AppHarbor

Strangely enough, there are time when I talk about things that aren’t directly related to security and yesterday’s guest appearance on the Uhuru podcast was one of these. In fact “the cloud” is something I’m deeply interested in and have spent a lot of time thinking about and working with lately, one significant of example of which has been the use of AppHarbor for hosting ASafaWeb. Yesterday I had a short chat to Michael Surkan from Uhuru Software on how I was adapting to the new world cloud order and particularly what I like about the AppHarbor offering. I’d had some involvement with the Azure in the very early days...

As many of you know by now, I’m particularly fond of AppHarbor. They continue to provide a totally awesome integrated CI and hosting environment, continue to offer a means of taking the service up for free (as well as recently adding some commercial offerings), and most importantly to this post, they still have a great selection of very cool add-ons. One of those add-ons is StillAlive which is awesome for two reasons: Firstly, it’s a local Aussie company and secondly, it actually provides a very valuable service that’s going to help me address a niggling problem with ASafaWeb running on AppHarbor. It’s broken – and I’m the last to know...

If we can get over Microsoft’s cheesy catchphrase for a moment, the whole idea of “to the cloud” is actually pretty cool. It’s the promise of taking things that used to be both labour and capital intensive, commoditising them and serving them up on demand. This can very easily sound like PowerPoint presentation rhetoric so let’s move past the warm and fuzzies and actually see it in action. A couple of weeks back I published a screencast as part of my 5 minute wonders series titled From zero to hero with AppHarbor. In that session I took my existing membership-enabled ASP.NET website (itself the subject of a previous 5 minute wonder)...

In case you’ve been living under a rock this year, AppHarbor is one of the hottest things to hit .NET since, well, just about ever. It packages up the entire app lifecycle of source control, build, deployment and hosting and makes it dead simple; in fact it couldn’t be easier. It then adds a comprehensive collection of add-ons to do everything from persisting data (MS SQL, MySQL, MongoDB) to caching services (Memcacher) to load testing (blitz). And the best bit? It’s free. Zero dollars. Nada. Zilch. If you want to get a bit demanding then you start to pay money but it’s in the order of figures like $10 a month for...