As today’s news about Facebook and Heroku attests, the cloud application platform wars are heating up. The reason is simple: the real money to be made in a gold rush is not from actually prospecting for gold dust in the river or mining the ground for nuggets, but in selling the picks and sifters and shovels to those chasing the get-rich-quick dream.

With start-ups, there are a number of tools that software start-ups depend on, perhaps the most significant being a place to run those services, the “Cloud” on everyone’s lips. But configuring infrastructure isn’t fun or sexy - at least not for most of us - and so we turn to someone else to provide this service.

In posts to come, I’ll be looking at some of the tools out there and comparing them. I don’t want to spoil it, but if you’re the kind of person who likes to turn to the end of a book to see how it turns out, well, maybe you should take a look at dotCloud.