Heroku vs. DotCloud vs. Duostack vs. other cloud / PaaS providers (Rails and non-Rails)?

Question

We have a very simple function (we look at something from a third-party database and return the answer. These are literally five lines of code.) We would like to unload this task from our main server, because we expect a lot of traffic for this function and would like to optimize it.

We are thinking about testing the promises of many cloud / PaaS providers where they perform scalability and performance tasks.

We are most interested in Rails environments, but you are curious to hear about other things about any company in space.

Here are the PaaS companies we discovered that support Rails:

1) Heroku 2) DotCloud 3) Duostack

Questions:

1) Do you know about other companies specializing in Rails? Also feel free to list non-Rails companies, as we are interested in keeping track of other companies if they ultimately provide Rails support.

2) How was your experience with these companies?

Answer 1

Foreword and Disclaimer: I work for DotCloud; therefore, the following may be biased. You have been warned.

DotCloud may be interesting for you if you like the following features:

• run something else than Ruby (how about some Django or Pylons code that speaks from your SQL database? Or even some PHP blog like WordPress or Drupal using the same user authentication database?)
• an experiment with databases such as Redis or MongoDB, or background ruby ​​workers without paying for add-ons
• SSH access, crontab access (no need to add)
• cheaper workers (I didn’t come up with this, some of our users from the Heroku world told us that workers there are insanely expensive).

Duostack is really very nice if you just want to combine Rails and Node.js. I was told that they have great auto-tuning capabilities.

Finally, if you plan on doing Rails and nothing more, you can also stick with Heroku , as they have been in this business for a while and are probably more mature than the first two games.

Shameless plug-in: DotCloud offers beta test drive; therefore, if you want to see how it looks, just subscribe to the beta version and you can quickly see for yourself. Heroku also has a free level.

Answer 2

You can add EngineYard to the mix, but I would be inclined to use Heroku as my first choice, Dotcloud second (this is a new product and is very good, but still under development)

Answer 3

If you want more control over your application / server or want to run it in any cloud or your own infrastructure without having to download / deploy anything, you can try Cloud 66 ( www.cloud66.com )

Disclaimer: I work for Cloud 66

Answer 4

Just stumbled upon a question. There are similar ones. The problem is also that the PaaS scene is changing very fast. New sellers appear every week or so.

Currently, OpenShift from Red Hat can also be referred to here as Ruby PaaS.

OFFTOPIC + shameless plugin: I compiled a list of PHP PaaS here: http://blog.fortrabbit.com/comparing-cloud-hosting-platforms/

Answer 5

A lot has changed on stage since this question was asked. We recently studied these services and settled on Heroku, but more recently we decided to continue to manage our own deployments directly on EC2. Here are some points not mentioned in other answers.

Heroku

• Now much more is supported than just ruby
• Great PostgreSQL Support
• Uses LXC for process containers such as DotCloud

Dotcloud

• Now Docker and invests a lot of manpower in the development of docker.io
• No more free tier

I'm not sure if DotCloud uses Docker internally or not, as the docs say explicitly that it is not ready for production yet.

Our decision to stick to simple EC2 was motivated by the fact that it is cheaper and provides much greater flexibility. For example, we use only local HTTP servers behind our public server to perform some of our request processing, which does not actually fit into the PaaS model. We would have to reorient all our back-end components as redis workers and pay for them as additional dinosaurs. The fact that Amazon RDS now supports PostgreSQL is also a compelling factor. By the way, Amazon also offers a complete PaaS package, Elastic Beanstalk .