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  1. Stackups
  2. Application & Data
  3. Platform as a Service
  4. Platform As A Service
  5. AppHarbor vs Microsoft Azure

AppHarbor vs Microsoft Azure

OverviewComparisonAlternatives

Overview

AppHarbor
AppHarbor
Stacks17
Followers24
Votes28
Microsoft Azure
Microsoft Azure
Stacks25.6K
Followers17.6K
Votes768

AppHarbor vs Microsoft Azure: What are the differences?

Developers describe AppHarbor as "Instantly deploy and scale .NET applications". AppHarbor is a fully hosted .NET Platform as a Service. AppHarbor can deploy and scale any standard .NET application to the cloud. On the other hand, Microsoft Azure is detailed as "Integrated cloud services and infrastructure to support computing, database, analytics, mobile, and web scenarios". Azure is an open and flexible cloud platform that enables you to quickly build, deploy and manage applications across a global network of Microsoft-managed datacenters. You can build applications using any language, tool or framework. And you can integrate your public cloud applications with your existing IT environment.

AppHarbor and Microsoft Azure are primarily classified as "Platform as a Service" and "Cloud Hosting" tools respectively.

Some of the features offered by AppHarbor are:

  • You push .NET and Windows code to AppHarbor using Git, Mercurial, Subversion or Team Foundation Server with the complimentary Git service or through integrations offered in collaboration with Bitbucket, CodePlex and GitHub.
  • When AppHarbor receives your code it will be built by a build server. If the code compiles all unit tests contained in the compiled assemblies will be run. The result and progress of the build and unit test status can be monitored on the application dashboard. AppHarbor will call any service hooks that you add to notify you of the build result.
  • If everything checks out the application is deployed and configured on AppHarbor application servers. AppHarbor can scale an application vertically and horizontally within seconds for better request throughout, performance and failover. AppHarbor balance load across all instances running that application. Scaling an application gives higher request thoughput, redundancy in case of instance failure and better performance.

On the other hand, Microsoft Azure provides the following key features:

  • Use your OS, language, database, tool
  • Global datacenter footprint
  • Enterprise Grade with up to a 99.95% monthly SLA

"Has a totally free account option" is the primary reason why developers consider AppHarbor over the competitors, whereas "Scales well and quite easy" was stated as the key factor in picking Microsoft Azure.

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Detailed Comparison

AppHarbor
AppHarbor
Microsoft Azure
Microsoft Azure

AppHarbor is a fully hosted .NET Platform as a Service. AppHarbor can deploy and scale any standard .NET application to the cloud.

Azure is an open and flexible cloud platform that enables you to quickly build, deploy and manage applications across a global network of Microsoft-managed datacenters. You can build applications using any language, tool or framework. And you can integrate your public cloud applications with your existing IT environment.

You push .NET and Windows code to AppHarbor using Git, Mercurial, Subversion or Team Foundation Server with the complimentary Git service or through integrations offered in collaboration with Bitbucket, CodePlex and GitHub.;When AppHarbor receives your code it will be built by a build server. If the code compiles all unit tests contained in the compiled assemblies will be run. The result and progress of the build and unit test status can be monitored on the application dashboard. AppHarbor will call any service hooks that you add to notify you of the build result.;If everything checks out the application is deployed and configured on AppHarbor application servers. AppHarbor can scale an application vertically and horizontally within seconds for better request throughout, performance and failover. AppHarbor balance load across all instances running that application. Scaling an application gives higher request thoughput, redundancy in case of instance failure and better performance.
Use your OS, language, database, tool;Global datacenter footprint;Enterprise Grade with up to a 99.95% monthly SLA;Web Sites- Get started for free and scale up as your traffic grows. Build with ASP.NET, PHP or Node.js and deploy in seconds with FTP, Git or TFS.;Infrastructure Services- Access scalable, on-demand infrastructure using Virtual Machines and Virtual Networks. Take advantage of what you already know to achieve new capabilities in the cloud.;Mobile Services- App development with a scalable and secure backend hosted in Windows Azure. Incorporate structured storage, user authentication and push notifications in minutes.;Cloud Services- Create highly-available, infinitely scalable applications and services using a rich Platform as a Service (PaaS) environment. Support multi-tier scenarios, automated deployments and elastic scale.;Big Data- Process, analyze, and gain new insights from big data using the power of Apache Hadoop.;Media- Create, manage and distribute media in the cloud. This PaaS offering provides everything from encoding to content protection to streaming and analytics support.
Statistics
Stacks
17
Stacks
25.6K
Followers
24
Followers
17.6K
Votes
28
Votes
768
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 8
    Has a totally free account option
  • 2
    PostgreSQL
  • 2
    Low cost
  • 2
    GitHub integration
  • 2
    BitBucket integration
Pros
  • 114
    Scales well and quite easy
  • 96
    Can use .Net or open source tools
  • 81
    Startup friendly
  • 73
    Startup plans via BizSpark
  • 62
    High performance
Cons
  • 7
    Confusing UI
  • 2
    Expensive plesk on Azure
Integrations
Blitz
Blitz
Cloudant
Cloudant
Logentries
Logentries
Compose
Compose
MongoLab
MongoLab
New Relic
New Relic
Redis To Go
Redis To Go
Twilio SendGrid
Twilio SendGrid
MemCachier
MemCachier
Cloudinary
Cloudinary
New Relic
New Relic
Twilio SendGrid
Twilio SendGrid
Cloudinary
Cloudinary
Redis Cloud
Redis Cloud
Bitnami
Bitnami
AWS Cloud9
AWS Cloud9
MongoLab
MongoLab
AppDynamics
AppDynamics
Cloudant
Cloudant
CopperEgg
CopperEgg

What are some alternatives to AppHarbor, Microsoft Azure?

Heroku

Heroku

Heroku is a cloud application platform – a new way of building and deploying web apps. Heroku lets app developers spend 100% of their time on their application code, not managing servers, deployment, ongoing operations, or scaling.

DigitalOcean

DigitalOcean

We take the complexities out of cloud hosting by offering blazing fast, on-demand SSD cloud servers, straightforward pricing, a simple API, and an easy-to-use control panel.

Amazon EC2

Amazon EC2

It is a web service that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers.

Clever Cloud

Clever Cloud

Clever Cloud is a polyglot cloud application platform. The service helps developers to build applications with many languages and services, with auto-scaling features and a true pay-as-you-go pricing model.

Google App Engine

Google App Engine

Google has a reputation for highly reliable, high performance infrastructure. With App Engine you can take advantage of the 10 years of knowledge Google has in running massively scalable, performance driven systems. App Engine applications are easy to build, easy to maintain, and easy to scale as your traffic and data storage needs grow.

Red Hat OpenShift

Red Hat OpenShift

OpenShift is Red Hat's Cloud Computing Platform as a Service (PaaS) offering. OpenShift is an application platform in the cloud where application developers and teams can build, test, deploy, and run their applications.

Google Compute Engine

Google Compute Engine

Google Compute Engine is a service that provides virtual machines that run on Google infrastructure. Google Compute Engine offers scale, performance, and value that allows you to easily launch large compute clusters on Google's infrastructure. There are no upfront investments and you can run up to thousands of virtual CPUs on a system that has been designed from the ground up to be fast, and to offer strong consistency of performance.

Linode

Linode

Get a server running in minutes with your choice of Linux distro, resources, and node location.

AWS Elastic Beanstalk

AWS Elastic Beanstalk

Once you upload your application, Elastic Beanstalk automatically handles the deployment details of capacity provisioning, load balancing, auto-scaling, and application health monitoring.

Scaleway

Scaleway

European cloud computing company proposing a complete & simple public cloud ecosystem, bare-metal servers & private datacenter infrastructures.

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