cloud computing

heroku Heroku, who we previously covered here and here, offers quick and easy Ruby hosting. Today their service came out of beta, with a commercial, paid version of it’s service. Web developers can focus on development, leaving deployment, hosting and scaling of the application to Heroku. Meant to provide affordable services which easily scale, packages start around $36/month. As the popularity of an application increase, Heroku can match demand, allowing developers to start small but scale up on the same platform.

Developers can customize their hosting by choosing database performance and size, http performance, and add-ons. Databases start with 5MB of storage for free and run up to 20 compute units and 2 TB of storage for $1600. Http performance, which Heroku calls dynos, representing one process of an application, and are priced by hour starting at 1 dyno for free and 40 dynos for $1.95/hour. There are recommended amounts of dynos for each type of database, starting at 2 for the smallest, free version. Add-ons include additional backups or crons (some are included), with wildcard domains and delayed jobs in beta, and memcaching, workling, and AMQP planned soon.

More coverage:

Heroku to Exit Beta, Start Charging for Cloud Computing (GigaOM)
Commerical Launch (Heroku)

Technorati Tags: heroku, rails, ruby on rails, ror, rails hosting, internet consulting

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Robert Dempsey has an excellent talk up on Confreaks where he looks at the Ruby language accessing Cloud computing. As Robert knows, Standard Operating Procedure for a high level talk is to define the terms for the audience. For this group the term ‘Ruby’ was a given, so he wisely focused on the Cloud. Lemme recap what he lists as NOT being a Cloud if…

You cannot buy it with your personal credit card
They are trying to sell you hardware
There is no API
You need to rearchitect your system for it
it takes more than 10 minutes to provision
you need to specify the number of machines you want up front
you own all the hardware

This, in my opinion, is an excellent primer for evaluating that ‘Try our new Cloud Computing Service’ pitch your VAR is feeding you. I can only add one point of my own, as in my mind it is not Cloud Computing if…

The the business model hinges on lock-in

Value Added Networks (VANs) can have a cloud-like smell to them when they branch beyond simple traffic passing and on into backend processing, but I have difficulty reconciling the lock-in potential. If you cannot shift your system to a new Cloud provider easily, then I believe you are dealing with an entirely different animal. Buyer Be Ware.