I hope that the "why" is that it's much simpler to use on a small scale. What I'd really like is a standardized engine to deploy apps of many flavors on rather than having to create new chef scripts to deploy everything I write.

I essentially want something that works like heroku as far as ease of use for deployment/scaling, accommodates many different application types, and is easy for me to spin up in a 2-4 node cluster on my own VPSes. Every time I have a new app to deploy I just push it to the cluster and I'm done, adding additional VPSes as it starts to get full. I'm hoping this is such a thing, but I haven't tried it just yet, so I can't say for sure.

CloudFoundry, OpenShift, etc. seem pretty heavyweight and more meant for service providers or large corporate private clouds. If they can be used like I describe too could anyone provide some links to docs/blogs about it? I haven't found it so far.