
AppHarbor (YC W11): "Azure Done Right" - troethom
http://techcrunch.com/2011/01/20/yc-funded-appharbor-a-heroku-for-net-or-azure-done-right/
======
javery
As a fan of Heroku and Git I love seeing this and other efforts to duplicate
their ease of deployment and process for .NET developers.

However, I question whether there is enough of a market for these services to
be truly successful. There are plenty of .NET developers using Git - but for
the most part many of them are just now getting to Subversion - or even worse
going with TFS (Microsoft's mess of a SCM). MS developers are also
traditionally inside medium to large companies - the majority of which want
their applications hosted in their own data centers. MS might be able to
convince them to use Azure - but a small startup is going to have one helluva
time convincing them to host their LOB app with them.

~~~
jcromartie
Exactly. The .NET "community" is home to mostly enterprise devs who only ever
code to pay the bills. Any developer that is hip to Herkou, and loves Git and
automated testing and deployment, is not going to be starting a new .NET app.
They'll start an app in Ruby, Python, Clojure, Haskell or Smalltalk (or
something).

I'm only speaking from experience here. It's just not a community of tinkerers
that's on the cutting edge. I can't think of a single exciting .NET open
source project. All of the good stuff that I know of in .NET is commercial:
Stack Overflow, Unity, umm... anything else? It's a community that waits for
the next thing to be handed down from Microsoft.

Show me Heroku for Seaside... now we're talking!

P.S. If anybody wants to show me some vibrant cutting-edge open source
projects built on .NET instead of just downvoting, I'd love to know. Thanks!

~~~
daeken
I very frequently start new .NET apps, and I by no means "only ever code to
pay the bills" (in fact, I don't work as a programmer at all anymore). Here's
a list of a few interesting .NET projects: <http://easyhook.codeplex.com/>
<http://ccimetadata.codeplex.com/> <http://www.mono-project.com/Cecil>
<http://daeken.com/renraku-future-os>
<http://www.assembla.com/wiki/show/nethooker>
<https://github.com/daeken/Dotpack> (The latter three are mine, so I'm a bit
biased there)

The .NET community may not have the number of hobbyist developers that Ruby,
Python, et al have, but we do exist.

------
meterplech
Seems like a winning strategy to take a popular language/framework and make it
incredibly simple and easy to deploy. As long as you have a very strong
technical team I think this will be a successful YC exit every time. Either it
can get huge due to great marketing, or the technology will be desperately
sought after by larger hosting companies.

------
Locke1689
Why would you use Git on Windows instead of Mercurial?

Also, it seems to me that SQL Azure alone may be worth using Azure instead.

Disclaimer: I was an intern in the Microsoft SQL server group last year. Since
I'm normally a POSIX kernel developer the rest of Azure was only mediumly
interesting, but it seems like SQL Server is one of the really strong
advantages of the Azure platform.

~~~
vyrotek
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.

~~~
troethom
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.

~~~
DennisP
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.

------
jswinghammer
This seems like a pretty cool service for those of us who prefer .Net and want
cool things like everyone else gets.

~~~
viggity
I kind of have to take exception to that. .Net is a phenomenal platform to
develop for and has plenty of cool things to work with (including Silverlight
and WPF). Everyone I talk to that has tried to do Android development and WP7
development comments on how much nicer and easier WP7 is to work with. And I
call ease of use and eye candy pretty "cool".

~~~
nkohari
Now you just need some people to actually buy WP7 phones.

------
rksprst
We're using Azure heavily for Socialblaze.

At first this seemed great, but for us to even consider switching we would
need to know a few things:

\- How backups work \- How does well does it scale \- How is the MsSQL
organized, shared db with thousands of users? \- SSL is a must \- Can't run
any real web app without services, background processes \- Pricing (bandwith,
storage, etc.)

------
bjtitus
I'm doing some very light work with .NET and am using AppHarbor right now. So
far it's been fantastic.

I wouldn't go so far to say that I'd choose it over Heroku or other stacks.

~~~
trezor
Since you're obviously happy with the setup, I'm curious about what specific
setup you used for git in Windows. Last time I tried it, it was (literally) a
cluster-fuck which completely set me off git.

Do you just use cygwin'd git wrappers? Do you use any additional tools? Any
advice would be appreciated as I'd love to try this service out on its own
merits (and not biased by git's lacking merits in a Windows environment).

~~~
troethom
One of the things we do to make it easier is our support for basic
authentication when pushing. This removes any requirement for getting SSH to
work on Windows, which is usually the issue you'll run into.

~~~
trezor
Thanks for the reply. That sounds great and should definitely address one of
my two major problems with git on Windows.

The second one (with \'s vs /'s in paths) can iirc be fixed with some simple
bash aliases for the git-console, so it should probably work out.

Looking forward to try the service out :)

~~~
johns
A bigger problem is newline handling, which no one can seem to agree on.

------
zvikara
Anybody knows if AppHarbor is using Windows based servers or Linux+Mono?

~~~
runesoerensen
The application and build servers are Windows based

------
elvirs
This is great. I think a good payoff for all the work they've put in would
come from acquisition by microsoft instead of selling this as a service to
customers.

Probably that's exactly what is on their mind.

~~~
jswinghammer
Why would Microsoft buy them? I'd imagine someone else in the space would be
interested in adding MS support to what they offer.

~~~
elvirs
may be to make Azure and other cloud products/services better.

------
chwolfe
Very cool. It will be interesting to see how successful AppHarbor can be
without first establishing a competitor to Azure Appfabric.The service bus and
access control inherit in Appfabric makes cloud computing palatable for
enterprise companies.

------
dstein
The problem for them of course is they've chosen a dying platform. Microsoft's
operating systems, mobile toolkit, and their entire technology stack as a
whole is coming to a dead end. I have never met a developer younger than
myself who uses any of Microsoft's technologies to build anything, and I don't
see this ever changing.

~~~
vyrotek
Ah yes, because you've never met anyone then that must mean its dead. I'm
curious, how old are you? I'm 26 and working full time on a company I founded
running completely on .Net and Azure.

~~~
dstein
Well I'm older than you are. And I didn't say it's dead. I said it's a dead
end. Microsoft's dominance has absolutely been on the down slope for the past
decade, and this time they will not recover. Your business will succeed if it
does not depend on the particular technology stack you've chosen (eg a retail
site). But for a hosting company that is dependent on the technology stack
growing in popularity, Microsoft's stack is absolutely the poorest choice of
all available programming systems to build a cloud hosting service.

~~~
NetMonkey
Could you give some examples of why Microsoft's stack is so bad and which ones
are better?

I often see these things thrown around but very seldomly with any good
examples. We use Visual Studio + .NET + MSSql/SqlAzure and from time to time I
take a look at what else is out there but I have a hard time seeing how any of
it could make us more productive.

~~~
arethuza
Well, one example that recently irritated me terribly is the performance of
VS2010 - on this laptop I'm using at the moment (which is a perfectly decent
machine and runs VS2008 perfectly well) it just _doesn't_ run acceptably. The
OS has been rebuilt and just about every tweak possible has been applied -
even a quick Google search shows that I'm not the only one having this
problem.

Now in the past I've used a lot of different development tools and in those
cases there is a loose coupling between things like editors (e.g. emacs, vi)
and a particular development platform. Now I rather like VS and C# - but the
prospect of buying completely new hardware (work and home) just to make up for
deficiencies in Microsoft's tools is driving me crazy.

With .Net you really _do_ have to use Visual Studio - if you don't then you
probably have lost 70% of the benefits of the platform. If I was to move
(actually move back) to using emacs or something as my main editor I might as
well move completely to JavaScript, CouchDB and node.js - which was a
direction I was moving in anyway for my own projects.

~~~
NetMonkey
It's a fair point, but I think that has mainly to do with the developers
Microsoft are targeting. Buying new hardware every two years costs next to
nothing compared to the salary of developers almost anywhere in the world.

~~~
arethuza
Of course, having to buy hardware isn't a huge problem, but it is just an
example of a growing feeling that I've had with using a Microsoft stack - that
you are completely dependent on the whims of one supplier and if they do
something that causes you grief you really have _no_ choice.

~~~
eftpotrm
Agreed.

However, I find myself tripping up because I'm using the wrong language's
syntax or intricacies of library functions often enough with the portfolio of
languages I work with already.

I need to know .Net for work. The idea of adding yet more platforms and more
variations on the same theme just to be able to play doesn't appeal.

------
gscott
What makes me mad about Azure is that they support PHP but not Asp "Classic".
I might try it, if it supported my favorite technology.

~~~
nkohari
Why in the world would they support a 10+ year old technology that's been
replaced by a technology (ASP.NET WebForms) that's now also widely considered
outdated?

~~~
gscott
Because there is a customer base who would pay for that. I pay $350 a month
for a 1/4th rack colocation space and 15mbps bandwidth. If there was a
comparable and compatable "cloud" option I might consider it.

------
mgutz
They lost 95% of the .NET developers. There's a command line involved.

