I am looking for your inputs on which cloud platform will be suitable if I am starting from scratch to build a web based application. My key needs are - Build Locally and deploy on cloud - Auto-Scaling so that I don't have to change code later - Since I am in POC mode, cheapest cost (or free) is one of the goals - Platform agnostic coding so that I can choose to move my application later from one cloud to another
Amit
When you go to the cloud you can chose between an IaaS and a PaaS. In an IaaS you are renting the infrastructure and you have to take care of installing, configuring and maintaining everythig when in a PaaS you have everything pre-configured and you just need to take care of your development process. In a PaaS you could have Tomcat as a Service, Git as a Service, MySQL database as a service,...
In a PaaS you can usually scale up/down, vertically or horizontally ,paying depends on the resources that you use. Regarding auto-scaling, maybe you could be looking for something related to this.
You have several PaaS: CloudBees, CloudFoundry, GAE,... However, depend on what you are looking for, you will find some PaaS more suitable than others. For example CloudBees is really suitable for Java applications and GAE for Python apps. However, CloudBees also could support Play! apps and others stacks. The samething with GAE, CloudFoundry,..
All of them usually have a free tier where you can test if you app works. For a production environment, you should pay to get the enterprise features and to have your app working 24/7.