Heroku clone for Django?

Oh dear.

The only thing really wrong with App Engine is the datastore:

- It's very different than anything you've come across before - The docs are not sufficient for it's complexity. You end up having to read lots of blogs and watch lots of videos to figure it out. - It is ridiculously difficult to learn (one of the hardest things I ever had to do) - Important parts of your stack won't work, like Admin - You can't just add the fields you like to an object. Instead you need to meticulously plan _how_ your data is going to be accessed. This is exactly the wrong thing for a startup, since you can't get up and running fast. - You can't iterate fast, because any schema change is very risky and very slow. - If you don't get everything exactly right, your app will be very slow. - There isn't much in the ecosystem.

By contrast, none of these are true for Heroku.

There are some things that are pretty good about App Engine:

- the tools are pretty good. Not as good as Heroku, but good. - the billing is spot on. They give you about $1 per day of free stuff, which can maintain a site with hundreds of thousands of users. And it's pretty cheap from there on. - They scale it automatically. On Heroku, it's really hard to tell how many "dynos" (whatever the hell that is) you need, except by trial and error. I would expect that nearly all Heroku apps are overprovisioned. App Engine just nails the scaling - it happens automatically, and you specify a maximum amount to pay per day, with lots of different dials to control it more precicely if you like.

I hope Djangy takes the best of both worlds.

I think what we're seeing here is an email/hype-grabbing attempt with an interesting vision, using the Heroku name for leverage.

Would like to see it materialise, but they really should have hardened something as simple as a signup form. I've emailed the admin telling him to lock it down.