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by aneth4 4858 days ago
That's certainly a consideration, but every PAAS is "unique" by definition. Something like Google Apps has more lock-in than others. Some like Heroku are attractive because they have features not available elsewhere that would take a lot of resources to reproduce.

We chose heroku and Rails for the reasons you suggest, and even tried to avoid major tie-ins to the platform. That doesn't mean it's trivial to move to another platform.
2 comments
okalex 4850 days ago
That's not entirely true. Cloud Foundry (the software) is an open-source platform that allows for compatibility across providers. You can see a list of compatible providers here, in addition to cloudfoundry.com: http://www.cloudfoundry.com/partners

Full disclosure: I work for AppFog, one of the providers listed.

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lsc 4857 days ago
> That's certainly a consideration, but every PAAS is "unique" by definition.

I don't see how this is true.

There is nothing about PaaS that says there can't be compatible competitors. Hell, there have been PHP shared hosting platforms that were very nearly identical between providers for a decade before anyone started saying PaaS, and really, the "Innovation" that made shared hosting PaaS lies in per-usage billing.

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