DotCloud, the cloud service that gave birth to Docker, is shutting down on February 29

The dotCloud platform as a service (PaaS), which developers can use to build and run apps without worrying about the underlying infrastructure, will be shutting down on February 29.

This is happening because dotCloud’s parent company, cloudControl, has reached the point of “insolvency,” according to a post that cloudControl published today on its PaaSfinder blog.

“Yes, unfortunately this is correct,” cloudControl founder and chief executive Philipp Strube told VentureBeat in an email.

The dotCloud brand has history to it. It was once an independent venture-backed startup that participated in the prominent Silicon Valley accelerator Y Combinator. The service was not a huge moneymaker, and the engineers behind it open-sourced key underlying technology called Docker — which wraps up application code in Linux containers that can be easily moved from server to server — in 2013. As this open-source technology took off, dotCloud the startup pivoted to focus on Docker and changed its name to Docker as well. Then, in August 2014, Docker sold dotCloud to cloudControl.

https://twitter.com/konklone/status/690595825718657024/photo/1

Today’s blog post suggests that customers migrate to the Salesforce-owned Heroku PaaS.

For years, it’s been hard to determine how big the market for PaaS is or could be. Major cloud providers Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform all offer PaaS, and some cloud-only PaaS startups have gone away. HP bought the Stackato business from ActiveState, for instance, and Engine Yard bought OpDemand, the company behind Deis. Earlier AppFog was acquired by CenturyLink.

Updated at 1:46 p.m. Pacific to include comment from cloudControl’s chief executive.