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DigitalOcean App Platform

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Re: DigitalOcean App Platform

#71
We've been happy https://render.com customers for over a year now and on the surface this looks very similar. I'm glad to see another company take a stab at iterating on Heroku while keeping ops burden low.

I'm interested to know - what's the sales pitch for DO over Render? I'm noticing some pricing differences but at first glance it seems they tip Render's direction. I'm also noticing Render is a bit further along (persistent storage, cron jobs, custom domains).

Re: DigitalOcean App Platform

#72
post #58

I like the idea of rebuilding Heroku without the command line. It's not for me, but it's probably for somebody. There's just too much of a premium for this over a standard DigitalOcean droplet though. At the low end you're paying double for the same resources, and at the high end you're paying 4x. I deployed a toy Node.js app that was a bit too resource hungry for 1 virtual CPU. The cheapest plan with 2 virtual CPUs…

Not sure what you mean. Heroku can autodeploy from a Github repo just as well? You don't need the CLI for that

Re: DigitalOcean App Platform

#73
post #58

I like the idea of rebuilding Heroku without the command line. It's not for me, but it's probably for somebody. There's just too much of a premium for this over a standard DigitalOcean droplet though. At the low end you're paying double for the same resources, and at the high end you're paying 4x. I deployed a toy Node.js app that was a bit too resource hungry for 1 virtual CPU. The cheapest plan with 2 virtual CPUs…

Thanks for your feedback on the pricing plans. We will definitely take a look at options and potentially roll out some additional plans soon.

Re: DigitalOcean App Platform

#74
post #16

Like all DigitalOcean products, the App Platform provides predictable, easy-to-understand pricing that allows you to control costs to prevent surprise bills. I can't see any features listed that enable me to control costs to prevent surprise bills. If a site got submitted to HN and hugged to not-to-death-because-it-autoscales then I'd wake up to a bunch of alerts and massive outbound bandwidth bill. I don't want that…

That seems somewhat opposite to the point of PaaS, no?

If you want controllable costs and you don't want people using your service because interest explodes, then just stick to a regular droplet, no?

The entire point of this is that if usage explodes, you want to pay to support that usage. That's the entire feature.

(Also, HN frontpage traffic isn't that much -- it's a few requests per second at most, not thousands per second.)

The only scenario I can imagine where this would be a genuine concern would be if you were subjected to a (D)DoS-type attack. But in that case you still want legitimate users to get through, so you really need a separate DoS-protection layer which is totally orthogonal to this.

Am I missing something?

Re: DigitalOcean App Platform

#75
I am so glad to see this. I was looking to deploy an app and the choice is either Heroku or manage your own server which I don't want to do.

Heroku gives instant deployment for the most common types of apps (python/java/ruby). It's PaaS done right, it's fantastic. You should really have a look if you're not aware of it, it's only $7 for a starter app.

Problem is, scaling up is about $50 per gigabyte of memory which makes it a dead end for anything non trivial. You're forced to go to digital ocean / Linode / OVH instead to have something affordable.

That leaves Digital Ocean as the only alternative (don't trust Linode) and it sucks because it only gives me a server to manage. I don't want to manage a server I want to run a (python) application. It's 2020 this sort of things should auto deploy from GitHub without bothering me to manage an operating system.

Re: DigitalOcean App Platform

#76
post #35

So if I understand correctly, DigitalOcean just built an inferior version of caprover? (for which a digital ocean one-click droplet exists BTW) Caprover is essentially a really nice GUI for docker swarm, Let's encrypt and nginx. https://caprover.com/

First time I'm hearing of this thing. It looks like another take on Dokku?

Re: DigitalOcean App Platform

#77
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the feedback! Autoscaling is not yet supported on the platform (but is coming soon). Before autoscaling lands as a feature, insights based alerting will also land. You'll be able to setup alerts for scaling events, bandwidth, cpu, memory, and more that can be sent via email or slack.

What good are alerts when I sleep? I usually don't even check my personal mail until I'm done at work. There's a lot that can happen in 16h

On AWS I tie high billing threshold alerts with PagerDuty so it wakes me up at night.

Re: DigitalOcean App Platform

#78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AWS has a PaaS: Elastic Beanstalk. Though I would forgive you for forgetting about EB since it sometimes feels like AWS's neglected step child.

I had no idea that was the point of beanstalk. Now I know what I’m doing this evening.

Oh, the name Elastic Beanstalk didn't make it obvious???

/s

Re: DigitalOcean App Platform

#80

We've been happy https://render.com customers for over a year now and on the surface this looks very similar. I'm glad to see another company take a stab at iterating on Heroku while keeping ops burden low. I'm interested to know - what's the sales pitch for DO over Render? I'm noticing some pricing differences but at first glance it seems they tip Render's direction. I'm also noticing Render is a bit further along (…

There are various areas where App Platform pricing is in your favor, including the initial getting started pricing for services on both the basic and pro plan, as well as the cost of databases as you scale beyond the cheapest plan on Render. App Platform supports custom domains today, but we do plan to roll out enhanced functionality around domain management very soon. Today we support pre/post-deploy jobs with cron job coming soon, as well as a persistent storage solution. In addition, beyond the $7 price point we support MySQL/Redis/Postgres as opposed to just Postgres. We will also be rolling out App Platform to many more of our DigitalOcean regions very soon and have an exciting roadmap what we can't wait to get built out and released. Thanks so much for checking out the product and providing your feedback.
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