What I love about heroku : super easy to deploy and maintain.
What I don't love about heroku : poor support, uptime and performance
I looked into AppFog, but it was not nearly customizable for my fairly intense Django app. I found too much of the configuration to be baked in.
On Heroku, I really like the ease of connecting third party services, and the fact that many of those services have free tiers. I love their New Relic pricing as well. I like that Foreman/Honcho make for a pretty awesome staging environment. What I don't like is the inability to directly connect to dynos.
So far, of the products I've tried, Heroku seems the closest to being fully baked, but it's still a ways away from hitting it out of the park. I'm really glad this question was brought up, even if it's quite frequently asked. There are so many players and the scene is so rapidly changing that information is constantly going out of date. It seems to me that what's really needed is some sort of ongoing comparison tool/site to track the whole PaaS scene.
FWIW you can do:
heroku run bash
I thought the point of Heroku was not having to SSH into your servers?
- Super easy deployment. Just as in Heroku you just do a git push and we take care of the rest. We also offer integrated setup for databases and file storage, so deployment of Ruby applications is even more streamlined than on Heroku.
- Super easy maintenance. We take care of monitoring, and broken processes and machines are replaced automatically. You also get logs and backups for free.
- Great support. We're Ruby programmers ourselves and we're easily approachable. Even if you're not our client feel free to visit our Campfire room at http://support.shellycloud.com/ . We help with deployment to our platform and day to day usage problems for free.
- Highly reliable architecture. We offer components (like mongo replica sets) that allow you to create applications with very high uptime.
- Great performance. In our model you get something comparable to an EC2 instance, so even our "small" server gets you much more power (and RAM space) than a Heroku dyno.
I hope that this at least piqued your interest. Feel free to ask questions, I'd be glad to answer them.
The best thing about AWS Elastic Beanstalk is you can still login into the machine in case you need to troubleshoot for some low level stuffs.
I'd like to think that Elastic Beanstalk is Amazon's answer to Heroku
Your "not loves" don't ring true for me though- perhaps you'd like to elaborate there?
I've been running production apps on Heroku for more than 2 years now, and there has only been one occasion where their uptime impacted the apps' availability. Even during Hurricane Sandy, my apps were up 24/7, so it's hard to understand your comment.
Yes, they do have non-critical issues at times (their API goes through brief, but not infrequent periods of instability)... but this only impacts your ability to deploy/manage an app, not the app's actual uptime.
Uses git just like Heroku. Has a similar "dyno" concept but calls them gears. Has a free developer version.
Don't know about support today, but the people I talked to from the team were incredibly helpful.
It scales automaticaly, analyzing the resource you need on your server, and you only pay what you use, like electricity.
It supports actually PHP, Scala, Ruby, Java, Node JS, and it's still upgrading. Also they have deployed PostgreSQL, MySQL, CouchBase and they are working on MongoDB integration, and ElasticSearch as well.
This company is pretty young, so they have a good support, as they care for their customer. I don't hesitate to send them an email and then give a call, or to tweet their account. Usually I get an answer under 2 hours.
Short story: I used to work with Play 2.0 and MongoDB, and had several issues on Heroku because of a problem on their side with the MongoDB driver. They didn't help in 3 days. With Clever-Cloud, everything worked perfectly, and they even helped me to deploy my app the first time. I immediately migrated my apps from Heroku, no regrets since.
Maybe because it's French eheh. We don't have the same politics to go global!
For their pricing page, you buy Drops, which is like fuel for your car. They offer a better documentation here: http://doc.clever-cloud.com/pricing/ It will go from $600 (classical apps) to $2400 (huge apps) a year.
They designed their offer to be cheaper than AWS with same or better performances.
measuring is always better than estimating :)
They helped me by setting up a Capistrano script for me that I run alongside my Heroku pushes. They set up the entire stack according to a specification I talked them through. And they helped me write a script to keep my backup DB in line with my production DB (Heroku Postgres). It's not nearly as quick as provisioning a Heroku app yourself, but if you can spare the week it took to get all that put together with just a little hands-on work, it's not bad.
Overall good experience, good support, if a little slow to respond, but I think mainly because they had one engineer working my case for the entire process, who I'm sure was also working with other customers. But having that 1:1 relationship is good, too. Tradeoffs.
I agree with grrrando, there were a few instances of slow responses during setup, but I also agree thats because you're talking to an individual in that case, rather than a support team.
Two of my favorite things about Blue Box: 1) On the first sales call they had a knowledgeable engineer that discussed the specifics of our app. 2) With their online chat I get answers from an engineer within minutes, even on nights or weekends (they have phone support too, I prefer chat)
We're also really happy about Dotcloud open-sourcing hipache and docker, and it seems like at least some sort of quasi-standardized PaaS-stack is in the near future, in the same way that you can shop around for LAMP hosts.
You can use the Datastore for NoSQL data, or connect with CloudSQL if you want to use a traditional MySQL database. It's quite forgiving when it comes to mistakes; and GAE will automatically spin up new instances as traffic warrants. (No need to manually add/remove dynos).
I know people have had problems with support, but at the same point I understand that if you pay the ($500/year?) for Premium support that the team is really responsive.
For me, as a very novice developer, I had enough on my plate building my app. It was nice to leave ALL of the sysadmin work to App Engine...
http://www.opdemand.com/docs/ruby-on-rails-quick-start-guide...
The stack automatically provisions, monitors and maintains an ELB, EC2 Instance(s), RDS and all the networking and key pair infrastructure you need. Most Heroku apps don't even need to be modified due to OpDemand's use Procfiles and standard dependency management. Deployment automation is all open-source Puppet hosted on GitHub.
Meteor support is coming next week, and Rails will follow shortly.
(Disclaimer: I do work at Stackful.io)
Does Stackful offer the hard drive to use as we please? If so, you just got yourself a customer. (As soon as you support Rails)
The $8 plan, for example, offers 20 GB SSD storage, and this includes files and database.
You can sign up, so we can notify you when Rails support is ready.
They also support Heroku's buildpack API and compared to Heroku, they have a lot of support options.
The biggest caveat is that you don't get integrated no-fuss horizontal scaling the way you do with their MySQL and MongoDB products.
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I've been experimenting with Cloud66. Currently everything I have is on heroku. I'm going to be moving a few things over to cloud66.
It's definitely a little bit more work, but once you get over the learning curve and have your manifest/post-deploy hooks setup correctly... It's pretty much auto pilot. Scaling and deployment are a breeze.
I'm running it with digitalocean. Going to be saving a lot of $$.
My favorite part is running my own redis and memcached. No more need for expensive add-ons.