Disclaimer: I founded a DevOps (now Kubernetes) consulting company.
We, up until recently, had our own (closed source) ansible/terraform/packer immutable AWS-based PaaS sort of thing. We abandoned it in July when Kubernetes hit 1.0.
It's not just if Flynn and Convox and other VC-powered startups whomever can even exist another couple of years - but whether they exist and if they can out-compete Docker and CoreOS and Kubernetes and... etc.
My feeling is that a lot of infrastructure companies died in July. Just like Blackberry after the iPhone - gradually, and sometime in the future, suddenly.
What's the future for these PaaS companies? I dunno. Consulting services? Managed PaaS? These are fine, but... have a finite growth curve. Not everyone wants or needs to be a unicorn - for sure - but if you're tying your SaaS or web business to someone's infrastructure code, you kinda want:
a) the thing everyone else is doing (so you can grow your own team eventually - it's easier to hire a kube developer than a eg. flynn dev)
b) something that will be around for a long time and
c) something that has the best blend of features/power/ergonomics (Kubernetes has almost 1,000 contributors. Flynn: 98. Convox: 52. Bigger isn't always better, but...)
For us, that's kube. We're still iterating on our our business model - perhaps we just stay as a kube consulting shop for a good while - but running an Open Source PaaS business is not where we think the puck is heading.
We, up until recently, had our own (closed source) ansible/terraform/packer immutable AWS-based PaaS sort of thing. We abandoned it in July when Kubernetes hit 1.0.
It's not just if Flynn and Convox and other VC-powered startups whomever can even exist another couple of years - but whether they exist and if they can out-compete Docker and CoreOS and Kubernetes and... etc.
My feeling is that a lot of infrastructure companies died in July. Just like Blackberry after the iPhone - gradually, and sometime in the future, suddenly.
What's the future for these PaaS companies? I dunno. Consulting services? Managed PaaS? These are fine, but... have a finite growth curve. Not everyone wants or needs to be a unicorn - for sure - but if you're tying your SaaS or web business to someone's infrastructure code, you kinda want:
a) the thing everyone else is doing (so you can grow your own team eventually - it's easier to hire a kube developer than a eg. flynn dev)
b) something that will be around for a long time and
c) something that has the best blend of features/power/ergonomics (Kubernetes has almost 1,000 contributors. Flynn: 98. Convox: 52. Bigger isn't always better, but...)
For us, that's kube. We're still iterating on our our business model - perhaps we just stay as a kube consulting shop for a good while - but running an Open Source PaaS business is not where we think the puck is heading.