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Comment by cardmagic | Hacker News Reader

Note my bias: I am the founder of AppFog.com which deploys CloudFoundry to public clouds as a service.

"Heroku is Just Unix"

No. Heroku is not "Just Unix". This statement is completely 100% wrong. To claim that what Heroku or any other PaaS does is "just VPS" or "just Unix" is so far off. People vastly underestimate how difficult it is to run a PaaS and how much technology it takes to pull it off at scale.

I speak from experience, having built one PaaS from scratch and having used CloudFoundry to build a second one. The technology to get "just unix" into a fully managed, n-tier, scalable system is incredibly complex.

I have heard people complain that CloudFoundry is overly complex, but these people judge a piece of open source code that does something that for so long has been hidden behind the curtains. Heroku is at least as complex if not more so, you just never see that part of the equation because you don't have to.

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> "Heroku is Just Unix"

Well, I'll take the blame for this one. I often say this (in a positive light, which I believe is shared by the article) as someone who works at Heroku, and I think I said it to someone else (who had not used Heroku) while in the author's presence; other people might say this as well. The reason I say this is because a lot of people expect a lot of unique APIs or locked-in ways of doing things on Heroku, and it can be quite a while -- if ever -- before they find "heroku run bash" and sort of understand how little magic there is that they have to put in their application.

For some people, it makes the idea of getting on and off the platform less scary. I also happen to like that my local machine models the remote environment in broad strokes quite closely.

Heya! It's extremely awesome to see a comment from you. I've actually been wanting to play around with appfog since I first saw it several months back.

Anyhow--you're totally right. Heroku is definitely not 'just unix'. I really meant this in a different way than it may seem in the article. I was trying to get the point across that there's really no vendor lock-in, you can easily port your code back and fourth from a physical box or vps to Heroku, with almost no delay.

Thanks again! Incredibly awesome to actually talk with you ^^

I think the expression "just unix" is right - at the end of the day platforms like Heroku, CloudFoundry and dotCloud (since we're all plugging our respective platforms) expose an API to spawn and manage unix processes - the way EC2 exposes an API to spawn and manage servers.

It all boils down to the metaphor, and the language that supports it:

PaaS borrows from the Unix metaphor of deployment with primitives like processes, executables, virtual filesystems, sockets and stdout/stderr.

IaaS borrows from the hardware metaphor of deployment with primitives like images, block devices, OS installs, firewalling rules and load-balancers.

The premise of PaaS is that, in a large and growing number of cases, as a developer the Unix metaphor requires less of my time, it maps my day-to-day experience better (As fdr pointed out, the remote platform behaves the same, roughly, as my laptop), and I don't actually need control over the underlying hardware.

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