It seems ever so many magical solutions are available to us these days. "Want to build the Next Big Web App? Open an account with WhizBang PaaS Services and we'll take care of everything for you -- all you need to do is upload your code!"
The promise is that you won't have to waste time with all that scary sys admin stuff. You're free to pursue the greatness that is your application without a care in the world about how it will function, deploy, scale, or secure itself. It's magic, more or less.
As many people are coming to understand, there is some legitimacy to these claims -- to a point, and with significant caveats. If you're looking for the quickest and easiest way to get a simple Rails or Django app up on the Web, these services are definitely the way to go. Fire up a stack, and git pull your code; with (ideally) a small amount of adjustment, you're up and running in a few minutes. It's once you try to move beyond the high and tight walls of the provider that you immediately run into problems, and those problems may indeed prove intractable.
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