A screenshot of the pricing page for the Heroku Ruby on Rails development environment and cloud hosting platform.
(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — Heroku (www.heroku.com), a project that has been in beta for months, launched today, offering an in-browser Ruby on Rails development environment and an associated cloud-based hosting service.
The product is a multi-tenant development environment, built in Ruby on top of the Amazon cloud platform. The company reportedly says it hopes the offering will compete with the Google App Engine platform.
According to a report on InfoWorld, the project has been in beta for a year, and has attracted 25,000 applications, according to its developers. Heroku reportedly supports enterprise applications, along with Web 2.0 applications and hobbyist projects.
Code pushed to the service is compiled into read-only “slugs,” which are then hosted on sections of the infrastructure grid known as “dynos.” A more exhaustive description of the architecture at work is available on the Heroku website.
Pricing is dependent on a variety of factors. Users can customize an architecture on the Heroku pricing page, and immediately generate pricing for their custom implementation.
According to the InfoWorld report, a typical enterprise deployment might run between $5,000 and $10,000.
“It provides single-step deployment of Web applications in a way that just works, without configuration,” said James Lindenbaum, CEO and co-founder of Heroku, quoted in the InfoWorld story.
