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You can basically do anything you want on heroku because they allow custom buildpacks. You could make your own buildpack that vendors in node.js and your tool and builds at deploy time. Here's a heroku doc article all about it: https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/buildpacks

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Thanks for the correction, I didn't read the docs carefully. Buildpack's a better idea than building stuff locally. This makes slightly steeper learning curve the only weakness of Heroku compared to Ep.io.

No problem. They don't actually talk about buildpacks all that much but I see it as the major differentiating feature on Heroku.

One thing you may be interested in is heroku-buildpack-multi[1] which lets you run multiple buildpacks. You could theoretically use this to include the standard Python and Node.js buildpacks plus a small custom one that just installs and runs Brunch.

[1]: https://github.com/ddollar/heroku-buildpack-multi

dotCloud has a comparable system called custom services. In addition to a custom build script you can also allocate arbitrary custom network ports (tcp/udp/http/websockets), as well as custom system packages.

I definitely agree with other comments in this thread that paas and orchestrated-iaas are on a collision course. Exciting times!

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