Looks like there's a huge opportunity in the .NET game...one of those providers looks amateurish and the other isn't even running yet. I would definitely pursue that if I didn't have my hands full.
How about another Heroku for Ruby? Could use some competition I think, and the market is already proven.<p>Seems like it should be straightforward replicate the functionality for a lower price and get a good percentage of the Heroku user base. Nothing really ties people to the platform. And the addon's should work with pretty much any EC2 based platform as a service.
I have evaluated a few of the these for PHP deployments recently, here are my thoughts (from comment on the article):<p>Cloudfront:
Pros: Best "Heroku" for PHP. Fair pricing. Deployment process is sort of similar to Heroku
Cons: Documentation is lacking, and in some cases flat out wrong. Lacking "heroku-y" polish. Customer support needs improvement (replies to questions/bug reports were a bit gruff).
Other: Have to use Mercurial (ability to use Git is documented, but wrong [see documentation in Cons])<p>Kodigen:
Pros: Lots of options. Good pricing.
Cons: Lots of options. Very complicated/busy UI. Have to use in-browser code editor. Hard to find relevant documentation.
Other: Probably more for hobbyists.<p>All in all - for intermediate or advanced developers - there isn't really much of an advantage to using one of the mentioned PaaS vs. FTP or scripted deployments (capistrano, etc.) to regular hosting.
All the Python ones other than GAE are in different beta stages. I hope one of them becomes as good as Heroku, Google would be incredibly tempted to buy something like that. GAE seems designed to assimilate apps into Google rather than to serve the needs of developers.
It's sad that one of the originals in the space that I worked at (Bungee Labs, <a href="http://www.bungeeconnect.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.bungeeconnect.com/</a>) couldn't quite make it work. They had an amazing technology but very poor customer development: up to the day they closed the doors, I don't think they could have identified their target customer beyond "developers".
I wish there was a Heroku for Drupal. Over the last three years I've learned how to twist that poor project into all sorts of fun shapes. Deploying it quickly and reliably on a new domain is a real pain in the butt though.
You can add to the list <a href="http://www.erbix.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.erbix.com/</a> (for server-side JavaScript). We're using RingoJS as an engine (you can go to <a href="http://www.erbix.com/documentation/overview/nodejs/" rel="nofollow">http://www.erbix.com/documentation/overview/nodejs/</a> for a comparison with NodeJS).<p>Disclaimer: I'm affiliated with the Erbix project.