re-appear within the Dropbox infrastructure. Do you think they bought it for internal use only?

Do you expect the open source pickup by Multyvac to be a bust?

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Re:PiCloud has joined Dropbox by cschmidt on Monday November 18, 2013 @03:11PM (#6756622)

I think if you read the announcement carefully, it is the standard aqui-hire wording. Dropbox isn't remotely in the same space as PiCloud, and doesn't want to be. They simply "acquired" PiCloud to get their team of developers, which is why they're fine with open sourcing PiCloud. They won't even be using it internally.

   the team has decided to join Dropbox... 
   We’ll be bringing our API-building expertise to the Dropbox Platform, ... 
   Even though the team is moving on ...

I also hope that Multyvac will be a success. That said, I hope they'll start communicating soon. I can't really judge if they'll be able to be a success... but I hope so.

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Re:PiCloud has joined Dropbox by jmartens on Thursday November 21, 2013 @04:00PM (#6777437)

Try cpusage

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