Hi,

a .NET developer here, trying to determine which PaaS solution is right for his needs.

A little background first

• I'm a .NET + Oracle developer on the Windows platform.
• Spent 5+ years in a managed service provider: a lot of domain modelling, a lot of sending data back and forth, so I'm no stranger to complex business rules and large models.
• Zero cloud experience :/

Recently, I've been given a green light to start work on a completely new SaaS product. The project is a first in-house product we've ever built - we'll use .NET Core and MVC. Other then that, it's a blank slate.

For a newbie, the amount of Cloud-related choices is overwhelming. I did a lot of reading up on PaaS vs. IaaS, Heroku and Docker. We don't have any in-house Cloud and DevOps expertise and we want to focus on product development initially, so Heroku seems like a perfect fit. However, I'm having a hard time determining whether we'll be able to deploy a .NET Core app on Heroku - I found a couple of articles, but the low number of reports makes me nervous. It will be a two-man team going into this and I don't want to spread myself too thin - the focus must be on product development, not fighting the platform.

To sum up my requirements

• .NET Core 2
• A relational database (PostgreSQL caught my eye).
• Devs are running Windows on their machines. Servers can be Linux or Windows.
• Easy to use Cloud platform that will allow us to focus on product development.

To sum up my doubts

• Am I on the right path when considering PaaS solutions that could run .NET Core app?
• Is Heroku able to run .NET Core at all?
• Should I be thinking of using Docker containers at this point? Since we're a Windows shop, is it going to be a problem finding somewhere to deploy Windows Docker containers? The idea of being able to spin up identical dev/production environments is appealing, I still have .dll hell traumas from my previous job.
• Perhaps I should look into AWS EBS or an Azure AppService PaaS? I read these are more low level than Heroku, so a bit more difficult to get started with?
• Is AppHarbour a good choice? It offers some sort of a PostgreSQL Add-On service.

Any help is appreciated, even just a nudge in the right direction.