I have no affiliation with AppHarbor, but I do know a lot about Azure. I don't think it's really the best choice for running a platform like this, so I doubt they are using it. It's more of a greenfield platform because while you certainly can run legacy apps on it, in order to fully take advantage of the platform you have to design for it. For example. SQL Azure is a subset of what SQL Server 2008 R2 offers, so while if you use something like NHibernate, your app's data access code may still work, you may find that you have a reporting query that uses a specialized T-SQL feature it doesn't work.
Our goal is to make people c# developers use the cloud. I do agree that a lot of c# developers doesn't use the cloud yet, but I don't see how that should keep Appharbor from becoming popular.
A more likely cause for the lack of cloud-hosted c# apps would probably be, that there aren't really any viable options for c# developers who wants their app hosted in the cloud (Azure isn't really the bee's knees, right?)
I'm currently stuck on a mix of shared hosting and VPS with my asp.net apps. I'm really keen to move to something simpler that also fits with my git-workflow. AppHarbor looks very promising and much simpler than Azure (hopefully cheaper too!)
Azure is expensive, but its getting better. They enabled full IIS in the latest 1.3 release. Now you can host multiple websites within a single WebRole and map subdomains to each site. Remote Desktop access and full admin rights removed many other restrictions as well.
SQL Azure still has the craziest pricing. $10/gb. Thats why we decided to go the 'NoSql' route and use Table Storage for everything possible.
I hope you have a nice roadmap of features planned. Like I mentioned in other comments, our company is completely hosted within Azure and would love to try out your service. But, I imagine that most companies like ours are going to need a lot more sophisticated 'cloud' services beyond IIS and SQL Server.
For example, how will you compete with Table and Blob Storage? Can I instantly turn up/down new nodes? Will you have caching?
We do and for now we'll be focusing on implementing rudimentary support for stuff everyone needs. To compete with Azure's Table/Blob storage I think a combination of S3 and SimpleDB (or an rdbms) would be the best option... Obviously we would like to make it as easy for people to get started with this as possible, so we'll probably end up wrapping it in some way convenient to our users - for now people should feel free to use these services directly from amazon.
The ability to instantly scale up/down is a feature at the core of our business and it will be available no later than our official launch.
Providing various caching options is also ranked highly on our feature list and will be available as an add-on (and paid) service.
I can imagine this being popular in the enterprise, especially if it supports other version control systems like subversion. I know many enterprise shops are researching cloud hosting for Java and .NET apps.
Comments
Interesting, but I doubt it will become that popular - lots of people use the cloud, lots of people use c# but the intersection isn't that high.
More than 35,000 startups are enrolled in Microsoft BizSpark (http://www.bizspark.com/About/Pages/Overview.aspx). Some of them are likely to be interested in web-hosting with simplified deployment. Also, Microsoft is building a PaaS (Windows Azure: http://www.microsoft.com/windowsazure/) which suggests that they think there is a market.
Disclaimer, I'm an AppHarbor co-founder.
I'm very interested in your project. Do you use Azure as backend or a custom server provisioning system (server core + iis 7 + a sql server hotel)?
I have no affiliation with AppHarbor, but I do know a lot about Azure. I don't think it's really the best choice for running a platform like this, so I doubt they are using it. It's more of a greenfield platform because while you certainly can run legacy apps on it, in order to fully take advantage of the platform you have to design for it. For example. SQL Azure is a subset of what SQL Server 2008 R2 offers, so while if you use something like NHibernate, your app's data access code may still work, you may find that you have a reporting query that uses a specialized T-SQL feature it doesn't work.
Right now we run on top of Amazon EC2 Windows Instances.
Our goal is to make people c# developers use the cloud. I do agree that a lot of c# developers doesn't use the cloud yet, but I don't see how that should keep Appharbor from becoming popular.
A more likely cause for the lack of cloud-hosted c# apps would probably be, that there aren't really any viable options for c# developers who wants their app hosted in the cloud (Azure isn't really the bee's knees, right?)
I'm currently stuck on a mix of shared hosting and VPS with my asp.net apps. I'm really keen to move to something simpler that also fits with my git-workflow. AppHarbor looks very promising and much simpler than Azure (hopefully cheaper too!)
Pricing is going to be a huge deciding factor.
Azure is expensive, but its getting better. They enabled full IIS in the latest 1.3 release. Now you can host multiple websites within a single WebRole and map subdomains to each site. Remote Desktop access and full admin rights removed many other restrictions as well.
SQL Azure still has the craziest pricing. $10/gb. Thats why we decided to go the 'NoSql' route and use Table Storage for everything possible.
I hope you have a nice roadmap of features planned. Like I mentioned in other comments, our company is completely hosted within Azure and would love to try out your service. But, I imagine that most companies like ours are going to need a lot more sophisticated 'cloud' services beyond IIS and SQL Server.
For example, how will you compete with Table and Blob Storage? Can I instantly turn up/down new nodes? Will you have caching?
We do and for now we'll be focusing on implementing rudimentary support for stuff everyone needs. To compete with Azure's Table/Blob storage I think a combination of S3 and SimpleDB (or an rdbms) would be the best option... Obviously we would like to make it as easy for people to get started with this as possible, so we'll probably end up wrapping it in some way convenient to our users - for now people should feel free to use these services directly from amazon.
The ability to instantly scale up/down is a feature at the core of our business and it will be available no later than our official launch.
Providing various caching options is also ranked highly on our feature list and will be available as an add-on (and paid) service.
I can imagine this being popular in the enterprise, especially if it supports other version control systems like subversion. I know many enterprise shops are researching cloud hosting for Java and .NET apps.
We're a .Net startup hosted in Windows Azure. Sure, we might be a minority but I'm excited to see .Net/IIS get some attention once in a while.