[mr_luc]

Convox and Otto are occupying similar spaces (with Empire being vaguely similar). Otto has the immutable infrastructure powers of Terraform to fall back on, (not to mention Consul, Vault and Packer), and at v0.0.1 already supports deploying apps to clouds other than Amazon (and has as lower fixed cost for deploying simple apps, because apps using the simple recipe don't need private registries etc, so the only real non-app fixed cost in the simple case is storage of built AMIs).

However, Convox is built to do something considerably more focused, and doesn't have to worry about eg its infrastructure setup bits being usable as a separate product yet ... and it shows in the sophistication of what they've put together in such a short time, like the Postgresql, Redis and Papertrail services. Likewise, though Otto is slated to integrate with Nomad (for containers as a deployment unit), it doesn't yet, and only supports AMIs.

Who wins? We do! I am very, very happy that there's such active innovation happening in this space.