Heroku announces the availability of the commercial version of its new cloud hosting and deployment service. The multitenant Heroku platform is designed for Ruby and Rails applications.Heroku has announced the availability of
the commercial version of its new cloud hosting and deployment service.
Heroku's provisionless Web hosting service provides developers with an agile
platform for development, testing and production deployment of Web
applications, the company said.
Herokus multitenant platform is designed for applications written in the
popular Ruby programming language, and running on any Rack-compatible framework
such as Rails, Merb, Sinatra and others. The platform provides automated
end-to-end management and instant scaling.
A Heroku spokesman called the company a vigorous proponent of the Open
Cloud Manifesto.
Herokus service has been battle-tested during an extended beta period in
which over 25,000 Ruby apps have been deployed to the platform by more than
23,000 developers. By conservative estimates, this makes Herokus platform 10
times larger than the next most popular Ruby deployment provider.
We set out to fundamentally change the economics of application
development, and it appears to be working," said James Lindenbaum, Heroku
co-founder and CEO. "Heroku is
hands-down the most agile deployment environment available to Web app developers
today.
We've used Heroku to launch the back end of almost a dozen iPhone sites,
said Josh Stephenson, director of technology at RightSprite. They make the
system administration headache disappear for our deployments.
According to Stephenson, RightSprites application portfolio now exceeds 2
million iPhone users, and the Heroku platform scaled right along with their
needs. This has allowed us to own the trade-off of development budget versus
hosting power, with Heroku's hosting power being the frequent winner, he said.
According to Jonathan Siegel, founder of ELC
Technologies, Heroku's platform has been in our sights for some time, and
we've been amazed at the growth of business-level features on the platform. We
initially started using Heroku for a staging server pool and quickly realized
that the ease of scalable provisionless deployment was a great fit for many of
our clients growing production apps.
Siegel said ELC uses Heroku for most of
the company's internal projects, including a massive multiplayer online game
called Farlanders.com. To get the same quality of deployment and maintained
infrastructure, we would expect to allocate $5,000 per month for sysadmin and
deployment infrastructure," he said. "Heroku provides the same value
for a fraction of the cost of doing it ourselves.
Heroku charges users only for the resources they consume, while meeting the
needs of users of all levels, the company said. There are a variety of tiers to
accommodate customers, from large enterprises with large applications and
millions of unique hits per month down to entry-level users, the company said.
Prices range from thousands of dollars a month to less than $100, and the
platform includes a free offering great for testing the service and rapid
prototyping, Heroku officials said.
A summary of the features of the Heroku service, as well as complete pricing
information, can be accessed online at http://heroku.com/pricing.
Cloud Computing 
