You can create an AppFog account and have your first application up and running in minutes. This chapter shows you how to perform this, and also demonstrates some of the features of the application control panel.
Note
You can create and deploy several applications using AppFog's free service level, which allows you to use up to 2 GB of RAM. You can use the free service level without supplying a credit card number. Some advanced features, such as use of external domain names, SSL, and team access, are only available to the paid users.
AppFog is a platform that you can use to host and deploy your applications to the cloud. You can write applications in Java, Node.js, Ruby, Python, or PHP and it also has built-in support for MySQL, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Redis, and RabbitMQ. Applications and their services can all be configured from a simple dashboard in a matter of minutes. AppFog also provides scalable architectures with load balancing so as your applications grow, you can easily increase the number of instances you have running.
There are free and paid plans. The paid plans currently start at $20 and go up from there depending on how much memory, storage, and instances you need. There are also enterprise level plans for larger businesses.
One of the main benefits of using AppFog is that it reduces the amount of time you need to spend on configuring servers, installing and configuring firewalls and security, and managing load balancers.