Alternatives to Heroku besides Porter?
We're building one at https://apppack.io. It's a Heroku-like experience in your own AWS account leveraging their suite of managed services.
Why companies move off Heroku (besides the cost)
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Re: Why companies move off Heroku (besides the cost)
#62As someone that was there at Heroku after the acquisition, I don't think you can state that since the acquisition it's been consistently downhill. There isn't much debate that things have stagnated in the last 5-7 years which is a longer story on why probably. Some examples of innovation that happened and were launched after the acquisition: buildpacks (at the time of acquisition Heroku was still Ruby only), Heroku P…
https://scalingo.com/ is nice too
not really, it's available only in france and it's crazy expensive, we are talking about 115€/month for a container with 4gb of ram, so large that the offer is named 2XL. Wow now 2cpu/4GB of ram is considered 2XL
Re: Why companies move off Heroku (besides the cost)
#63Alternatives to Heroku besides Porter?
fly.io is promising in the direct competitor space Dokku is a good alternative for running herokuish on a single server with lots of control.
Dokku Maintainer here.
Dokku also supports Dockerfiles, Docker Images, Tarballs (similar to heroku slugs), and Cloud Native Buildpacks. I'm also actively working on AWS Lambda support[1] (both for simple usage without much config as well as SAM-based usage) and investigating Replicate's Cog[2] and Railways Nixpacks[3] functionalities for building apps.
There are quite a few options in the OSS space (as well as Commercial offerings from new startups and popular incumbents). It's an interesting space to be in, and its always fun to see how new offerings innovate on existing solutions.
[1] https://github.com/dokku/lambda-builder
[2] https://github.com/replicate/cog
[3] https://github.com/railwayapp/nixpacksRe: Why companies move off Heroku (besides the cost)
#64I took a few minutes to scan Porter's website. They have a free tier. But when I read the getting started documentation, it says that I have to provision everything in my existing cloud infrastructure (e.g.; AWS). So I'm paying for the services in AWS. It seems I got lost in the story. Porter doesn't immediately feel like a replacement for Heroku.
OP and Porter founder here. The article was meant to outline the most common technical limitations we see companies on Heroku bump up against as they outgrow Heroku. For individuals and teams running smaller workloads on Heroku where saving $ is a chief concern, Heroku is probably still a good option even though they’re declining in market share (this unprecedented recent outage aside). Porter is designed for companies that are maturing off Heroku for the technical reasons we mention or for those already looking to get the automation of Heroku in their own AWS/GCP cloud.
Re: Why companies move off Heroku (besides the cost)
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
https://render.com is my favorite in this space
Care to explain why you like these choices?
I can only speak about render.com as I use for a mix of 10 static websites / Go webapps + cloudflare for DNS and caching proxy.
It sounds prosaic but "it just works".
Specifically compared to Digital Ocean Apps (which I used before render):
* the dashboard UI is better designed and faster
* the builds and deployments happen faster
* similar price (to Digital Ocean, much cheaper than Heroku)
* similar capabilities (attached disks, hosted Postgres, hosted redis) but the velocity seems better i.e. render.com seems to implement features faster than DO
You would think that "well designed dashboard that displays instantly" would be a table stakes in an offering like that, but sadly it isn't.
Re: Why companies move off Heroku (besides the cost)
#66As someone that was there at Heroku after the acquisition, I don't think you can state that since the acquisition it's been consistently downhill. There isn't much debate that things have stagnated in the last 5-7 years which is a longer story on why probably. Some examples of innovation that happened and were launched after the acquisition: buildpacks (at the time of acquisition Heroku was still Ruby only), Heroku P…
The first few years after the Salesforce acquisition were incredible - for quite a while I thought of Heroku as one of the best examples of an acquisiton where the product improved after the release.
Sad to see that momentum eventually fade away.
Re: Why companies move off Heroku (besides the cost)
#67Alternatives to Heroku besides Porter?
Pretty different approach, but with many application architectures today you can move beyond "hosting" into pure serverless with a stack like Vercel + Convex ( https://convex.dev ) In the news today: https://www.forbes.com/sites/kenrickcai/2022/04/27/convex-se... (disclosure: Convex co-founder)
Oh, I didn't realize convex was still around. How are you guys doing ?
Edit: just read that article. "dump databases". huh, what? weren't you guys doing a heroku alternative in the past?
Edit2: Sorry, I confused your company with convox! https://convox.com/
Re: Why companies move off Heroku (besides the cost)
#68Alternatives to Heroku besides Porter?
Preface: I work for DevGraph, which contains EngineYard.
I would definitely have a strong look at EngineYard [1]. Our tagline: "A NoOps PaaS for deploying and managing applications on AWS backed with a world-class support offering." There is a good comparison with Heroku located here [2].
Having worked with several engineers, I can personally vouch for the world class support. We spend a lot of time thinking about and implementing ways to host Ruby, Node, PHP, Java, Python, and other containerized workloads on AWS. EngineYard has been around since before Heroku, so we have a long track record and a lot of experience in making your applications run reliably, keeping costs under control, and with full 24x7 support.
Email is in the description, along with my Twitter. Please reach out for any questions.
Re: Why companies move off Heroku (besides the cost)
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's fine as a solo developer – but what about a team with CI pipelines etc?
can't you put that in the ci pipeline
I’m pretty confident if ‘putting it in the ci pipeline’ were a straight-forward option for most people, they probably wouldn’t be paying Heroku to manage review apps. I’ve used Heroku review apps for years and have also written and taken over different custom deployment pipelines. Review apps have a million different ways to be a giant time and money sink if not planned and implemented properly.
Re: Why companies move off Heroku (besides the cost)
#70For all heroku's frustrations (and I agree with all of them in the article), it is still the only thing that "just works" for a standard monolith web app. Heroku is not cheap, but it is still cheaper than a couple full time employees + aws. It is really too bad they aren't innovating - they are just burning up their 10 year lead in the space. I wouldn't start a new project on Heroku - not because of the cost, but bec…
Heroku is not _the only thing that just works for standard monolith web apps_. Plenty of others in this space, like netlify, vercel, firebase, etc. I don't know how they all compare to each other, I don't use any of them.