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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AppFog’s platform as a service, available as of late Wednesday, abstracts out the tweaking and tuning of cloud servers, databases and storage. And, if you want to run your work on Amazon and then move it to, say, Rackspace, or Microsoft Windows Azure, or the HP Cloud, you can do so with the click of a button, according to AppFog CEO Lucas Carlson.

The Portland, Ore.-based company, which started out as a PHP-specific PaaS called PHPFog, has broadened and adjusted strategy in the past year, adding support for Java, .NET, and Node and other popular languages and deciding to restructure its foundation atop standard Cloud Foundry technology. That means it can run across the major public clouds, now supporting the aforementioned Amazon, Rackspace, Microsoft and HP offerings with more to come. “We will be adding them like mad — we’ll have an all SSD cloud soon,” Carlson said.

AppFog makes big cross-cloud promises

“We become your front-end to cloud. We took a standard Cloud Foundry API and delivered that across all the public clouds,” Carlson said. The resulting PaaS has been put through its paces by 5,000 beta testers including the City of New York and 40,000 developers, he said.

This is a tall order. But so far, Matthew Knight, founder and CEO of Merchpin, a beta tester for the past four months, is impressed. Merchpin ran its e-commerce app on Amazon’s infrastructure before AppFog but got bogged down with infrastructure fussing they had to do. “We were building our application and also having to deal with maintaining our servers. It was a pain. AppFog fixes that,” he said. That and its tight integration with MongoDB, Merchpin’s database of choice, makes implementation and deployment extremely easy.  He said that AppFog will cost more than Amazon alone but only in dollars. “When you factor in man hours, it’s much less expensive,” he said.

Lucas Carlson, CEO AppFog

Companies can go to AppFog’s site to set up a free account with 2 GB of RAM. Yes, it distills out all the other confusing pricing units listed by the public cloud providers. No need to worry about instances or storage type or database choice. AppFog prices on RAM requirement only.  Monthly plans with additional RAM are available: 4GB for $100; 16GB for $380 and 32 GB for $720. AppFog will bill the customer for the entire infrastructure stack, including the backend cloud, giving it pretty good account control.

Merchpin ran its application on Amazon before and after moving to AppFog so Knight has not tested its promised easy push-button cloud migrations. But, if it lives up to its billing, it would interest many companies looking into multi-cloud solutions, a trend that Carlson has done his best to promote. If AppFog really can move applications from cloud to cloud as advertised, it will be a huge draw.

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Lucas Carlson, CEO, AppFog

AppFog, which started out as a PHP-based Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), just added Java to its roster of supported programming languages. Full, multilanguage support is becoming table stakes in the PaaS world, where players like Heroku, DotCloud and Microsoft Windows Azure now give users a broad choice of programming languages to work with.

AppFog (once known as PHP Fog) recently added Ruby and Node.js to its list. Still to come is support for Python, .NET and “smaller languages like Erlang,” said AppFog CEO Lucas Carlson.

Support for Java, which is widely used in enterprise accounts, makes particular sense for AppFog, which estimates that more than half (60 percent) of Java developers build PHP front ends to their applications.

Last August, the Portland, Ore.–based AppFog moved its service onto a foundation of VMware’s open-source Cloud Foundry PaaS. That decision makes it easier for AppFog to support more languages.

“One of the nice things about working with the open-source Cloud Foundry is that people with smaller languages can still contribute to the PaaS and still be supported,” Carlson said.

“PaaS is three layers. If you break it out, the user experience is at the top — the web UI, the pricing — in the middle is the lifecycle management of the applications, and at the bottom is the orchestration with the Infrastructure-as-a-Service players. That’s where the APIs for AWS or Joyent or other underlying services sit. Cloud Foundry does the middle piece for us,” Carlson explained. “We add our secret sauce to make it better atop all that user experience and orchestration.”

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Here are some highlights from the presentations:

• Acunu CEO Tim Moreton demonstrated how his company helps enterprises achieve “consistently and predictably higher performance” from their commodity hardware systems. Acunu’s technology combines storage stack pipeline into a single platform, promising less latency and more range read throughput.
• Beyondcore CEO Arijit Sengupta described how his San Mateo-based company helps clients utilize the cloud as much as possible by ensuring the privacy and security of their sensitive data. Beyondcore’s SplitSecure technology splits–and later recombines — private information from the more general data that can be stored in the cloud.
• BigSwitch co-founder Kyle Forster demonstrated his company’s Open Flow-based technology platform that purportedly brings the benefits of cloud computing and virtualization to the networking space. According to Forster, the Palo Alto, California-based BigSwitch aims to become the “VMware of networking.”
• Cloudability, led by CEO Mat Ellis, provides a web-based dashboard that allows companies to see all their cloud costs in one place. The Portland, Oregon-based startup, which sends its clients alerts when its cloud spending spikes, aims to be “the Mint.com for the cloud.”
• CloudFloor CTO Imad Mouline demonstrated the company’s cloud management and optimization service. The Waltham, Massachusetts-based company has built its service to help both IT and business people get control and visibility over their cloud operations.
• DotCloud CEO Solomon Hyes described his company’s platform-as-a-service offering, that allows developers to run any major application or database stack in the cloud, regardless of the programming language or database it utilizes. The San Francisco-based startup received both the judge’s choice and audience choice awards for its Structure Launchpad presentation.
• GenieDB founder Dr. Jack Kreindler described how his company aims to solve large-scale distributed data problems with its geodiverse datafabric. The Orange County, Calif.-based startup has developed a datafabric that combines SQL and NoSQL for platform-as-a-service providers and cloud builders.
• PHP Fog founder and CEO Lucas Carlson talked about his Portland, Oregon-based company’s platform-as-a-service technology aimed at PHP developers. PHP Fog hopes to drastically reduce the time it takes for developers to build an application, potentially helping them save time and money upfront and system and scaling costs over time.
• Real-Status CEO Royce Murphy demonstrates his company’s modeling and visualization software product HyperGlance. The Cambridge, UK-based company purportedly helps companies visualize their experience in moving and hosting their data in the cloud.
• vCider CEO Chris Marino shows off his company’s on-demand distributed virtual switch product for the cloud. vCider works as a self-service overlay on top of existing networking structures.
• Zerto CEO Ziv Kedem launches the company out of stealth mode, announcing its technology for ensuring disaster recovery in the cloud. Zerto aims to help companies feel more comfortable with moving critical applications to the cloud by ensuring business continuity and disaster recovery by replicating data in a virtualized, hyper-visor layer.

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