Heroku, the San Francisco based platform as a service startup, has just announced it has raised an additional $15 million in the second round of venture capital investment.

As one of the first cloud providers, Heroku were incubated in Y-Combinator, following an investment round of $5 million afterwards.

Heroku is currently hosting over 60.000 app on their service. Anyone can host for free an app there, as long as their database doesn’t exceed 5MB of storage.

The system provided by Heroku offers the simplest deployment and scalability solution for Ruby on Rails, by pushing the app via Git and moving up and down a couple sliders when additional concurrency or background processing is needed.

Many people see the investment actually being directed at Ruby and Ruby on Rails, and as a bet to the future that more and more startups will choose this framework and programming language and host their apps in a cloud environment as opposed to dedicated servers.

Google’s simple Linux distribution formally known as Google Chrome OS was finally previewed. It is fully based on the Google applications for search, editing documents or reading email with nothing more than the operating system stored on the computer’s HDD, but rather accessible online from the Google cloud.

Google’s strength with Google Chrome OS is that it can become the standard OS for new netbooks, lowering their cost as compared to shipping with Windows as well as running on more modest hardware configurations lacking the need of a traditional HDD for storing user data. I admin that currently I am not a fan of this concept as I use my laptop for way more than Internet browsing and find no real use for my existing Windows 7 running netbook.

Pros:

• Free & netbook optimized
• Instant on (7 seconds on current version)
• Free of conventional viruses

Cons:

• All your data is on Google’s servers
• Currently it is no more than a lightweight Linux distribution
• Limited hardware support

Related posts:

1. Google Will No Longer Give Access To Internet Explorer 6