Ruby Clouds: Engine Yard Vs. Heroku
snydeq writes "InfoWorld's Andrew Glover provides an in-depth comparison of Engine Yard and Heroku, two cloud-based, platform-as-a-service offerings for Ruby development. 'To put it simply, Heroku will appeal more to developers and Engine Yard will appeal to operations folks. Consequently, when evaluating the two platforms, one's choice usually comes down to what's more important: Heroku's rapid deployment via a hands-off infrastructure, or Engine Yard's total control over all aspects of application deployment, provisioning, and monitoring.'"
I love Heroku's approach to offering a base tier for free. It makes it really simple of throw up a quick app at no cost (four or file commands) and it's dead easy to scale. It's expensive compared to self-hosting though (obviously) and there are some restrictions that chafe a bit now and then, but it's pretty cool!
While I am a fan of both of these services, I really enjoy using openshift more. OpenShift is completely free and supports ruby, python, perl, java, and PHP.
For those who don't know, OpenShift is Red Hat's free platform as a service all running on top of RHEL.
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