My hope is that they will provide personal application hosting as a service along with a marketplace. That sounds confusing, but here's why it's intriguing to me.
The iOS app store changed the way developers build and scale software. By publishing Flappy Bird, the creator was able to handle millions of installations without any thought at all. There was no need for payment gateways in distribution either. The author just built it and put it in the app store.
Imagine a similar situation with server side software? Imagine a service like "Oh Life" (recently shut down). Instead of signing up for their service and leaning on them to pay for the operations costs, what if I bought "Oh Life" as a server app and paid my own hosting costs. "Oh Life" goes out of business, but I still have my running copy and can continue to use it forever.
Docker may be the key to creating the right user experience here. Launching an AMI for a private service like this is 1) too complicated and 2) too expensive for a single user. The user experience could be streamlined fairly easily, but the footprint is too big without something like Docker.
You described most of the goals of Sandstorm (https://sandstorm.io/). I don't think they've really landed on the right user experience yet but I imagine they're definitely working towards improving it.
Support to businesses who have Docker as a fundamental part of their product offering which they offer to other businesses or consumers (think services companies - IaaS, PaaS, etc.)
The iOS app store changed the way developers build and scale software. By publishing Flappy Bird, the creator was able to handle millions of installations without any thought at all. There was no need for payment gateways in distribution either. The author just built it and put it in the app store.
Imagine a similar situation with server side software? Imagine a service like "Oh Life" (recently shut down). Instead of signing up for their service and leaning on them to pay for the operations costs, what if I bought "Oh Life" as a server app and paid my own hosting costs. "Oh Life" goes out of business, but I still have my running copy and can continue to use it forever.
Docker may be the key to creating the right user experience here. Launching an AMI for a private service like this is 1) too complicated and 2) too expensive for a single user. The user experience could be streamlined fairly easily, but the footprint is too big without something like Docker.