I made a similar comment the first time I heard about these guys. We're a .Net based startup currently hosted in Azure and was really excited to learn about AppHarbor. But like you mentioned, there are some other very valuable services in Azure such as SQL Azure which still seem to make it much more attractive.
We committed ourselves to the Azure platform because we also needed things like Table Storage and Message Queues. I'm not quite sure what their road-map looks like, but before claiming to be 'Azure done right' I'd like to see some tips on how I would run my Azure app within their service.
I have to also admit that the GIT stuff basically prevents me from actually being able to play around with it right now.
One of the things we'd like with AppHarbor is to endorse best practices. This means that you'll probably not be able to run your Azure application in AppHarbor without modifications. This is not due to special requirements for AppHarbor, but because Azure requires special code. On the other hand, you are able to create a template ASP.NET MVC application and push it directly.
Another thing is that we will never provide the full range of Microsoft solutions. Microsoft already does that. Our edge is that we can offer more than just Microsoft products, and as we're running in EC2, there's a whole range of providers offering additional value as well.
For instance, we're going to support memcached, because it's industry standard. Microsoft will support Velocity, because that's what they make. I think this is a substantial and important difference.
To sum it up, we're going to support file storage, message queues and what you need to build a scalable web application. Some may be the Microsoft flavor, and other may not.
Hmm, being on EC2, are you going to provide access to SimpleDB, S3, SQS, and SNS? Seems to me that would bring it pretty close to Azure's feature list.
I honestly doubt that the various Git-knocking commenters on this story have any real experience using Git on Windows. They are likely just parroting what they have heard about the early days of Git on Windows.
All of my Windows work during 2010 used Git and it was perfectly fine. The only thing that even comes to mind is that there was a tiny bit more effort with initial setup of SSH than on other platforms.
We committed ourselves to the Azure platform because we also needed things like Table Storage and Message Queues. I'm not quite sure what their road-map looks like, but before claiming to be 'Azure done right' I'd like to see some tips on how I would run my Azure app within their service.
I have to also admit that the GIT stuff basically prevents me from actually being able to play around with it right now.