[jeffb]

stackoverflow said: "There’s also the 30 minute deploy cycle." ... "It is important to note that these issues are by no means specific to Azure; similar teething issues affect other Platform-As-A-Service providers such as Google App Engine and Heroku"

Deployment on Heroku takes seconds in my experience. Certainly not 30 minutes!

Also, db backups on Heroku are easy. And if you don't want to use Heroku's built-in PostgreSQL db, it's easy to use Amazon's RDS instead.

It seems strange to imply that Heroku currently has the same problems they attribute to Azure.

[patio11]

I think the claim is that PAAS has tradeoffs which you make versus "as simple as dedicated" host-it-yerself, which is true in my experience.

Heroku is wonderful, don't get me wrong, but it is not all "I don't know anything about sysadminning and now I don't have too, git push origin deploy OK now I can go back to making rounded corners and drop shadows" peaches and cream. I have a client product on it. Half of the gems/plugins that I used required me to either hack the source or do some deep spelunking to find out why they aren't working. For example, I used TinyMCE editor for that nice Wordpress-esque WYSIWYG feel. TinyMCE is written in Javascript, and the configurations for the plugin causes the Javascript to be written out on first access. Heroku is not quite so happy when you try to write things to the hard drive, and died hard on that.

This was for a site which is pretty darn pedestrian as far as Rails projects go.

[steveklabnik]

I have always felt that Heroku's constraints are good for you, though. Yeah, it might be mildly annoying at times, but you really _should_ be putting static content on a CDN, and not have long-running processes, etc.

I also have yet to have a gem blow up in my face, though.