AppHarbor (YC W11): "Azure Done Right"

As a fan of Heroku and Git I love seeing this and other efforts to duplicate their ease of deployment and process for .NET developers.<p>However, I question whether there is enough of a market for these services to be truly successful. There are plenty of .NET developers using Git - but for the most part many of them are just now getting to Subversion - or even worse going with TFS (Microsoft's mess of a SCM). MS developers are also traditionally inside medium to large companies - the majority of which want their applications hosted in their own data centers. MS might be able to convince them to use Azure - but a small startup is going to have one helluva time convincing them to host their LOB app with them.

Seems like a winning strategy to take a popular language/framework and make it incredibly simple and easy to deploy. As long as you have a very strong technical team I think this will be a successful YC exit every time. Either it can get huge due to great marketing, or the technology will be desperately sought after by larger hosting companies.

Why would you use Git on Windows instead of Mercurial?<p>Also, it seems to me that SQL Azure alone may be worth using Azure instead.<p>Disclaimer: I was an intern in the Microsoft SQL server group last year. Since I'm normally a POSIX kernel developer the rest of Azure was only mediumly interesting, but it seems like SQL Server is one of the really strong advantages of the Azure platform.

This seems like a pretty cool service for those of us who prefer .Net and want cool things like everyone else gets.

We're using Azure heavily for Socialblaze.<p>At first this seemed great, but for us to even consider switching we would need to know a few things:<p>- How backups work - How does well does it scale - How is the MsSQL organized, shared db with thousands of users? - SSL is a must - Can't run any real web app without services, background processes - Pricing (bandwith, storage, etc.)

I'm doing some very light work with .NET and am using AppHarbor right now. So far it's been fantastic.<p>I wouldn't go so far to say that I'd choose it over Heroku or other stacks.

Anybody knows if AppHarbor is using Windows based servers or Linux+Mono?

This is great. I think a good payoff for all the work they've put in would come from acquisition by microsoft instead of selling this as a service to customers.<p>Probably that's exactly what is on their mind.

Very cool. It will be interesting to see how successful AppHarbor can be without first establishing a competitor to Azure Appfabric.The service bus and access control inherit in Appfabric makes cloud computing palatable for enterprise companies.

The problem for them of course is they've chosen a dying platform. Microsoft's operating systems, mobile toolkit, and their entire technology stack as a whole is coming to a dead end. I have never met a developer younger than myself who uses any of Microsoft's technologies to build anything, and I don't see this ever changing.

What makes me mad about Azure is that they support PHP but not Asp "Classic". I might try it, if it supported my favorite technology.

They lost 95% of the .NET developers. There's a command line involved.