The DotCloud experience

Rocking and Rolling out

The Edge of the Empire Character Generator v0.1 is now out.

As it is not even feature complete, I would not define this as a milestone worth its own post. This post is about the deployment experience on the DotCloud Platform it runs on.

Documentation

While the platform documentation seems comprehensive and well written, it is somewhat outdated. The changes around dcuser did not make their way into the docs.

On the other side the help system around the command line utilities and the deployment tutorial was useful to figure out what is happening and why (not).

Platform requirements

If you are about to start a new project on DotCloud, I would highly recommend cloning the example repositories. The exact requirements does not documented too well, so it is all trial and error for those poor folks who try to bring an existing app (even a simple one) to the platform. Fortunately the things are kept really simple here.

Summary

It has been a bumpy, but short ride so far with dotCloud. It is always confusing to start using a new tool, people rush and overlook things clearly stated in the documentation. The dotCloud docs explains the concepts well but not up to date in all the details. This makes the deployment experience somewhat difficult, but I have seen lot worse than this. The concepts are however relatively simple and this keeps the pain tolerable.

All in all, DotCloud runs my simple web app for free, so I got more than I paid for.