Ignition Partners is leading a $10 million investment in Heroku, a San Francisco-based startup which helps developers more easily build and manage applications in the cloud. About 60,000 Ruby on Rails applications are now running on its platform, which GigaOm notes operates on the back of Amazon.com's EC2 infrastructure. Those include applications for the iPad, iPhone and Twitter.

As part of the investment, John Connors of Ignition Partners is joining the company's board. Connors is the former CIO and CFO at Microsoft, which is trying to attract developers to its own Azure platform.

Other investors in Heroku include Redpoint Ventures, Baseline Ventures, and Harrison Metal Capital. The company was started in 2007 at the business incubator Y Combinator.

Last October, it named Byron Sebastian -- a Seattle startup veteran who previously worked at Crossgain and SourceLabs -- as CEO. Ignition was an investor in SourceLabs, which was sold to EMC for an undisclosed price in January 2009.

Connors noted in a statement:

“The consumerization of IT is one of the major themes of our investment strategy: trends like cloud computing are driving tremendous, transformative improvements in productivity, agility, efficiency, and reliability. Heroku’s team, approach, and product have given it a significant and increasing lead in the exploding cloud application platform market."