.

AppFog Platform as a Service (PaaS) delivery model now as clear as day

Rick Turoczy on August 25, 2011

When Portland startup PHP Fog announced that they were becoming AppFog, the obvious first question was “What are they going to begin supporting beyond PHP?”

Well, today, we got our answer. AppFog is going provide a whole lot more than push button application deployment.

AppFog is a cloud-based hosting service for your favorite web application stack. You can get servers setup and ready for your code in under a minute. When your code is ready, deploy to our reliable, fast, and scalable platform with just a single command.

What kind of services will it support? Well, there’s PHP, NodeJS, Ruby, Python, Java, .NET, MySQL, and PostgreSQL, among others. And they’re deciding what other platforms they’d like to add.

It’s all built on top of VMware’s Cloud Foundry. And from the sounds of things, it’s a mutually beneficial relationship.

“AppFog’s expertise in PHP, active community and service experience make them the obvious choice to collaborate with VMware and help build the Cloud Foundry PHP community,” said Jerry Chen, VP Application Platform Product Management & Marketing at VMware. “Multi-framework PaaS is extremely difficult to pull off well without the support of the Open Source community and domain experts like AppFog. We hope the AppFog service built on Cloud Foundry will be a popular offering for developers.”

Long story short, AppFog is pursuing Platform as a Service (PaaS). That means, they think developers should spend time developing and writing code. Not managing the servers on which that code runs.

It’s kind of like having your own magic IT department in a box.

But that’s not the only way they’re hoping to make developers’ lives easier.

We also have spent the last year perfecting PaaS user experience at phpfog.com, and have come up with something unique and compelling. Our pricing model is unlike any other PaaS on the market, and way better. Our design is better than anything in PaaS. Our amazing customer support has tickled our users. These are where we spend our time. We let you build Ruby, Node, Python, Java, .Net support the exact way you want by embracing open source.

Still need a little more detail on what this means to developers? Well, lucky you. Another Portland startup, Epipheo Studios, has lent a hand to help explain what AppFog does:

[HTML2]

For more information, visit AppFog.

Published by Rick Turoczy

More than mildly obsessed with the Portland startup community. Founder and editor at Silicon Florist. Cofounder and general manager at PIE. Follow me on Twitter: @turoczy