[msmith]

OP has a good point about deployment. DevOps tools have made huge strides in the last few years and it's feasible to build something that approaches the convenience of Heroku's fully-managed deployment pipeline, but that's not the only value that a PaaS provides.

You really shouldn't underestimate the amount of work that it takes just to keep a product running. For example, dealing with hardware & network failures, maintaining data backups, keeping up with OS-level security, & scaling up. That's a huge part of the value that Heroku provides for us.

[ghempton]

The deployment pipeline is a small portion of it. Even capistrano can provide the same.

The problems you describe are definitely real and non-trivial, but Chef helps with this.

Heroku is also not a silver bullet for scaling up.