According to the mail (and subsequent blog post):

“It is with genuine sadness that we inform you that Xeround’s service will be terminated in the course of the coming weeks, across all of our currently active data centers.”

Xeround’s free and paid service options run on Amazon Web Services; Rackspace, AppFog, Heroku and HP Cloud. The company could not be reached for comment but rivals are circling — ClearDB and Cloudant posted tweets to woo Xeround users.

This news has to be sobering given the number of cloud-based database services dotting the landscape. The company had raised more than $30 million in funding starting in 2005.  Xeround investors include Benchmark Capital, Giza Venture Capital, Ignition Partners and Trilogy Partnership.

This story was updated at 4:38 a.m. PST to add the closing date of the paid service, a link to the Xeround blog post, and information on Xeround funding and investors.

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While helping users host applications on five public clouds was one of Appfog’s main selling points, “it’s also become increasingly resource-intensive to maintain so many instances of our infrastructure,” AppFog CEO Lucas Carlson wrote in the email. He referred users to the AppFog Console, which will enable them to clone their application onto new target infrastructure.

Carlson could not be reached for comment Monday morning, but, Generally speaking, PaaS adoption by business users has been sketchy at best. Many developers love PaaS because it makes development and testing very easy, but once the applications are built, many companies prefer to run them in-house (i.e., not on a public cloud). And, more specifically, there have been rumors  that AppFog was seeking investment or even a potential buyout.

AppFog tried to end-run that argument by allowing deployment on private clouds as well, but it’s unclear how well that effort has gone. There has also been angst among companies, including AppFog, that built their PaaS offerings atop the Cloud Foundry framework. That was true when Cloud Foundry resided under VMware, and remains true since it was spun off to Pivotal, which is now selling its own Cloud Foundry PaaS that competes with third-party options.

I’ve reached out to Carlson for comment and will update this story when he responds.

Update: Carlson would not comment on rationale for dropping Rackspace but did say that AppFog has hundreds of paying customers and that his goal is to “build a big company in a big space.” AppFog still supports Amazon Web Services in three regions — North America, Europe and Asia as well as HP’s cloud.

This story was updated at 7:25 a.m. PST with Carlson’s comment.

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The addition of “external committers” to the project could ease tensions brewing among some Cloud Foundry backers — companies that built their own PaaSes atop the Cloud Foundry framework.

But then again, the fact that Pivotal is now selling software/support could open new areas of contention with partners that may want to do the same thing. Such is the life of an open source project where coopetition is the rule of engagement.

As set forth in a new blog post, Cloud Foundry is going to add “full-time external committers” to the process. Governance and openness had been an ongoing issue with the PaaS project according to an exec with one Cloud Foundry vendor. “We just didn’t have any visibility into what was going on [inside the project],” he said.

He would like to see the whole effort turned over to a vendor-neutral foundation for management, as Rackspace did with OpenStack and IBM did with Eclipse. That didn’t happen here but the addition of outside committers is a step in the right direction and, to be fair, some folks in the OpenStack community complained that Rackspace took its sweet time to make its move.

Lucas Carlson, CEO of AppFog, another Cloud Foundry backer, said he’s seen other good signs from Cloud Foundry. He is thrilled, for example, that the code is back on a public Github repository. It had been removed some time ago. “We see it as a sign of a more open approach from the Cloud Foundry team,” he said.

Collaborators or competitors: a fine line

Some history: The worry initially was that Cloud Foundry, despite all the talk of open-source goodness and just plain openness, was too closely associated with one vendor:  VMware. Then, when VMware spun it off to a VMware-and-EMC-backed entity (Pivotal) there was more uncertainty about its future.

There was also concern that some of the Cloud Foundry players were going to take the work they’d done and fork the project altogether because of the lack of visibility into Cloud Foundry plans. Under this definition a “fork” — and yes, I’ll get hate mail on this — that could lead to the creation of several not-always-compatible versions of a project.

For some in the open source community, there is no such thing as a bad fork.But for mere mortals there is worry about an actual ecosystem divergence when many members of the same community start getting their updates from different places instead of relying on a central source, in this case Pivotal. To be fair, there is analogous concern that several versions of OpenStack backed by many vendors — some contributing back more than others — will lead to the same problem. At any rate, that’s the kind of angst Pivotal is trying to lay to rest.

In Thursday’s blog post, James Watters, head of product for Cloud Foundry, reiterated that the project will support multiple clouds, promising “open interfaces, support and continued development on AWS, OpenStack, vCloud and vSphere environments.”

And, he maintained, that the addition of outside committers was always a goal:

” … we are engaged with several organizations about putting dedicated resources on the extended engineering team –we believe this to be a very important step forward. The scale of these external investments is significant and a major milestone in our growth. The heart of Cloud Foundry, however, really comes from individual community contributions and users, so of course, we invite you to join us. All you need to do is send a pull-request.”

Going  orward it will be interesting to see what engineers from which companies will be added as committers. For now, the naysayers appear to be relieved at what Cloud Foundry has done.

Watters endorsed Cloud Foundry’s existing “corporate sponsored, Apache 2 licensed, pull request driven approach” as the right way to go. The outside committers will open up the process going forward, but he also left the door open to further changes. He wrote: “The massive growth of the community and ecosystem requires mediating a diverse set of needs and we will always be open to other governance models for the project in the future.”

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The attraction of the multi-vendor Cloud Foundry effort is that, in theory, it would provide customers an array of compatible PaaSes from different vendors. If they don’t like their experience with one, they can move their code elsewhere. But now the prospect of a “fork” looms with some other vendors thinking of splitting off and doing their own iterations. Worst case scenario: that could negate any promise of compatibility. And that raises the old bugaboo of vendor lock-in which even PaaS providers say has restricted business demand for PaaSes.

Some background: late last year, VMware turned over the Cloud Foundry effort and related projects to the Pivotal Initiative spinoff. Since then some of the third-party Cloud Foundry crowd have complained that they have not gotten information  they need from Pivotal. And, they worry that Pivotal or VMware will push its own commercial, competitive version of Cloud Foundry. And so they privately discussed forking the Cloud Foundry code. Any fork or forks raises the specter of a fractured standard.

Sinclair Schuller, CEO of Apprenda, a non-Cloud Foundry PaaS, raised a ruckus last week when he posted his take on the impact of any fork or forks on Cloud Foundry. (Long story short: it will be bad for customers, Schuller wrote.) That caused a kerfuffle which Redmonk analyst Stephen O’Grady addressed in his  blog post. O’Grady tried to downplay the negative impact of forks, writing:

“We reject the notion that forking is an undesirable outcome. Forking is, to the contrary, provably beneficial to modern open source projects – at least from a developmental perspective.”

But O’Grady also conceded that, because Cloud Foundry is not licensed under the General Public License (GPL) — as Linux was — it faces different issues;

“Compatibility, ultimately, is the key to determining whether the forks which are so beneficial to development are a problem for customers. Java, for example, had multiple distinct implementations, which ensured competition and thus continued innovation to benefit customers.”

In his own blog post, cloud pundit Ben Kepes cites “tensions in the Cloud Foundry world, ” and maintains the possibility of a fork should concern customers.

“Quite simply a fork, or even worse multiple forks, too early in a project is a sign of bad governance and questions the validity of the entire initiative. Let me reiterate – these are very early days and any doubt that factions in the community sow in end users minds are wildly damaging to the community. This is especially the case since, from what I’m hearing, some of the conversation around forking is happening for all the wrong reasons – it comes down to vendors making the right decisions for the right reasons.”

I’ve asked Cloud Foundry and some of the third-party PaaS providers for comment and will update this when they get back to me.

Photo courtesy of  Flickr user Marshall Astor – Food Fetishist

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The company started out as PHPfog, which GigaOM’s Derrick Harris characterized two years ago as a sort of Heroku for PHP developers, but changed focus to support multiple languages and multiple public clouds.

The developers using PHPFog probably already know it’s not  easy to migrate from one software version to another and when the software in question is actually the platform which runs your applications, things get really hairy. One AppFog user acknowledged that the company provided notice and guidance about migrating applications but said any such migration is fraught. “Infrastructure moves are incredibly difficult and risky and the upside is usually fairly slim,” he said via email.

We'd love to keep in touch… so please follow @AppFog as we wind down here…. It's been freaking awesome.—
PHP Fog (@phpfog) January 23, 2013

The problem of a defunct PaaS may be rare — Coghead disappeared in 2009, although SAP ended up buying the intellectual property. But given that PaaSes act as platforms for real applications, customers need to go into deployment with their eyes wide open.

Gartner distinguished analyst Yefim Natiz, who studies this topic, recommends that PaaS customers negotiate terms to mitigate risk. “You should put something in your provisions that if the company is acquired or goes away, you can get some money back — even if a company goes bankrupt there are assets left over. The best thing is to get your code in escrow so if the PaaS goes away you can run it on premises if you need to,” he said.

And of course, all companies should always back up their underlying data all the time.

Carlson, who provided the tweetstream below to show how some customers “evolved” their thinking about the transition, said the benefits of moving to AppFog outweigh the headaches of the move itself.

“They get much better service, a choice of infrastructure, new languages, five new database services and can choose whatever version control system they want to manage their code instead of being forced into Git,” he said in an interview.

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The new option, available from AppFog’s site, costs $50 per user for 500MB to 4GB of database storage and 50GB of data transfer. In July, Portland, Ore.-based AppFog launched its ambitious cross-cloud PaaS effort including a free  version for up to 2GB of RAM. Additional monthly plans with more memory started at $100 for 4G, $380 for 16GB and $720 for 32GB. The free version is still available.

Each MySQL and PostgreSQL database instance comes with 500MB of storage; each Redis and RabbitMQ instance comes with 10MB of RAM and 6 concurrent connections; free custom domains and the fastest servers from whichever cloud infrastructure the developer selects.

AppFog CEO Lucas Carlson said he made the move in response to developers who want more storage and other resources.  ”When developers told me that our plans were not quite right for their needs I knew i had to make it better,” Carlson said via email.

The problem with PaaS is that while developers love the freedom to design and develop on that infrastructure, many companies still don’t want to deploy on an outside platform. Another issue is VMware’s decision to spin off Cloud Foundry to a new corporate entity. That has sparked concern about how open the Cloud Foundry development process will be going forward. VMware and parent company EMC have said they won’t discuss details of its spinoff plans until early next year, leaving Cloud Foundry-dependent PaaSes in a bit of a quandary.

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What we still don’t know is what the emergence of this new entity means for the Cloud Foundry ecosystem — the third parties that built their own platforms atop the Cloud Foundry platform. Officially, no one’s saying anything beyond VMware’s opaque blog post announcing the move. Basically, VMware told us all to check back in Q1 2013 for details.

Unofficially the word to these partners, who worry about having to compete more with the Pivotal mothership’s Cloud Foundry commercial release, is:  ”remain calm.” Companies that built their PaaSes atop Foundry include Tier 3, Uhuru, AppFog and Activestate.

Macro PaaS picture still bleak

While enterprise uptake of PaaSes in general remains spotty at best — the Cloud Foundry ecosystem has gotten traction of late at least with big IT partners. Two weeks ago, Hewlett-Packard dubbed ActiveState’s Stackato as its PaaS platform while Rackspace is marketing AppFog to its customers.  And, this week, Cloud Elements launched a formal systems integration practice around Cloud Foundry.

“With this spinoff I expect to see increased focus and resources for Cloud Foundry,” said Cloud Elements CEO Mark Geene. “If they put Paul Maritz on to head this up, they’re serious about this business.” (Maritz, the former VMware CEO and current EMC chief strategist will, in fact, be CEO of this new effort.)

Of course, the subtext behind the spinoff devoting more resources to the PaaS is that it will also focus more on selling that PaaS to customers which, naturally would mean contention with its PaaS partners who are likewise trying to sell services and support around their own PaaSes. Coopetition lives!

The problem is that most folks — even many PaaS companies —  think their market will consolidate and converge around a few key players. Most expect Cloud Foundry and Heroku which Salesforce.com bought two years ago, will remain along with Microsoft Windows Azure in the Windows and .Net realm, but many smaller more niche players will get acquired or fade away. So coopetition may live on but with fewer actual competitors.

The big question underlying all of this is whether this flurry of vendor action will lead to actual adoption by business customers. You can bet one thing — winning real customers was the primary motivation behind the Pivotal Initiative from the get go.

Photo courtesy by Flickr user fontplaydotcom

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To add more transparency, Cloud Foundry is now offering now offering an application to help customers check out what features and services are available from any public CloudFoundry endpoint.

 Cloud Foundry Core, which went live Tuesday morning “will give you a real-time glimpse of what any Cloud Foundry endpoint will support,” said James Watters, director of ecosystem development for Cloud Foundry

According to the web site:

To promote cloud portability across different instances of Cloud Foundry, Cloud Foundry Core defines a baseline of common capabilities for different Cloud Foundry instances. Further, it provides an open mechanism that lets anyone instantly validate and confirm the specific frameworks and applications supported by a particular instance of Cloud Foundry and whether it supports Cloud Foundry Core.

Lucas Carlson, CEO of AppFog, which now claims 100,000 applications running on its PaaS, is bullish on the new app, calling it “a step forward in PaaS transparency, proving interoperability can exist and giving enterprises more comfort in taking the leap to PaaS.”

Carlson says business PaaS adoption will remain stalled until customers can be assured that their applications can be moved from platform to platform as needed.

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The new Heroku Enterprise for Java supports the latest Java Development Kits (JDKs), adds native support for the popular Eclipse integrated development environment and adds enterprise support that includes guaranteed Service Level Agreements (SLAs.)

It won’t be alone in this Java PaaS fray. Red Hat — which owns the JBoss Java middleware franchise — is making a big Java PaaS play with Openshift.  Cloudbees is a Java PaaS and even Microsoft Azure supports Java.

Heroku which started out 5 years ago as a Ruby-focused PaaS, is popular among Web developers designing customer- facing apps. It has since added other languages – including for some Java support — over the years. What’s happening here, however is a major endorsement of the full Java ecosystem which is key in enterprise accounts where Salesforce.com’s CRM software as a service (SaaS)  offering is popular.

The importance of embracing Java

“We looked at Java and saw what you need to deploy Java web apps — Tomcat, SQL databases– you always need some sort of caching layer for session management and all those pieces take a lot of work to put together even with the modern technologies available. Heroku Enterprise for Java provides this all out of the box — the full Java stack provisioned for the enterprise cloud app that you would normally deploy on premise,” Oren Teich COO of Heroku told me recently.

Heroku will charge customers $1,000 per production application per month. “You pay one price for the whole set up, the production app, the sandbox and development environment,” Jesper Joergensen, senior director of product for Heroku said in a recent interview

Since Salesforce bought Heroku in January 2010 for $212 million, developers both inside and outside of big businesses —  have used these platforms like it to build and test applications. But their corporate masters are less enthused about putting production corporate applications on these platforms. That’s something Salesforce.com, Red Hat, Microsoft (with Azure) and others are trying to change.

Al Hilwa, IDC program director for application development  said Salesforce is doing a lot with this new “Winter” release of its platform — broadening it out to include essential enterprise-class services including s file storage and identity management. Bringing 5-year-old Heroku more into the fold is part of that effort.

The company is also accommodating touch devices with its HTML5 Salesforce Touch framework. “Finally, we are seeing [Salesforce.com] bolster the Java capabilities to support real Java workloads. This is a crucial point for Heroku to run a larger mix of enterprise Java workloads, namely existing enterprise Java applications,” he said.

Salesforce’s two PaaS problem

One nagging issue for the company is that it’s fielding two PaaSes – Force.com which supports the company’s proprietary APEX language and the polyglot Heroku. The expectation is that it will bring those offerings together over time. For now, developers will be able to use Force.com’s new Canvas tool to integrate third-party applications into that environment.  With Canvas “you can now write Ruby or Java apps that use Force.com metadata and context,” Hilwa said.

Another issue: Heroku now runs only on Amazon infrastructure. As big and powerful as that platform is, it’s been known to go down and take customers — including Heroku and Netflix — with it.  Other, smaller PaaSes like Appfog, preach a multi-cloud strategy for that reason. Krishnan Subramanian, principal analyst with Rishidot, said Heroku needs to follow suit. “I’ve been pushing them a long time on this [Amazon Web Services] thing,” he said. In his view, Heroku needs to stay on Amazon but also move to other infrastructure including Salesforce.com infrastructure.

A few months ago Heroku’s then-CEO Byron Sebastian told me that Heroku is always evaluating options and will do what’s best for customers. Sebastian left in August, but Teich reiterated his message, saying Heroku will have more to say on this topic in a few months.

“You don’t come to Heroku because you want Amazon … We firmly believe uptime is critical and irrespective of the underlying infrastructure you need to know that we will be accountable for our uptime,” Teich said.

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According to co-founder Alex Loddengaard, Levy began building MemCachier as a side project in mid-2011, and he hosted a private beta version in the Heroku add-on market so a friend could easily access the service. The team at Heroku saw the service, liked it and encouraged Levy to pursue it for real. Levy, who’s still in the middle of getting a Ph.D. from Stanford, called Loddengaard (who taught Levy while a teaching assistant at the University of Washington) and fellow Stanford Ph.D. candidate David Terei for help, and MemCachier launched in April 2012.

Alex Loddengaard

Landing Loddengaard wasn’t too tough. He had quit his job at software-development firm Atlassian, after beginning his career at Google and then following his boss Christophe Bisciglia to Hadoop pioneer Cloudera, where Loddengaard was a pre-funding employee. (MemCachier, by the way, now shares office space with Bisciglia’s new company, WibiData, in the former Atlassian headquarters.) He was living off his savings, had “built a bunch of stupid web apps that you never heard of” and was trying to figure out what to do next, he told me. And then Levy called.

Memcached, and MemCachier, are everywhere

Memcached is a popular open-source key-value system that speeds up web applications by caching certain data in the memory of distributed systems rather than on disk in the database itself. Facebook is widely cited as the largest user for the hundreds of terabytes it’s now storing in memcached, but, Loddengaard said, “Every company that needs to scale uses memcached.”

Aside from the core open source version, developers might choose the Couchbase’s eponymous NoSQL database (into which the popular memcached implementation Membase Server has been integrated) or its hosted Membase service called Memcache, which is available on Heroku. Another hosted option is AWS’s ElastiCache, a membased-compliant service available to developers building web applications on the Amazon EC2 cloud.

Since starting off on Heroku, MemCachier has already expanded to the AppHarbor and Cloud Control platforms, but Wednesday’s expansion represents  the company’s first real introduction to the public, Loddengaard said. Now, MemCachier is also available on AppFog, CloudBees and DotCloud — three popular PaaS offerings — as well as Amazon EC2.

Growing isn’t always easy

Moving to Amazon’s cloud, in particular, also meant a change in pricing to reflect a different class of user (e.g., AWS mega-user Netflix) than most PaaS offerings attract. Whereas MemCachier’s options on Heroku range from 100MB to 10GB in size, Amazon users can get up to a 100GB instance. Loddengaard said most Amazon EC2 users use more than a gigabyte of RAM for memcached, and ElastiCache actually starts out at 1.3GB.

MemCachier’s architecture, simplified.

Loddengaard acknowledges that trying to woo developers away from ElastiCache service on Amazon’s own platform won’t necessarily be easy, but he thinks the difference in approach between the two services favors MemCachier for a particular class of developers — those who don’t want to manage their infrastructure too closely. Whereas ElastiCache still requires users to manage their instances, as is the norm with Amazon’s lower-level infrastructure-as-a-service platform, MemCachier is about “no operations whatsoever,” he said. “Developers shouldn’t spend any time operating servers over developing software.”

That mindset has proven effective so far. Thanks to word of mouth alone, the bootstrapped MemCachier has been growing steadily in terms of revenue and users, now claiming more than 1,500 developers, but its broader footprint and some proactive marketing should mean sharp upticks in both areas. However, a jump in users — especially the larger ones that might come from Amazon EC2 — will probably require MemCachier to grow beyond its current three-person team. Of course, there are worse problems to have.

Feature image courtesy of Shutterstock user optimarc.

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