HN Explorer

Orchestrate.io shutting down, deleting user data

8 points by cyberferret ↗ HN
Well, my trepidation proved correct. We signed up for Orchestrate.io's free tier for a bot project last month, and were impressed with how easy and quick it was to use their tools to integrate with our Slackbot project. However in the back of my mind, I knew Orchestrate wasn't one of the popular NoSQL systems that people talk about, and I wondered if they would stick around for the longer term.

This morning, I received the following in my Inbox:

"Effective December 15, 2016, the Orchestrate NoSQL Database product (“Orchestrate”) will be retired. On this date, existing free and paid accounts will be deactivated. The Orchestrate product will be fully supported until that date and you will continue to have access to any applicable Content in order to remove and/or backup any applicable Content prior to deactivation.After December 15, you will no longer have access to any Content or the Orchestrate NoSQL Database product.For assistance with this transition, you can contact CenturyLink Cloud support by opening a ticket via help@ctl.io. If you have any other questions, or would like additional information, please email help@ctl.io or reach out to your account manager.

Regards, CenturyLink Cloud"

I'd appreciate feedback from anyone else who uses Orchestrate who can give me pointers to a good alternative, who has a good Node library that integrates will with Slack's botkit.

6 comments

[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 28.3 ms ] thread
mamod
Just got the same shocking message, I had the same feelings about orchestrate, I worked with orchestrate for a wile but I was skeptical as you (glad for that) so I switched to self hosted solution few months ago to a new data base "crate.io" it wasn't that hard to migrate code base, no data transfer though since I stopped using it before launching my project :)

again I'm glad I followed my hunch :)

cyberferret
Yes, I am kind of wishing I had followed my gut feel too. I had tried AWS's NoSQL system, but had interminable trouble getting it to integrate with BotKit - Then while researching things I saw that Orchestrate had a plugin which integrated easily, and we managed to get it working in an afternoon and were delighted.

Now it means we have to pull out all that code and integrate another NoSQL system in there for data storage. I am glad that we held off from launching our bot to the public this month - we were waiting until the new year. So fortunately I don't risk losing any real customer data - only beta tester data. Inconvenient, but not insurmountable.

It has made me a lot more reticent to consider other small players in our stack though - might stick with AWS all the way from now on.

firehawk895
Well I built the backend of 3 startups pyoopil.com, zapprep.in, playable.in - they are all going to go bust in 30 days. these are products I've written and tested over a year. the startups will simply die. there is no way to port! The least they could at least release the source and allow self hosted version of orchestrate. but where is the sadism in that right?
cyberferret
Yeah, I would have thought at least offer an open source version that people could self host - would make it SO much easier, especially if they are just going to shutter the original product. Sorry to hear about your projects having to be scrapped just like that.
jgentes
I've been using Orchestrate for 2 years, can't believe they are just pulling the plug with 30 days notification. Lame.
cyberferret
UPDATE: Just got another email from them saying that they are extending the shutdown period to 120 days, so everyone has until 31st March 2017 to either convert to another system or grab their data before it is gone.

We've just spent the past 2 days working round the clock to transition our work to Amazon's DynamoDB.

Still wish they had released their NoSQL system as open source or something, to allow people to self host.