Our public shared tier (Heroku-like offering) is on AWS for now - but we have a few advantages in that we can run reserved spot instances and use far less overhead than we would with virtual machines. We will more than likely move this to dedicated hardware eventually since we use almost nothing AWS has to offer other than compute, network and NVMe. Our free tier is better than AWS's ever will be, because although we might offer fewer resources (CPU/memory), our offer is automatically highly-available out of the box, and you share a server with _much_ better network and diskIO than AWS can offer, which means different but typically similar performance. We also don't up charge for services like Postgres and Redis (they use the same resources as any other "app" or container). Also we have an open API (kubernetes!) you can use on your laptop or dedicated gear!
But the more important "no in practice" is for companies who offer some value add - say for example Intragram wanted to allow you to run some code that manipulated your images server-side (or more realistically, think PagerDuty allowing custom web-hooks from their servers based on code you write on their site). Hopefully one day large companies that need a public cloud but cannot use Amazon for Reasons(tm) also see us as an option as well.
One final "no in practice" is due to our tool's ultimate goal to be to nicely encourage developers to build cloud native apps - and we believe high-available applications are actually "cheaper" than commodity-priced single-point-of-failure applications. See any website you use your credit card on that crashes all the time.
I'd like to think of it as "isn't this just a better Heroku?" instead of a more expensive AWS :P
Our public shared tier (Heroku-like offering) is on AWS for now - but we have a few advantages in that we can run reserved spot instances and use far less overhead than we would with virtual machines. We will more than likely move this to dedicated hardware eventually since we use almost nothing AWS has to offer other than compute, network and NVMe. Our free tier is better than AWS's ever will be, because although we might offer fewer resources (CPU/memory), our offer is automatically highly-available out of the box, and you share a server with _much_ better network and diskIO than AWS can offer, which means different but typically similar performance. We also don't up charge for services like Postgres and Redis (they use the same resources as any other "app" or container). Also we have an open API (kubernetes!) you can use on your laptop or dedicated gear!
But the more important "no in practice" is for companies who offer some value add - say for example Intragram wanted to allow you to run some code that manipulated your images server-side (or more realistically, think PagerDuty allowing custom web-hooks from their servers based on code you write on their site). Hopefully one day large companies that need a public cloud but cannot use Amazon for Reasons(tm) also see us as an option as well.
One final "no in practice" is due to our tool's ultimate goal to be to nicely encourage developers to build cloud native apps - and we believe high-available applications are actually "cheaper" than commodity-priced single-point-of-failure applications. See any website you use your credit card on that crashes all the time.
I'd like to think of it as "isn't this just a better Heroku?" instead of a more expensive AWS :P