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Random freezes, missing sound and display glitches usually trace back to one bad driver. Find and replace yours safely.Free scan · under a minuteCenturyLink announced on June 14, 2013, that it had acquired AppFog, a Portland-based provider of platform-as-a-service (PaaS) software. The purchase price was not disclosed. CenturyLink planned to place AppFog within its Savvis cloud business, offering public-cloud access through Savvisdirect and private or dedicated deployments to enterprise customers. The deal was meant to add a developer-facing application platform to a company already strong in hosting, infrastructure and networking—not simply to buy more servers.
What CenturyLink bought
AppFog was a PaaS provider: it offered a layer between developers’ applications and the underlying cloud infrastructure. With infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), a customer generally manages virtual machines, storage, networking and more of the software stack. PaaS abstracts much of that operational work so developers can deploy and run applications without managing every server and operating-system detail.
AppFog emphasized application deployment across cloud environments and support for several programming languages. Contemporary accounts listed technologies such as Ruby, Node.js, PHP, Python, Java and .NET, though the precise runtime list varied by product version. Those are historical descriptions, not a current compatibility list. AppFog began as PHP Fog before expanding beyond PHP.
The acquisition announcement and planned product placement were reported by CenturyLink’s June 2013 announcement and Data Center Knowledge’s coverage.
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Why AppFog fit CenturyLink’s cloud ambitions
Savvis brought hosting, colocation, managed services and cloud infrastructure. CenturyLink brought a large business network and an established telecom customer base. AppFog added a higher layer: tools oriented toward developers building and deploying applications. The strategic logic was to offer more than connectivity and computing capacity by linking infrastructure to application workflows.
That distinction mattered in a crowded 2013 market. Companies such as Dell were buying cloud-management capabilities, while Enstratius and RightScale were associated more with orchestration across infrastructure services. AppFog’s pitch was closer to application deployment and developer productivity. It was not simply another control panel for managing virtual machines. Contemporary context appears in InfoWorld’s report on the deal.
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CenturyLink said combining AppFog’s PaaS with Savvis infrastructure and its own network would help developers operate and connect applications more securely and reliably. That was the company’s rationale, not independent evidence that the acquisition produced measurable improvements in security, reliability or business results.
AppFog’s reported scale—and what the figures mean
CenturyLink and contemporaneous coverage said AppFog had more than 100,000 users or developers and more than 150,000 applications deployed. Sources do not use the same label for the first figure, so it should not be read as a verified count of paying customers. The acquisition price was not disclosed, making it impossible to assess the transaction’s valuation or return from the public figures alone. These numbers and the deal terms were reported by Data Center Knowledge and InfoWorld.
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What CenturyLink said customers could expect
CenturyLink planned to keep AppFog available as a public-cloud offering through Savvisdirect and to make private or dedicated deployments available for enterprise customers. The arrangement was intended to serve both developers seeking self-service deployment and organizations wanting a more controlled environment tied to Savvis services.
Those were plans announced in 2013, not proof of long-term availability or evidence that every customer received a particular migration path, runtime, service-level commitment or price. A multicloud platform could give developers flexibility, while a telecom owner might also have an incentive to steer workloads toward its own infrastructure. The acquisition announcement does not establish how that tension played out for AppFog users.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.The more consequential turn: CenturyLink acquired Tier 3
Five months later, on November 19, 2013, CenturyLink announced its acquisition of cloud-platform company Tier 3. CenturyLink said Tier 3’s products, roadmap and vision would form the foundation of CenturyLink Cloud. The later platform was described as including public multi-tenant cloud, self-service management, a web-services API and a Cloud Foundry-based PaaS. See CenturyLink’s Tier 3 announcement and its CenturyLink Cloud release.
This sequence is why AppFog should not be described as the established foundation of CenturyLink Cloud. AppFog filled a PaaS gap in the June strategy; the November Tier 3 deal provided the stated basis for the later branded cloud platform. The available announcements do not establish how much AppFog technology, staff or customer base carried into that later service.
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What can be said about AppFog’s legacy
The acquisition is best understood as one step in CenturyLink’s effort to move up the cloud stack, from network and infrastructure services toward developer platforms and application services. The strategic benefits—developer reach, a higher-value service layer and options for enterprise deployment—were plausible aims, but the deal announcements do not quantify resulting revenue, adoption or performance.
Nor do the sources establish a complete product-disposition timeline: they do not show that AppFog was shut down on a particular date, fully absorbed into Tier 3, or that all its customers were migrated. Lumen’s current portal information refers to CTL.io for managing cloud applications and services, but does not verify that the original AppFog product remains available as a standalone service. CenturyLink’s parent is now Lumen Technologies; its 2026 corporate context is described in Lumen’s announcement on its consumer-fiber sale.
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