Check out Tweek . We use it for feature flags/AB tests but it can be used for the scenario you are describing.

My short answer is: if you can afford it, PaaS will let you go live quicker. The long answer is: you guessed it, it depends:) You can go a very long way with a PaaS based solution until you get to the point where you feel that it is holding you back and if your app is relatively simple you might never get to that point. Then again, if your app is simple it probably means it won't be too hard to go the IaaS way. So my suggestion is, if you can afford it and want to go live quickly go with heroku. Once you feel you've reached the limits of heroku (meaning specific customizations or insights that you can't get out of heroku) or once you want to reduce costs start migration to an IaaS solution. Be aware though that this doesn't mean you don't need to understand what's going on at a lower level. Understanding how heroku (or any other PaaS) solution works will help you get the most out of it at a lower cost and avoid unexpected errors. It's also a great way to start learning about DevOps while having a lot of the difficulties handled for you.

Another great resource is InfoQ , they display the talk side by side with the slides in a nice interface.

Hi, thanks for your answer. Most of what you stated is not an issue with a Paas solution. e.g. development for Azure's websites doesn't require any additional libraries. I am specifically asking about advantages over that sort of solutions.

Thanks for the description Sandeep! Are the node instances running on a VM or are they an Azure Website?

We recently had a hackathon at work and we decided to write one of the services we needed in a different language than we're used to (C#, JS). We started with purescript (cool but hard), moved to clojurescript (ruled out due to lack of support and documentation for nodejs) and then moved to go. It just flowed . Granted, that service was a simple one but still we had something up and working in a few hours. It was very easy to get into. Simple concurrency was easy with goroutines , although we didn't use channels. Other stuff was a breeze (http service, websockets and other simple net stuff).

FreeCodeCamp is an awesome resource for getting up to speed on frontend development, plus it has a great community. Code Academy is where I got started but that was a few years ago, not sure how it is today.

Cory House wrote a nice article about this topic, check it out .

Thanks! I can definitely recommend checking Elm out even just for the fact that you don't know much about it. Learning something completely new once in a while is refreshing.

Do you mean Visual Studio Code? I use Visual Studio for .Net stuff but for JS I find Atom to be the fastest and with the biggest ecosystem. I tried WebStorm, Brackets, Sublime Text and Visual Studio Code. VS Code seems like it has great potential but is still lacking support for different languages and extensions. Visual Studio has good support for JS but after using Atom it just feels heavy.