No, that’s not a typo. I recently received an invitation to Heroku, a Ruby on Rails platform that seems to me to really highlight what’s possible in the new age of the web. Heroku is both an on-demand, web-based development environment for building web-based apps in Ruby on Rails and a scalable deployment and hosting service using Amazon’s platform services. This means that apps built on Heroku have on-demand access to virtual servers and bandwidth to simply scale with performance. Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Simple Storage Service (S3) provide both “machines” and database.

In short: I can open an account on Heroku and immediately start building an app through my browser. I don’t need to deploy servers, setup a web server such as Mongrel, setup a database like Postgres or be concerned with scalability beyond writing quality code. All of that magically happens with about as much trouble as it takes to open a Gmail account. Really. I did it. That’s about how hard it was.

I think this is a great example of what on-demand services are all about, especially at the smaller scale of the user spectrum. With Heroku, the only thing I need to worry about is building the app itself. I get flexible cost-efficiency and I’ve basically out-sourced the mucky platform concerns to an expert, freeing myself up to focus entirely on my service quality. Like Trading Grid Online’s web-based mailbox tools or Intelligent Web Forms, I can register by invitation for a hosted service that connects me to partners without any need to worry about software installation, distribution and other issues such as protocol mediation which require time and money to manage and which provide on-going cost and challenges to my service quality, but don’t stand to differentiate me significantly if managed well. Although it’s too early for me to tell, I would bet that the value of this approach will really be felt as new versions of Ruby, Rails or changes to the Amazon platform services are rolled out–like working with GXS, infrastructure improvements, modernization and adapting to my partners’ change should be handled by experts with economies of scale and extensive specialized experience.

Heroku also happens to be a YCombinator company. If Heroku is any indication, YCombinator’s unique approach to venture capital seed funding appears geared to producing some new and valuable services.