Heya! It's extremely awesome to see a comment from you. I've actually been wanting to play around with appfog since I first saw it several months back.
Anyhow--you're totally right. Heroku is definitely not 'just unix'. I really meant this in a different way than it may seem in the article. I was trying to get the point across that there's really no vendor lock-in, you can easily port your code back and fourth from a physical box or vps to Heroku, with almost no delay.
Thanks again! Incredibly awesome to actually talk with you ^^
I think the expression "just unix" is right - at the end of the day platforms like Heroku, CloudFoundry and dotCloud (since we're all plugging our respective platforms) expose an API to spawn and manage unix processes - the way EC2 exposes an API to spawn and manage servers.
It all boils down to the metaphor, and the language that supports it:
PaaS borrows from the Unix metaphor of deployment with primitives like processes, executables, virtual filesystems, sockets and stdout/stderr.
IaaS borrows from the hardware metaphor of deployment with primitives like images, block devices, OS installs, firewalling rules and load-balancers.
The premise of PaaS is that, in a large and growing number of cases, as a developer the Unix metaphor requires less of my time, it maps my day-to-day experience better (As fdr pointed out, the remote platform behaves the same, roughly, as my laptop), and I don't actually need control over the underlying hardware.
Anyhow--you're totally right. Heroku is definitely not 'just unix'. I really meant this in a different way than it may seem in the article. I was trying to get the point across that there's really no vendor lock-in, you can easily port your code back and fourth from a physical box or vps to Heroku, with almost no delay.
Thanks again! Incredibly awesome to actually talk with you ^^