UPDATED 23:01 EDT / DECEMBER 06 2011

AppFog logo NEWS

AppFog Rolling Out Third Party Add-Ons, Including MongoDB Hosting

AppFog logo Platform-as-a-Service provider AppFog announced today that it is rolling out a new program for third party add-ons. Users will be able to manage accounts with third-party services from a single interface. The first partners are the MongoDB host MongoLab and the application performance monitoring company New Relic.

This gives AppFog similar capabilities to Heroku, which has a thriving third party platform. But CEO Lucas Carlson notes that AppFog’s add-on framework provides the ability to deploy to multiple infrastructure-as-a-service providers, not just Amazon Web Services. Carlson told me earlier this year that AppFog plans to offer multiple IaaS provider options in the near future (The Register has confirmed that Joyent will be one of those providers). Heroku CEO Byron Sebastian said at the Dreamforce even that the company plans to offer multiple IaaS providers in the future as well.

Carlson emphasizes the strategic importance of building an ecosystem of third-party add-ons. “Once every PaaS provider has a similar technology stack, the ecosystem will be the main way that a company can differentiate,” Carlson says.

AppFog started life as PHPFog. But like many other PaaS providers, it’s been expanding out to provide support for more languages. AppFog adopted Cloud Foundry to build out its support and now offers: PHP, Python, Ruby, Java, Perl and several database technologies. It contributed its own PHP software back to the open source Cloud Foundry project. Since many companies will be offering PaaS via Cloud Foundry, there’s a real need to provide additional value. But third party providers will want to focus development efforts on existing markets, and will want to make it easy to port their own code to multiple PaaS providers – a standard way of building add-ons to Cloud Foundry, for example. That could make it hard for new entrants to get support from third parties, which will need to have an existing customer base. And if adding apps to existing PaaSes is easy, it could become difficult for platforms to differentiate themselves based on third-party apps alone.

But there’s more to building an ecosystem than just having a big library of add-ons. The key is execution. We’ll see how these companies manage.


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