[erlang-questions] Attracting Functional Programmers

[G Bulmer]

On 7 Oct 2007, at 17:37, Dale Harvey wrote:

> In terms of attracting programmers, it seems like my main reason,  
> if noticing the traction that erlang has been gaining recently, to  
> not decided to give erlang a shot is the fact that I would have to  
> own my own server in order to develop anything public in it.
>
> Personally I have tested quite a few web based languages, all of  
> which were little experiments which I could 'deploy' on my shared  
> hosting. If it werent for other circumstances I almost certainly  
> wouldnt have tested erlang.

I'm not sure I understand your point.
Are you saying Erlang/OTP will become much more useful to people like  
you when it is made available as a "shrink wrapped" platform by  
hosting companies?
If that's your point, I agree.

AFAIK, the only company offering (or planing to offer) hosted Erlang  
was joyent, and Joyant were expensive compared to the majority of  
hosting companies.
As a comparison, Railsplayground.com offers Ruby on Rails hosting  
starting at $5/month. You just upload your app., and go.

The cheapest way for a company to offer Erlang hosting would be  
within virtual private servers (VPS), e.g. Linux Virtual Machines  
running Erlang Nodes. I've googled around and can't find anyone doing  
that. Of course, you could build the virtual private server yourself,  
but that seems like significant effort which a hosting company could  
just 'solve' for people.
Is there a pre-built VPS image to take out all of the pain?

A nice solution would be to have a "pre-configured, templated image"  
of an Erlang environment and Erlang/OTP at Amazon Elastic Compute  
Cloud (Amazon EC2) http://www.amazon.com/gp/browse.html?node=201590011
Amazon's computing cloud supports starting up and closing down upnew  
servers on-demand, you only pay for what you use. This would be very  
handy if your throughput requirements are very peaky.

GB