Real alternatives to Windows Azure PaaS (web role)

Question

I am looking for alternatives to the Windows Azure PaaS (Platform as a Service) offering, meeting the following requirements:

1. The platform should provide high availability and scalability.
2. The platform should manage/update the application server and OS for me.
3. The platform should provide some form of NoSQL database (like Azure Table Storage or SimpleDB).
4. The platform should natively support ASP.NET MVC, i.e. IIS & runtime environment should be automatically managed/patched for me.

While Amazon satisfies item 1 and 3, it provides only IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service), meaning that I still have a large administration overhead.

So that question is, what alternatives are there to Windows Azure, that provide a roughly equivalent feature set? Any suggestions are welcome!

Answer 1

Have you tried AppHarbor?

It's just amazing!

• Runs on top of Amazon EC2
• The entire platform, including application servers, is managed and updated by AppHarbor.
• Applications run inside IIS on fully updated Windows Server 2008 R2 instances.
• .NET 2.0-4.0 is natively supported along with ASP.NET MVC 1, 2 and 3, ASP.NET WebPages, WCF services. Updates are installed as they are released.
• Scaling is really easy and it takes seconds to deploy. Scaling to multiple instances increases availability and redundancy.
• All website administration including rollback to a previous version and environment configuration can be handled through the appharbor.com web interface.
• Builds and tests .NET projects right out of GIT Repository (or Mercurial through BitBucket).
• MySQL and MSSQL are available as shared and dedicated offerings and optional redundancy for high availability.
• NoSQL databases are supported through add-ons. Add-ons are also available for e-mail, indexing, caching and performance testing.
• You can use AWS SimpleDB and any other AWS service through your own AWS account. Servers are currently located in US-EAST (Virginia), so put your services there if possible for lower latency.
• Excellent support
• Create background jobs easily

This is Heroku for .NET :o)