I understand the benefit of PaaS; I've used Heroku on occassion, and PHPFog seems to be making in the space as well. If you just want an app online, and don't c

I understand the benefit of PaaS; I've used Heroku on occassion, and PHPFog seems to be making in the space as well. If you just want an app online, and don't care about how it gets there, and have more money than system administration skill, PaaS is great. My question is more along the lines of "What do I get with Azure+ that I don't get with PHPFog or an existing AWS AMI or a Linode StackScript?" What's the killer feature? It's going to be more expensive (you get to buy a cloud-sized slice of a Windwos license), likely slower than a Linux platform (the benchmarks I've seen put PHP on Windows significantly behind Linux deploys), and so far, it doesn't solve the hard parts of a PHP application deployment. I'm a Rails developer, mostly, and I have Heroku apps, apps running on Linode VMs, apps running on rented Rackspace servers, and apps running on AWS. I've got a lot of experience setting this stuff up and maintaining it, but I still really appreciate the simplicity of Heroku; a dashboard of services and extensions ready to install in a click is awesome. Heroku's killer feature isn't that you don't have to set up RVM and Passenger, it's that you don't have to write bundles of daemon managers, monitoring scripts, rake tasks to manage code deploys and reloads, git hooks, background worker management, and a bunch of otherwise-tedious stuff. The sales pitch for Azure+ seems to be "We solved a problem that only exists on Azure", which just isn't very compelling. So far, it seems like the only target audience for this thing is people who will only deploy PHP apps on Azure and don't have any other options, period, which seems like a really small target audience.