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Comment by gonational

21 days ago

This!

It absolutely boggles my mind that nothing else exists to fill this spot. Fly and others offer varying degrees of easier-than-AWS hosting, but nobody offers true PaaS like Heroku, IMHO.

18 comments

gonational

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ghaff  20 days ago

The Heroku style of PaaS just isn't very interesting to most large businesses that actually pay for things. The world basically moved on to Kubernetes-based products (see Google and Red Hat)--or just shutdown like a lot of Cloud Foundry-based products. Yes, many individuals and smaller shops care more about simplicity but they're generally not willing/able to pay a lot (if anything).

  • twoodfin  20 days ago

    It seems like you’re right, but it’s strange that the data world seems to be moving in the opposite direction, with PaaS products like Snowflake, DataBricks, Microsoft Fabric, even Salesforce’s own Data Cloud eating the world.

    • ghaff  20 days ago

      PaaS has always been this thing that isn't pure infrastructure or pure hosted software that you use as-is. Salesforce has something over 100K attendees of partners and users to its annual conference. It's always been this in-between thing with a fairly loose definition. I'd argue that Salesforce was long a cross between SaaS (for the users) and PaaS (for developers). You can probably apply the same view to a lot of other company products.

airstrike  21 days ago

I find render.com basically as good as Heroku and certainly much better than fly.io's unpredictable pricing

  • lngric006  20 days ago

    In 2022 Render increased their prices (which for my team worked out at a doubling of costs) with a one month notice period and the CEO's response to me when I asked him if he thought that was a fair notice period was that it was operationally necessary and he was sorry to see us go.

ljm  20 days ago

Heroku and Ruby, for me, was the 21st century answer to 'deploying' a PHP site over FTP.

The fact that it required nothing but 'git push heroku master' at the time was incredible, especially for how easy it was to spin up pre-prod environments with it, and how wiring up a database was also trivial.

Every time I come across an infrastructure that is bloated out with k8s, helm charts, and a complex web of cloud resources, all for a service not even running at scale, I look back to the simplicity we used to have.

owenversteeg  20 days ago

I completely agree that there's nothing comparable to old-school Heroku, which is crazy. That said, Cloudflare seems promising for some types of projects and I use them for a few things. Anyone using them as a one-stop-shop?

almost  21 days ago

For me Northflank have filled this spot. Though by the time I switched I was already using Docker so can't speak directly to their Heroku Buildpack support.

fragmede  21 days ago

vercel goes a step further, and (when configured this way) allocates a new hostname (eg feature-branch-add-thingg.app.vercel.example.com) for new branches, to make testing even easier.