I see a lot of negative comments, but I actually think it is quite interesting that they are targeting Windows/ Azure. There are situations in which the platfor

I see a lot of negative comments, but I actually think it is quite interesting that they are targeting Windows/ Azure. There are situations in which the platform to deploy the apps has been decided higher up in the organization (that can be for a variety of reasons, some more rational than others) and in many cases it is Windows. In that case the question is not whether it is better to use Heroku or Azure, it is how to make Azure suck less :) The AppHarbor guys are doing well with a similar approach to .NET As a reference point, I am one of the developers of BitNami.org (we also provide a cloud hosting service) and we get over 150k developers every month coming to the site to get LAMP environments, Wordpress, Drupal, etc. You will be surprised at the (quite high) percentage of those developers that run open source web apps (PHP, Java, Ruby) on Windows. Again, not recommending that you do so, just remarking it is not as weird as some of the comments here make it look (though HN is probably not the target audience :)