dotCloud

» see dotcloud.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

dotCloud came out of private beta on 22 June 2011 as a platform you could push almost any stack to, when the only name in that category most people could remember was Heroku. The company had started in Paris in 2008, went through Y Combinator in the summer of 2010, and moved to Silicon Valley. Benchmark and Trinity put in $10 million in March 2011 and Jerry Yang joined the board.

To run many customers' code on shared machines, dotCloud needed a way to keep each application sealed off from the others, and it built one in house on top of Linux containers. In March 2013 that tool was open sourced. It was called Docker. By October the company had renamed itself after it, and the hosting product that had paid for its development was now the side business.

Docker sold the dotCloud brand and platform to cloudControl in August 2014. cloudControl was a Berlin PaaS, founded in Bonn in 2009, with its own customers and its own platform, and dotCloud became one product line among others there. Fifteen months later cloudControl filed for insolvency. The trigger, per the company, was one major customer sharply cutting back its business.

The notice went out in January 2016 and the service ended on 29 February.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the email ~

CEO Philipp Strube wrote to dotCloud customers with two sentences that did the whole job: "cloudControl our German parent company has filed for bankruptcy. Due to this, dotCloud will be shutdown on February 29, 2016." The migration advice in the same message was to move to Heroku, on the grounds that the two platforms were compatible enough to make it easy.

Strube also said the number of paying customers affected was very small, and that dotCloud was not a large enough part of the business to be worth rescuing. Both of those are true and neither is comforting if you were one of them, with five weeks to move production somewhere else over a leap day.

~ the name on the door ~

I met this one backwards. Docker was already the thing you were expected to know by the time I was anywhere near it professionally, and dotCloud surfaced later, as a line in Docker's own history that explained why a container runtime had been written by a hosting company in the first place. Working out that the original product was still running in Berlin under different owners while its spin-off was reorganizing the whole industry took another step after that.

~ what happened to the rest ~

Exoscale picked up what was left of cloudControl in March 2016, a few weeks after dotCloud went dark. Docker Inc. kept the name it had borrowed from an internal tool and spent the next decade as one of the most widely deployed pieces of infrastructure anywhere. Hardly any of the platform-as-a-service companies dotCloud launched against are still independent either: appfog was absorbed into CenturyLink and nodejitsu into GoDaddy.

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