29 ms·

DigitalOcean App Platform

646 points by digianarchist 6y ago

_kyran 6y ago
Tried this out in early access and wanted to love and use it however a few things that made it not workable: * wildcard subdomains aren't supported. * Only CNAMEs to digital ocean's CDN are supported (can't have an A record). * There was no way to run a console command. * Bandwidth is 12x higher than usual droplets and unlike standard droplets there isn't an included bandwidth pool.
- quaffapint 6y ago
  The bandwidth piece is interesting. I guess if you really have a need for bandwidth just use their K8s offering which is free and you just pay for droplets (with much more bandwidth)/networking. It will require more setup, but you will end up with higher bandwidth.
  - dkersten 6y ago
    "Just use k8s" isn't a solution as k8s is a complex beast.
    - quaffapint 6y ago
      Agreed, but they provide the management of the infrastructure. You will need to setup the services/pods, but it does then give you droplets with higher bandwidth if that is your need.
- phildougherty 6y ago
  Thanks for the feedback! I will be sure to address your points with the team as we continue to develop our roadmap. One thing to point out is that there is now console access available in the product.
- dubcanada 6y ago
  > * There was no way to run a console command. There is a console now, was added a few weeks ago.
- GordonS 6y ago
  > Bandwidth is 12x higher than usual droplets and unlike standard droplets there isn't an included bandwidth pool I'm particularly disappointed to hear this. Digital Ocean likes to say they have simple and predicable pricing, they even say so in TFA - charging high prices for bandwidth is surely the most despised practice of the big 3 cloud providers. I don't expect this from DP. I'm not angry, I'm just disappointed...
izolate 6y ago
> If you have apps in other languages, you can quickly deploy using the App Platform by providing the appropriate Dockerfile in the source repo I'm happy to see this. Makes it a viable contender to GCP Cloud Run, which has become my favorite way to deploy serverless apps.
bizzleDawg 6y ago
I'd be interested to know if this is integrated and rebranded nanobox [0]? Or something completely from scratch? [0]: https://nanobox.io/ https://nanobox.io/
- phildougherty 6y ago
  We certainly took a lot of inspiration and leaned on the awesome experience of the nanobox team, but this is largely a completely different architecture.
  - sciurus 6y ago
    Can you tell us anything about the architecture?
    - phildougherty 6y ago
      We will be revealing a lot more about the architecture at our upcoming virtual conference called Deploy that is happening Nov 10-11th. There are a few sessions that touch on how the platform was implemented and I encourage you to tune in for those! (schedule to be announced soon). https://www.digitalocean.com/deploy/ https://www.digitalocean.com/deploy/
    - alexellisuk 6y ago
      This is what I found out by printing the environment variables: https://twitter.com/alexellisuk/status/1306343018488791040 https://twitter.com/alexellisuk/status/1306343018488791040
  - Existenceblinks 6y ago
    Wasn't the Appsail nanobox? IIRC, it was planed to be DO's PaaS, so it's cancelled and then DO's PaaS is based on k8s instead?
    - dubcanada 6y ago
      Appsail was nanobox from what I saw, they redid it between appsail and "apps".
leadetes 6y ago
Digital Ocean has really changed. Just get the feeling leadership or something changed internally to pivot away from being customer/developer focused. I'll stick with gcp.
- kgraves 6y ago
  Disagree on GCP. Extremely hesitant to GCP ever since they performed that price hike of their GKE product for their control plane. I really can't trust them anymore, given that nearly all of Google's entire product suite can just get deprecated whenever they feel like it.
  - user5994461 6y ago
    It's really not comparable. Google is for companies and the smallest bill is $100 a month. Digital Ocean is for enthusiasts and the highest bill is $100 a month.
- chrisseaton 6y ago
  Seems a bit nonsensical to comment this on an article about how they're investing more in developer focus?
- erikrothoff 6y ago
  They recently increased the price of on-VM-storage by a minimum of 50% for larger plans (>100GB) in a pretty sneaky way, so I agree with the above sentiment. The pricing of recent releases is more towards large enterprise deployments or overly funded startups.
- fennecfoxen 6y ago
  What are you talking about? They sponsor Hacktoberfest, which gives people free T-shirts for spamming meaningless pull requests on open source projects on Github. How much more developer focus do you want?!?
- xenihn 6y ago
  Yes, there was a huge shift in leadership in 2018. Check out the linkedins of the founders and original employees. You'll see that they either left, or shifted from executives to board members.
nikon 6y ago
Bandwidth limits seem excessive? Outbound transfer – 40GiB per app Overall a cool idea. Would personally still prefer GCP Cloud Run which will bill me for request time only and allow me to scale based on requests per second.
- benbristow 6y ago
  Azure Static Apps could be a choice. Provides SPA + Functions support all in one deploy. https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/app-service/static/ https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/app-service/stati...
TheOtherWW 6y ago
A lot of folks come to DO for their lower costs, especially for egress. However, this App Platform is charging $0.10 per GB for bandwidth overage. That's 10x the cost of running your own Droplet/K8s cluster.
- js4ever 6y ago
  Probably because it's served by Cloudflare, so DO have to pay for Cloudflare bandwidth (0.10 per gb for enterprises products)
mrweasel 6y ago
Details aside, I think having a PAAS is awesome and something we’re really missing on AWS.
- tidepod12 6y ago
  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.
  - Existenceblinks 6y ago
    And it's been there for more than 6 years IIRC.
  - mrweasel 6y ago
    I had no idea that was the point of beanstalk. Now I know what I’m doing this evening.
    - quickthrower2 6y ago
      I was in the same boat until someone made me feel dumb after I smugly said why I moved from aws over to Heroku for a project. Too late for me though on this project. Have fun tonight!
    - jaywalk 6y ago
      Oh, the name Elastic Beanstalk didn't make it obvious??? /s
      - mrweasel 6y ago
        Weirdly enough no, and Amazon is normally so good and consistant in their naming of products.
  - libria 6y ago
    Amplify is also PaaS-ish. https://aws.amazon.com/amplify/ https://aws.amazon.com/amplify/
onion2k 6y ago
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. I want something that stops that happening.
- phildougherty 6y ago
  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.
  - onion2k 6y ago
    My point is that alerts aren't really enough. If I'm asleep or on a plane or something then it could be many hours before I even see an alert, by which time it's probably too late. I'd prefer to be able to set up rules beforehand that prevent an unforeseen bill. If the App Platform doesn't have that feature, and it isn't planned, that's OK but I'd argue that isn't really preventing a surprise bill as the marketing site claims. A warning isn't quite the same as prevention.
    - garettmd 6y ago
      Most autoscaling platforms let you define min and max types of restrictions. I assume DO would have the same functionality in their autoscaling.
      - bravura 6y ago
        Correct me if I'm wrong, but AWS doesn't allow you to do hard limits. I was creating a public S3 bucket today and wanted there to be a hard limit, so I couldn't get slapped with a huge AWS bill. Looking at the docs, it appears I can get alerts but not set a hard limit on my billing.
mitch-snipline 6y ago
I got quite excited at being able to stick my static sites on DO for free, but notice on this page[1] that only the first three are free, then it's $3/m/site. Perhaps I've been spoiled by services like Netlify. I'd be interested to know what the benefits are of using DO's service over free alternatives. [1] https://cloud.digitalocean.com/apps?i=6bf7f8 https://cloud.digitalocean.com/apps?i=6bf7f8
- phildougherty 6y ago
  Thanks, that is valuable feedback. We definitely recognize that there are other options out there that offer unlimited static sites. We feel that the additional features and capabilities offered by the platform including running scaled our dynamic workloads, workers, jobs, and databases - at a price point that is very competitive will provide you with value to make up for it - having these features just results in a different economic model for us.
  - withinboredom 6y ago
    It seems rather silly to limit the number of free sites unless you somehow restrict the number of accounts people can open. Also, by restricting, you lose the analytics to see how people are using the service when, not if, people start creating multiple accounts.
- sergeykish 6y ago
  Netlify Analytics $9/month per site [1], no way to download logs [2]. That said it is easy to deploy, free HTTPS [3] and they support MIME definitions in _headers [4]. I host on Google Cloud Storage, it is not that easy but not that hard either [5], GoAccess for web analytics, no HTTPS. I would be interesting to have a matrix of supported features on different platforms. And how deployment compares to Nginx, letsencrypt, git. [1] https://www.netlify.com/products/analytics/ https://www.netlify.com/products/analytics/ [2] https://community.netlify.com/t/download-raw-server-access-logs/6586 https://community.netlify.com/t/download-raw-server-access-l... [3] https://docs.netlify.com/domains-https/https-ssl/ https://docs.netlify.com/domains-https/https-ssl/ [4] https://docs.netlify.com/routing/headers/#syntax-for-the-headers-file https://docs.netlify.com/routing/headers/#syntax-for-the-hea... [5] http://sergeykish.com/google-cloud-storage-static-hosting http://sergeykish.com/google-cloud-storage-static-hosting
lizhang 6y ago
I would love a non-trivial demo app or webcast that uses some of the components (eg. service + DB + static site + multiple workers) to check out the configuration required to make everything work together. Maybe examples of how server/workers communicate, support for RPC, event queue. I'm in the process of figuring out all this stuff and App Platform sounds perfect, but without a starting point it may become more straightforward to take the platform-agnostic approach and spin up droplets where I control all of this.
nightowl_games 6y ago
This sounds good. I like DO. This sentence is a bit worrying though: "We automatically analyze your code, create containers, and run them on Kubernetes clusters." I still want to be able to make _some_ decisions as a developer.
- dubcanada 6y ago
  They analyse your code for things like composer.json or package.json to determine what base buildpack to use. You do have complete control over the configuration, see https://www.digitalocean.com/docs/app-platform/references/app-specification-reference/ https://www.digitalocean.com/docs/app-platform/references/ap...
renchap 6y ago
Is this based on knative? It seems very similar :)
- alexellisuk 6y ago
  It looks to be K8s + Istio, no scale to zero etc. https://twitter.com/alexellisuk/status/1306343018488791040 https://twitter.com/alexellisuk/status/1306343018488791040
devxpy 6y ago
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/ https://caprover.com/
- deleted 6y ago
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- robjan 6y ago
  Their value add is that it's a managed service
  - tupputuppu 6y ago
    So it's what - easier to buy? Can be managed from the same web site that you use to manage your droplets, instead of having two UIs?
- corobo 6y ago
  Well DigitalOcean usually have pretty amazing docs, which was something I found lacking with caprover. DO documentation feels like it was written for humans instead of.. I dunno caprover just feels too technically written. It activates the CBA "I'll find something easier to use" feeling Or yes, use their one click droplet and be using DO anyway except you manage the server if it breaks. Also auto scaling? That's on you
  - devxpy 6y ago
    I don't see DO mentioning auto scaling in their docs, links?
    - corobo 6y ago
      It's from this comment thread. Upcoming rather than available https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24698927 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24698927
user5994461 6y ago
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.
- ksajadi 6y ago
  There is also Cloud 66 which works with not only digital ocean but many other cloud providers, like a Heroku on top of any cloud.
  - joemclarke 6y ago
    I use cloud66, it works great!
  - leoplct 6y ago
    Cloud66 it's really a great service! I have been using for almost a year to deploy a rails stack and it works good.
- throw49477721 6y ago
  How does Heroku and these app hosting services handle updates to the underlying OS and other dependencies? Do they only patch non-breaking updates? Or are you on their schedule to ensure your app will run on the latest version?
  - user5994461 6y ago
    Who cares? The point is that it's their problem, you don't need to think about it, it's done for you. =) In practice your application restarts at least once a week. It's transparent because a new instance is started first and takes over. The provider can move applications around to add/drain servers and perform maintenance.
ramon 6y ago
I don't know why they make this scaling stuff so expensive, I understand we get technology but I mean no-one is actually going to get to that point from start. I was looking into Google App-engine it's so ridiculously expensive I was like hey it's cheaper for me to do my own clustering technology than anything else or maybe just buy a good server and host it myself.
- deleted 6y ago
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dkersten 6y ago
I just tried it out with a Jekyll site I have running on Cloudflare Worker Sites. It detected everything and is deploying but one thing I noticed is that deployment is kinda slow. My GitHub Actions pipeline to build the Jekyll site and deploy to Cloudflare takes less than 2 minutes (latest run took 1m 43s). DigitalOcean took 6 minutes in comparison. Sure, its not crazy, but 3x the time still seems excessive. It seems the bulk of the time was from installing ruby gems for Jekyll. Maybe GitHub Actions mirrors them or something so it can run faster? Besides that, it works great. Actual live performance seems as snappy as one would expect from a static site and setting it up was almost one click. I'll definitely be looking into this in more detail. First impressions are good and I may well migrate over for static site and API server (API server is currently running on a droplet as a single docker container, so seems like a nice way to lower the effort I have to put in). Everything else is running on AWS for.. reasons.. so this looks like a nice way to simplify my non-AWS stuff. I'll be experimenting with it over the coming days! The bandwidth limits are the biggest concern.
ramon 6y ago
Azure Static Web App is free and no limits compared to this offer, I can also scale Web Apps in Azure, not sure why I would choose the digital ocean option. Competition is good for us at least :).
- ilaksh 6y ago
  Free with no limits? For how long? What a load.
  - lostmsu 6y ago
    They give about 60 mins of compute per day for every app for free. Since 2012. Google AppEngine is very similar.
  - earthboundkid 6y ago
    Free, as in bear trap in the woods.
adav 6y ago
Happy to see easy docker support. But I guess my ideal PaaS would be to just tap in a docker image from a private registry rather than running a Dockerfile from a repo.
- phildougherty 6y ago
  That feature is on the roadmap!
futhey 6y ago
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 is $150 per month (vs. $15 for a droplet with 2 virtual CPUs). Seems like there are some pricing issues to work out.
- tupputuppu 6y ago
  Not sure what you mean. Heroku can autodeploy from a Github repo just as well? You don't need the CLI for that
- phildougherty 6y ago
  Thanks for your feedback on the pricing plans. We will definitely take a look at options and potentially roll out some additional plans soon.
- jonfriesen 6y ago
  Hey futhey, The team agreed that we had some gaps that needed to be filled, you will now see new plans: Basic $40/month 4GB RAM & 2 Shared vCPUs Pro $75/month 4GB RAM & 1 Dedicated vCPU We've also increased the vCPU count on the Pro $50/month plan from 1 to 2 vCPUS so it's now: Pro $50/month 4GB RAM & 2 Shared vCPUs
aejnsn 6y ago
HN when discussing their own project milestones: "Agile everything! Organic features." HN when discussing a new product: "OUTRAGE! It must support EVERYTHING I want on launch day!"
- tobr 6y ago
  Right, it’s almost as if there’s more than one person here, with more than one temperament.
  - stocknoob 6y ago
    A message board centered around startup accelerator might be expected to have a median temperament closer to a startup than a 100 year old accounting firm.
    - dang 6y ago
      HN has many different subpopulations and the startup founder subgroup became a small minority many years ago. There are probably more users here now who actively identify against startups than the other way around. Cycle of life.
- johncena33 6y ago
  > HN when discussing a new product: "OUTRAGE! It must support EVERYTHING I want on launch day!" You are describing internet mostly. There's simply too many unreasonable people on the internet.
elitan 6y ago
Cool. More players joining the "focus on code, not infrastructure" arena. I like it!
lookes 6y ago
The pricing is crazy!!
colinclerk 6y ago
We've been happy https://render.com 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).
- phildougherty 6y ago
  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.
  - sieabahlpark 6y ago
    Can you consider expanding a 3rd data center to somewhere else in the US besides SF and NYC? Like texas, chicago, or virginia?
- matt2000 6y ago
  Does Render run on AWS? Or it's own servers? Having a little trouble figuring out things like that and what regions they're in etc. Looks cool though.
  - anurag 6y ago
    Render runs on multiple VM providers (including GCP and AWS), and soon on bare metal. More info on geographies here: https://render.com/docs/regions https://render.com/docs/regions
ForHackernews 6y ago
This looks fantastic. I'm a big fan of DigitalOcean and their ongoing efforts to provide simpler, cheaper alternatives to the cloud giants. Their managed Kubernetes offering is a bargain compared to EKS.
avolcano 6y ago
Is it just me, or is $15/mo for the cheapest Postgres-with-backups a bit steep? Heroku's free DBs (or $9/mo basic plan) support daily backups. I've currently got a web app I'm just self-hosting on a DO VPS for $5/month. I have a Postgres DB on the same VPS (via a Docker image), with a 10-line shell script & cron job for backups to Backblaze B2 (which costs ~nothing/month for my tiny DB). Additionally, my web app is a Kotlin API and a Nuxt.js SSR server, so I think I'd have to set it up as two separate "apps" on this platform. That means I'd be going from $5/mo to $25/mo. On one hand, that's not a ton in the grand scheme of things. On the other hand, the whole reason I use DigitalOcean and self manage my infrastructure is to _not_ have to pay that kind of money for my projects with no revenue.
- asim 6y ago
  I think you're stating the reasons already. There are people who don't want to self manage. They want a fully managed solution and don't want to think about the ops.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- Sodman 6y ago
  This sounds a bit like the "Why pay for dropbox when rsync is free?" argument. Sure you can do all of that yourself, but for just $10 / mo (5->15) you don't have to worry about it. That's really what they're selling. $120 / year for peace of mind that your production DB is backed up is well worth it for a lot of people, especially if the alternative is potentially a bug in a homegrown shell script which could silently fail catastrophically and lose your whole DB.
  - simplify 6y ago
    > This sounds a bit like the "Why pay for dropbox when rsync is free?" argument. Sure you can do all of that yourself It doesn't sound like that argument. He compared it to Heroku's offerings, which are $0-9.
  - 6y ago
benboughton1 6y ago
I Like the example RSS app (https://github.com/do-community/rss-reader-api https://github.com/do-community/rss-reader-api) that DO provide. It's Django REST Framework but without a lot of the 'magic'. I reckon the DRF docs should link to it as a good example. When learning DRF from the docs tutorial it's so easy to get bogged down in the features that are meant to simplify everything that when something breaks it takes someone unfamiliar with the source a long time to troubleshoot. This example though, is very easy to follow.
amir734jj 6y ago
How is it different from Heroku? I'm and I think majority of the market in this segment is deeply invested in Heroku. How's it different?
- tupputuppu 6y ago
  It seems like their pitch is that it's a bit cheaper. Although it doesn't have most of the features Heroku has... nowadays they have some pretty great stuff, like a managed Postgres database connected to Kafka.
wasd 6y ago
Very cool. I'll definitely give it a test spin. I've been a big fan of PaaS but Render / App Engine / Beanstalk fall a bit short on dev ux. This looks the most promising. If you can add multiple regions and wildcard ssl, you'll solve 2 big problems we have with Heroku.
- anurag 6y ago
  If you're up for doing us a favor, I'd love to learn about the UX specifics we fell short on. Email is my username @render.com. Thank you!
deleted 6y ago
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xfalcox 6y ago
I really like this, but we need lower plans for smaller managed databases. A very small app composed of: - App Platform using 2 containers - $12 x 2 = $24 (not sure, price is weird) - PostgreSQL - $15 - Redis - $15 - Object Storage - $5 At ~$60 it becomes a bit too expensive.
- names_are_hard 6y ago
  Agreed. For me PaaS seems nice in theory until I start adding up the costs. For something that would generate revenue I'd go PaaS instead of playing sysadmin. But for my hobbies it's not worth it. I want a tiny postgres db, a tiny redis instance, a tiny bit of object storage...basically a tiny bit of everything. Maybe I'm not a good customer, I can accept that. I'm just happy it's possible to pay $5 and get a VM with 512 MB ram and 25GB of SSD storage, that would have been unthinkable $15 years ago. I have to manage everything on my own but I can run a few apps on that one VM. To steal an old saying, VMs are cheap if your time is worth nothing. My time on weekends is worth nothing. Shrug.
lloydatkinson 6y ago
Disappointing to not see .NET Core support in 2020
- raphaeljlps 6y ago
  Completely agree! I mean not even Java, which are two of the most used Languages/Platforms in the world.
  - lloydatkinson 6y ago
    All these new platforms seem to solely focus on JS/TS/Node (fair enough), Python (hmm I suppose that has a reasonable market share) and Go. Really, Go? It's barely used!
ev0xmusic 6y ago
Qovery helps any company to have a state of the art deployment platform on top of AWS, GCP, Azure, and Digital Ocean as well. More info here https://www.qovery.com/business https://www.qovery.com/business
erulabs 6y ago
Heh - this is extremely close to the company I am building! Shared Kubernetes is a great starting point, but unless the PaaS can be installed on _any_ Kube cluster I wonder how much of a step forward this really is. That said, auto-configuration guessing based on the contents of a GitHub repo is probably the future - Automatically get a redis server when you've installed a redis driver, etc.
EgoIncarnate 6y ago
Why are the bandwidth costs 10x higher than Droplets, Kubernetes, Spaces...?
bit_logic 6y ago
I looked at the page and FAQ but can't find a clear answer for this: does this have billing limits? That's the main reason why I don't use AWS or any major cloud for personal projects because there's potential for unlimited cost if something goes wrong. I would rather have a hard billing limit that just shuts down everything if it reaches the limit.
- nathanstitt 6y ago
  Not sure about the other cloud providers, but AWS has billing limits with email warnings when you approach them. https://docs.aws.amazon.com/awsaccountbilling/latest/aboutv2/budgets-managing-costs.html https://docs.aws.amazon.com/awsaccountbilling/latest/aboutv2...
  - anamexis 6y ago
    They aren't limits though, the email warnings is the only thing they actually do.
pier25 6y ago
The only way this would make sense is if Digital Ocean offered the PaaS layer for free (or very cheap) to boost the sales of their underlying services (droplets, spaces, etc). Otherwise, what's the point? It simply won't be able to compete. For example, static sites should be included for free on top of Spaces. There's no way this offering will be able to compete with Vercel, Netlify, or Firebase which all offer static sites for free with CDN. Vercel even includes 1TB of traffic per month, for free.
I_am_tiberius 6y ago
I would love to see an interface to Gitlab as well.
Matheus28 6y ago
$0.10/GiB bandwidth. Ouch. That's 10x what they charge for droplets exceeding their included bandwidth. Seems to follow the trend of grossly overcharging for bandwidth that most other PaaS providers do.
- atymic 6y ago
  Yea, that was my thought exactly. It's nuts, considering they offer Space (S3 alternative) with 1TB out outbound for $5/m (ignoring the fact that they are providing 250gb of storage as well). I was really keen on on until I saw that section.
- GordonS 6y ago
  That's insane - it's more than even Azure charge! They say in this very article how simple their pricing is, but that's just dishonest of they are charging for bandwidth (and through the nose at that).
Aeolun 6y ago
In terms of cost this seems silly. They say that it won’t get more expensive as you grow bigger, but that’s because it’s essentially a pre-deployed droplet. The benefit of PaaS offerings is generally that you pay per request. The bandwidth limits on this also seem incredibly out of whack with standard droplets.
antoncohen 6y ago
> The App Platform is one of the few PaaS products built on a shared Kubernetes platform. I wonder how they are doing this from a security standpoint. For customer workload isolation is every container actually a VM? The pricing/sizing kind of makes it look like that. > App Platform provides predictable, easy-to-understand pricing How? Outbound network is charged per-GB. I know autoscaling isn't supported yet, but hopefully they support setting a max number of instances. One of the things people like about DigitalOcean over other cloud services is that you can sign up to pay $X per month and know that is what exactly what you will pay, no surprises. > Upcoming features The list of things not supported yet includes auto-scaling and VPC. It is hard to imagine using a PaaS without autoscaling. And I wouldn't want to build out a microservices-like architecture without VPC. Overall I really like the concept of the offering. Simple PaaS, with custom container support, Kubernetes (for what it is worth in a PaaS, I don't know), and predictable pricing. That all sounds really good.
deleted 6y ago
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llacb47 6y ago
Please change the URL to https://www.digitalocean.com/blog/introducing-digitalocean-app-platform-reimagining-paas-to-make-it-simpler-for-you-to-build-deploy-and-scale-apps Yours is tracking clicks.
garrison 6y ago
I tried deploying a static site. DO App Platform makes the file page1/index.html available both at /page1 and at /page1/. If the page contains any relative links or images, it is impossible for both URLs to reference these links correctly. Most web servers handle this by redirecting /page1 to /page1/ before serving it. Netlify does this as well. Vercel works the same as DO in its default mode, but it allows the user to configure the trailing slash behavior to get the redirect. Hugo, for one, assumes all files are served with a trailing slash.
MarxOk 6y ago
Is it just me or is Heroku mostly dead now? Most people I know have given up on "PaaS" and gone back to plain EC2 etc. It's just not that hard to spin up an instance and deploy a rails/django or whatever app, especially with Docker now.
- trustfundbaby 6y ago
  I think its just you. Lots of people use Heroku, I have like 4-5 apps deployed on it, and I know quite a few smaller companies that were completely on it last I checked.
- colesantiago 6y ago
  > Is it just me or is Heroku mostly dead now? Not just you, I think Heroku is getting a bit pointless. After all, writing k8s yaml files and automating my infrastructure instead of focusing on my product gets me up in the morning, that's the real excitement. I shouldn't be the only one who is ecstatic about this. So anyway, why would anyone what to use a PaaS?
wolfgang000 6y ago
Nice initiative but I'm gonna stick with Dokku for now, after jumping between google app engine, heroku, plain old tar over scp and other custom solutions I find dokku the perfect option for small and side projects. dokku manage to hit that sweet spot of making everything easy and convenient but still let you do fine tweaks if you need it
simonw 6y ago
I tried this out today and figured out how to run a custom Python application there. You only need two files in a GitHub repo for that: a requirements.txt listing your dependencies and a Procfile that starts a process listening on port $PORT and IP 0.0.0.0. My Procfile looks like this: web: datasette . -h 0.0.0.0 -p $PORT Full notes here: https://til.simonwillison.net/til/til/digitalocean_datasette-on-digitalocean-app-platform.md https://til.simonwillison.net/til/til/digitalocean_datasette...
- vdfs 6y ago
  This is built on top of Heroku runtime, more info on Procfile here: https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/procfile https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/procfile Also, note that you shouldn't use SQLite, at least with heroku, because apps should be stateless https://12factor.net/processes https://12factor.net/processes
  - lolinder 6y ago
    Please avoid prescribing best practices without understanding the architecture OP is working with. First, you don't actually know that using SQLite would make the OP's app stateful—if datasette is set up in immutable mode, then the .db files are no more indicative of a stateful process than a static CSV or a JSON or YAML config. Second, not every app needs to be a 12 factor app, and you're not in a position to understand the trade-offs OP is dealing with. "Best practices" rarely are best in every circumstance, and often conflict.
  - simonw 6y ago
    I'm deliberately using SQLite here because my use-case is read-only. https://fivethirtyeight.datasettes.com/ https://fivethirtyeight.datasettes.com/ is a demo that I've been running on Heroku for over a year now - the trick is that if your data never changes you can package up the SQLite .db file as part of the deployment.
nirui 6y ago
$5 a month for the cheapest option? I mean, the cheapest Droplet is $5 a month with 1GB of Memory, 1 vCPU, 1TB transfer and 25GB storage. While the same tier of App Platform only gives you 512MiB of Memory and 40GiB Outbound transfer, plus you have to pay extra for the storage/db. Why the price varied this much? Kubernetes was that expensive?
AnonC 6y ago
Seems like someone from DigitalOcean is reading and responding to comments here. I won’t touch or recommend DigitalOcean to anyone unless it employs some humans to address and respond to queries instead of sending the same automated replies. The very first time I created an account, it charged my card for verification and then blocked my account (the charge was also immediately reversed) since its systems believed this was fraud. There was no way to get to a human, get any additional verification done and get my account reinstated. All I got was a string of automated replies with the same text. I decided then that this is not a company to rely on. I don’t mind fraud protection measures, and am willing to provide additional verification based on what’s asked for and relevance. But there’s no such process with this company. Later I see large scale layoffs in DigitalOcean, and I don’t think the situation could get any better. I know the same kind of lack of customer service could be said of Google and certain other companies too. But DigitalOcean made my very first experience a bitter one and to advocate against it.
- waheoo 6y ago
  Hah I had the opposite effect of getting to deal with a rude gatekeeper when I needed to create more than the I itial 5 instances they limit you to. I moved to lightsail. It has problems but at least AWS support treats you like a human.
  - tommica 6y ago
    I've had a different experience in regards of their communication - they've been nice to answer my questions in a timely fashion, for example about the instance amount, while running just a few servers
- aerovistae 6y ago
  By contrast, as a free user of heroku I've gotten support from _actual engineers rather than support staff._ AS A NON-PAYING USER!! literally never happened to me before. Love them.
- kanwisher 6y ago
  Surprised you need to post anonymously ;/ I just had an issue and I got a support staff to respond to me within a day. Maybe bad luck.
cabalamat 6y ago
Does this work with MongoDB? The documentation seems to imply you can only use MySQL, Redis, or PostgreSQL.
ilmiont 6y ago
I was really excited about this when I got the email a few weeks ago with a beta invite but after two minutes I realised I’d be unable to use it, and still can’t now it’s launched... Why oh why is GitHub now considered the single place where code lives? Even as alternative providers gain in popularity. It’s really sad to see DigitalOcean requiring this for some reason. Please either allow use of arbitrary Git repositories (e.g. self-hosted GitLab in my use case) or provide a stand-alone CLI tool to enable deployment of anything, like Firebase does. Disappointing so far.
- edem 6y ago
  Maybe 95% of people use it and it made sense to them, who knows?
- RikNieu 6y ago
  I hope this is in the backlog, because I'm not switching for GitLab for this.
- SifJar 6y ago
  From article: > You can deploy the source code directly from your GitHub repositories (support for GitLab and Bitbucket is coming soon). Naming specific git hosts suggests it may not be available on "arbitrary Git repositiories" in the near future, but looks like they are at least planning to broaden the options for where to have your code live
  - capableweb 6y ago
    Such a weird approach that seems repeated by many. Instead of building something general that works for most cases and is easier to implement, they focus on specialized cases of specific SCM platforms. If they started with support Git Remotes and then supporting specific platforms, they would have covered all use cases from the get-go, albeit with slightly poorer UX. But instead they chose to only support specific platforms, missing plenty of people who actually want to use this, but can't.
    - 6y ago
desmap 6y ago
Why are people upvoting this? Serious question. An easy and proprietary deploy layer isn't anything new. Docker makes it already quite easy to deploy anything, either to a single machine with docker-compose or k8s for multiple nodes. Former isn't much harder than any "app platform", is enough for most, you aren't vendor-locked-in and hosting costs are at the lowest since it's bare-metal. You want something easier? There are already gazillions other (proprietary) options. Maybe I missed something but I don't get what makes DO any special here.
taytus 6y ago
So this is something that in theory would compete with Laravel Forge but more expensive? I have more than 30 sites with Digital Ocean and I manage them via Forge. Total I pay is about $100/month including the droplet. I would have to pay $150/month ONLY for the apps without including the droplet if I use this system? Am I missing something?
leoplct 6y ago
What are the differences with Cloud66?
02020202 6y ago
Free plan has 1 Gib/month egress => 1 Gib / 8 = 125 MB / 30 days = 15,6 MB / 86400 seconds = 0,0001808 MB/s Basic plan has 40 Gib/month egress = 0,0001808 * 40 = 0,00723 MB/s Professional plan has 100 Gib/month = 0,0001808 * 100 = 0,0018 MB/s That's not much if you need to server some actual content. This is really just to run cheap workers that don't require much cpu/ram and networking. And even then it might be cheaper to just get a vps.
abol3z 6y ago
Jelastic PaaS did this a long time ago, and in much better form. It is possible to automatically scale your apps horizontally or vertically without any additional configs. I really don't understand why it is not that popular, It is the smoothest cloud experience I had compared to any other PaaS I tested.

646 points by digianarchist 6y ago

Tried this out in early access and wanted to love and use it however a few things that made it not workable: * wildcard subdomains aren't supported. * Only CNAMEs to digital ocean's CDN are supported (can't have an A record). * There was no way to run a console command. * Bandwidth is 12x higher than usual droplets and unlike standard droplets there isn't an included bandwidth pool.

quaffapint 6y ago
The bandwidth piece is interesting. I guess if you really have a need for bandwidth just use their K8s offering which is free and you just pay for droplets (with much more bandwidth)/networking. It will require more setup, but you will end up with higher bandwidth.
- dkersten 6y ago
  "Just use k8s" isn't a solution as k8s is a complex beast.
  - quaffapint 6y ago
    Agreed, but they provide the management of the infrastructure. You will need to setup the services/pods, but it does then give you droplets with higher bandwidth if that is your need.
phildougherty 6y ago
Thanks for the feedback! I will be sure to address your points with the team as we continue to develop our roadmap. One thing to point out is that there is now console access available in the product.
dubcanada 6y ago
> * There was no way to run a console command. There is a console now, was added a few weeks ago.
GordonS 6y ago
> Bandwidth is 12x higher than usual droplets and unlike standard droplets there isn't an included bandwidth pool I'm particularly disappointed to hear this. Digital Ocean likes to say they have simple and predicable pricing, they even say so in TFA - charging high prices for bandwidth is surely the most despised practice of the big 3 cloud providers. I don't expect this from DP. I'm not angry, I'm just disappointed...

izolate 6y ago

> If you have apps in other languages, you can quickly deploy using the App Platform by providing the appropriate Dockerfile in the source repo I'm happy to see this. Makes it a viable contender to GCP Cloud Run, which has become my favorite way to deploy serverless apps.

bizzleDawg 6y ago

I'd be interested to know if this is integrated and rebranded nanobox [0]? Or something completely from scratch? [0]: https://nanobox.io/ https://nanobox.io/

phildougherty 6y ago
We certainly took a lot of inspiration and leaned on the awesome experience of the nanobox team, but this is largely a completely different architecture.
- sciurus 6y ago
  Can you tell us anything about the architecture?
  - phildougherty 6y ago
    We will be revealing a lot more about the architecture at our upcoming virtual conference called Deploy that is happening Nov 10-11th. There are a few sessions that touch on how the platform was implemented and I encourage you to tune in for those! (schedule to be announced soon). https://www.digitalocean.com/deploy/ https://www.digitalocean.com/deploy/
  - alexellisuk 6y ago
    This is what I found out by printing the environment variables: https://twitter.com/alexellisuk/status/1306343018488791040 https://twitter.com/alexellisuk/status/1306343018488791040
- Existenceblinks 6y ago
  Wasn't the Appsail nanobox? IIRC, it was planed to be DO's PaaS, so it's cancelled and then DO's PaaS is based on k8s instead?
  - dubcanada 6y ago
    Appsail was nanobox from what I saw, they redid it between appsail and "apps".

leadetes 6y ago

Digital Ocean has really changed. Just get the feeling leadership or something changed internally to pivot away from being customer/developer focused. I'll stick with gcp.

kgraves 6y ago
Disagree on GCP. Extremely hesitant to GCP ever since they performed that price hike of their GKE product for their control plane. I really can't trust them anymore, given that nearly all of Google's entire product suite can just get deprecated whenever they feel like it.
- user5994461 6y ago
  It's really not comparable. Google is for companies and the smallest bill is $100 a month. Digital Ocean is for enthusiasts and the highest bill is $100 a month.
chrisseaton 6y ago
Seems a bit nonsensical to comment this on an article about how they're investing more in developer focus?
erikrothoff 6y ago
They recently increased the price of on-VM-storage by a minimum of 50% for larger plans (>100GB) in a pretty sneaky way, so I agree with the above sentiment. The pricing of recent releases is more towards large enterprise deployments or overly funded startups.
fennecfoxen 6y ago
What are you talking about? They sponsor Hacktoberfest, which gives people free T-shirts for spamming meaningless pull requests on open source projects on Github. How much more developer focus do you want?!?
xenihn 6y ago
Yes, there was a huge shift in leadership in 2018. Check out the linkedins of the founders and original employees. You'll see that they either left, or shifted from executives to board members.

nikon 6y ago

Bandwidth limits seem excessive? Outbound transfer – 40GiB per app Overall a cool idea. Would personally still prefer GCP Cloud Run which will bill me for request time only and allow me to scale based on requests per second.

benbristow 6y ago
Azure Static Apps could be a choice. Provides SPA + Functions support all in one deploy. https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/app-service/static/ https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/app-service/stati...

TheOtherWW 6y ago

A lot of folks come to DO for their lower costs, especially for egress. However, this App Platform is charging $0.10 per GB for bandwidth overage. That's 10x the cost of running your own Droplet/K8s cluster.

js4ever 6y ago
Probably because it's served by Cloudflare, so DO have to pay for Cloudflare bandwidth (0.10 per gb for enterprises products)

mrweasel 6y ago

Details aside, I think having a PAAS is awesome and something we’re really missing on AWS.

tidepod12 6y ago
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.
- Existenceblinks 6y ago
  And it's been there for more than 6 years IIRC.
- mrweasel 6y ago
  I had no idea that was the point of beanstalk. Now I know what I’m doing this evening.
  - quickthrower2 6y ago
    I was in the same boat until someone made me feel dumb after I smugly said why I moved from aws over to Heroku for a project. Too late for me though on this project. Have fun tonight!
  - jaywalk 6y ago
    Oh, the name Elastic Beanstalk didn't make it obvious??? /s
    - mrweasel 6y ago
      Weirdly enough no, and Amazon is normally so good and consistant in their naming of products.
- libria 6y ago
  Amplify is also PaaS-ish. https://aws.amazon.com/amplify/ https://aws.amazon.com/amplify/

onion2k 6y ago

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. I want something that stops that happening.

phildougherty 6y ago
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.
- onion2k 6y ago
  My point is that alerts aren't really enough. If I'm asleep or on a plane or something then it could be many hours before I even see an alert, by which time it's probably too late. I'd prefer to be able to set up rules beforehand that prevent an unforeseen bill. If the App Platform doesn't have that feature, and it isn't planned, that's OK but I'd argue that isn't really preventing a surprise bill as the marketing site claims. A warning isn't quite the same as prevention.
  - garettmd 6y ago
    Most autoscaling platforms let you define min and max types of restrictions. I assume DO would have the same functionality in their autoscaling.
    - bravura 6y ago
      Correct me if I'm wrong, but AWS doesn't allow you to do hard limits. I was creating a public S3 bucket today and wanted there to be a hard limit, so I couldn't get slapped with a huge AWS bill. Looking at the docs, it appears I can get alerts but not set a hard limit on my billing.

mitch-snipline 6y ago

I got quite excited at being able to stick my static sites on DO for free, but notice on this page[1] that only the first three are free, then it's $3/m/site. Perhaps I've been spoiled by services like Netlify. I'd be interested to know what the benefits are of using DO's service over free alternatives. [1] https://cloud.digitalocean.com/apps?i=6bf7f8 https://cloud.digitalocean.com/apps?i=6bf7f8

phildougherty 6y ago
Thanks, that is valuable feedback. We definitely recognize that there are other options out there that offer unlimited static sites. We feel that the additional features and capabilities offered by the platform including running scaled our dynamic workloads, workers, jobs, and databases - at a price point that is very competitive will provide you with value to make up for it - having these features just results in a different economic model for us.
- withinboredom 6y ago
  It seems rather silly to limit the number of free sites unless you somehow restrict the number of accounts people can open. Also, by restricting, you lose the analytics to see how people are using the service when, not if, people start creating multiple accounts.
sergeykish 6y ago
Netlify Analytics $9/month per site [1], no way to download logs [2]. That said it is easy to deploy, free HTTPS [3] and they support MIME definitions in _headers [4]. I host on Google Cloud Storage, it is not that easy but not that hard either [5], GoAccess for web analytics, no HTTPS. I would be interesting to have a matrix of supported features on different platforms. And how deployment compares to Nginx, letsencrypt, git. [1] https://www.netlify.com/products/analytics/ https://www.netlify.com/products/analytics/ [2] https://community.netlify.com/t/download-raw-server-access-logs/6586 https://community.netlify.com/t/download-raw-server-access-l... [3] https://docs.netlify.com/domains-https/https-ssl/ https://docs.netlify.com/domains-https/https-ssl/ [4] https://docs.netlify.com/routing/headers/#syntax-for-the-headers-file https://docs.netlify.com/routing/headers/#syntax-for-the-hea... [5] http://sergeykish.com/google-cloud-storage-static-hosting http://sergeykish.com/google-cloud-storage-static-hosting

lizhang 6y ago

I would love a non-trivial demo app or webcast that uses some of the components (eg. service + DB + static site + multiple workers) to check out the configuration required to make everything work together. Maybe examples of how server/workers communicate, support for RPC, event queue. I'm in the process of figuring out all this stuff and App Platform sounds perfect, but without a starting point it may become more straightforward to take the platform-agnostic approach and spin up droplets where I control all of this.

nightowl_games 6y ago

This sounds good. I like DO. This sentence is a bit worrying though: "We automatically analyze your code, create containers, and run them on Kubernetes clusters." I still want to be able to make _some_ decisions as a developer.

dubcanada 6y ago
They analyse your code for things like composer.json or package.json to determine what base buildpack to use. You do have complete control over the configuration, see https://www.digitalocean.com/docs/app-platform/references/app-specification-reference/ https://www.digitalocean.com/docs/app-platform/references/ap...

renchap 6y ago

Is this based on knative? It seems very similar :)

alexellisuk 6y ago
It looks to be K8s + Istio, no scale to zero etc. https://twitter.com/alexellisuk/status/1306343018488791040 https://twitter.com/alexellisuk/status/1306343018488791040

devxpy 6y ago

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/ https://caprover.com/

deleted 6y ago
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robjan 6y ago
Their value add is that it's a managed service
- tupputuppu 6y ago
  So it's what - easier to buy? Can be managed from the same web site that you use to manage your droplets, instead of having two UIs?
corobo 6y ago
Well DigitalOcean usually have pretty amazing docs, which was something I found lacking with caprover. DO documentation feels like it was written for humans instead of.. I dunno caprover just feels too technically written. It activates the CBA "I'll find something easier to use" feeling Or yes, use their one click droplet and be using DO anyway except you manage the server if it breaks. Also auto scaling? That's on you
- devxpy 6y ago
  I don't see DO mentioning auto scaling in their docs, links?
  - corobo 6y ago
    It's from this comment thread. Upcoming rather than available https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24698927 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24698927

user5994461 6y ago

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.

ksajadi 6y ago
There is also Cloud 66 which works with not only digital ocean but many other cloud providers, like a Heroku on top of any cloud.
- joemclarke 6y ago
  I use cloud66, it works great!
- leoplct 6y ago
  Cloud66 it's really a great service! I have been using for almost a year to deploy a rails stack and it works good.
throw49477721 6y ago
How does Heroku and these app hosting services handle updates to the underlying OS and other dependencies? Do they only patch non-breaking updates? Or are you on their schedule to ensure your app will run on the latest version?
- user5994461 6y ago
  Who cares? The point is that it's their problem, you don't need to think about it, it's done for you. =) In practice your application restarts at least once a week. It's transparent because a new instance is started first and takes over. The provider can move applications around to add/drain servers and perform maintenance.

ramon 6y ago

I don't know why they make this scaling stuff so expensive, I understand we get technology but I mean no-one is actually going to get to that point from start. I was looking into Google App-engine it's so ridiculously expensive I was like hey it's cheaper for me to do my own clustering technology than anything else or maybe just buy a good server and host it myself.

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dkersten 6y ago

I just tried it out with a Jekyll site I have running on Cloudflare Worker Sites. It detected everything and is deploying but one thing I noticed is that deployment is kinda slow. My GitHub Actions pipeline to build the Jekyll site and deploy to Cloudflare takes less than 2 minutes (latest run took 1m 43s). DigitalOcean took 6 minutes in comparison. Sure, its not crazy, but 3x the time still seems excessive. It seems the bulk of the time was from installing ruby gems for Jekyll. Maybe GitHub Actions mirrors them or something so it can run faster? Besides that, it works great. Actual live performance seems as snappy as one would expect from a static site and setting it up was almost one click. I'll definitely be looking into this in more detail. First impressions are good and I may well migrate over for static site and API server (API server is currently running on a droplet as a single docker container, so seems like a nice way to lower the effort I have to put in). Everything else is running on AWS for.. reasons.. so this looks like a nice way to simplify my non-AWS stuff. I'll be experimenting with it over the coming days! The bandwidth limits are the biggest concern.

ramon 6y ago

Azure Static Web App is free and no limits compared to this offer, I can also scale Web Apps in Azure, not sure why I would choose the digital ocean option. Competition is good for us at least :).

ilaksh 6y ago
Free with no limits? For how long? What a load.
- lostmsu 6y ago
  They give about 60 mins of compute per day for every app for free. Since 2012. Google AppEngine is very similar.
- earthboundkid 6y ago
  Free, as in bear trap in the woods.

adav 6y ago

Happy to see easy docker support. But I guess my ideal PaaS would be to just tap in a docker image from a private registry rather than running a Dockerfile from a repo.

phildougherty 6y ago
That feature is on the roadmap!

futhey 6y ago

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 is $150 per month (vs. $15 for a droplet with 2 virtual CPUs). Seems like there are some pricing issues to work out.

tupputuppu 6y ago
Not sure what you mean. Heroku can autodeploy from a Github repo just as well? You don't need the CLI for that
phildougherty 6y ago
Thanks for your feedback on the pricing plans. We will definitely take a look at options and potentially roll out some additional plans soon.
jonfriesen 6y ago
Hey futhey, The team agreed that we had some gaps that needed to be filled, you will now see new plans: Basic $40/month 4GB RAM & 2 Shared vCPUs Pro $75/month 4GB RAM & 1 Dedicated vCPU We've also increased the vCPU count on the Pro $50/month plan from 1 to 2 vCPUS so it's now: Pro $50/month 4GB RAM & 2 Shared vCPUs

aejnsn 6y ago

HN when discussing their own project milestones: "Agile everything! Organic features." HN when discussing a new product: "OUTRAGE! It must support EVERYTHING I want on launch day!"

tobr 6y ago
Right, it’s almost as if there’s more than one person here, with more than one temperament.
- stocknoob 6y ago
  A message board centered around startup accelerator might be expected to have a median temperament closer to a startup than a 100 year old accounting firm.
  - dang 6y ago
    HN has many different subpopulations and the startup founder subgroup became a small minority many years ago. There are probably more users here now who actively identify against startups than the other way around. Cycle of life.
johncena33 6y ago
> HN when discussing a new product: "OUTRAGE! It must support EVERYTHING I want on launch day!" You are describing internet mostly. There's simply too many unreasonable people on the internet.

elitan 6y ago

Cool. More players joining the "focus on code, not infrastructure" arena. I like it!

lookes 6y ago

The pricing is crazy!!

colinclerk 6y ago

We've been happy https://render.com 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).

phildougherty 6y ago
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.
- sieabahlpark 6y ago
  Can you consider expanding a 3rd data center to somewhere else in the US besides SF and NYC? Like texas, chicago, or virginia?
matt2000 6y ago
Does Render run on AWS? Or it's own servers? Having a little trouble figuring out things like that and what regions they're in etc. Looks cool though.
- anurag 6y ago
  Render runs on multiple VM providers (including GCP and AWS), and soon on bare metal. More info on geographies here: https://render.com/docs/regions https://render.com/docs/regions

ForHackernews 6y ago

This looks fantastic. I'm a big fan of DigitalOcean and their ongoing efforts to provide simpler, cheaper alternatives to the cloud giants. Their managed Kubernetes offering is a bargain compared to EKS.

avolcano 6y ago

Is it just me, or is $15/mo for the cheapest Postgres-with-backups a bit steep? Heroku's free DBs (or $9/mo basic plan) support daily backups. I've currently got a web app I'm just self-hosting on a DO VPS for $5/month. I have a Postgres DB on the same VPS (via a Docker image), with a 10-line shell script & cron job for backups to Backblaze B2 (which costs ~nothing/month for my tiny DB). Additionally, my web app is a Kotlin API and a Nuxt.js SSR server, so I think I'd have to set it up as two separate "apps" on this platform. That means I'd be going from $5/mo to $25/mo. On one hand, that's not a ton in the grand scheme of things. On the other hand, the whole reason I use DigitalOcean and self manage my infrastructure is to _not_ have to pay that kind of money for my projects with no revenue.

asim 6y ago
I think you're stating the reasons already. There are people who don't want to self manage. They want a fully managed solution and don't want to think about the ops.
- deleted 6y ago
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Sodman 6y ago
This sounds a bit like the "Why pay for dropbox when rsync is free?" argument. Sure you can do all of that yourself, but for just $10 / mo (5->15) you don't have to worry about it. That's really what they're selling. $120 / year for peace of mind that your production DB is backed up is well worth it for a lot of people, especially if the alternative is potentially a bug in a homegrown shell script which could silently fail catastrophically and lose your whole DB.
- simplify 6y ago
  > This sounds a bit like the "Why pay for dropbox when rsync is free?" argument. Sure you can do all of that yourself It doesn't sound like that argument. He compared it to Heroku's offerings, which are $0-9.
- 6y ago

benboughton1 6y ago

I Like the example RSS app (https://github.com/do-community/rss-reader-api https://github.com/do-community/rss-reader-api) that DO provide. It's Django REST Framework but without a lot of the 'magic'. I reckon the DRF docs should link to it as a good example. When learning DRF from the docs tutorial it's so easy to get bogged down in the features that are meant to simplify everything that when something breaks it takes someone unfamiliar with the source a long time to troubleshoot. This example though, is very easy to follow.

amir734jj 6y ago

How is it different from Heroku? I'm and I think majority of the market in this segment is deeply invested in Heroku. How's it different?

tupputuppu 6y ago
It seems like their pitch is that it's a bit cheaper. Although it doesn't have most of the features Heroku has... nowadays they have some pretty great stuff, like a managed Postgres database connected to Kafka.

wasd 6y ago

Very cool. I'll definitely give it a test spin. I've been a big fan of PaaS but Render / App Engine / Beanstalk fall a bit short on dev ux. This looks the most promising. If you can add multiple regions and wildcard ssl, you'll solve 2 big problems we have with Heroku.

anurag 6y ago
If you're up for doing us a favor, I'd love to learn about the UX specifics we fell short on. Email is my username @render.com. Thank you!

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xfalcox 6y ago

I really like this, but we need lower plans for smaller managed databases. A very small app composed of: - App Platform using 2 containers - $12 x 2 = $24 (not sure, price is weird) - PostgreSQL - $15 - Redis - $15 - Object Storage - $5 At ~$60 it becomes a bit too expensive.

names_are_hard 6y ago
Agreed. For me PaaS seems nice in theory until I start adding up the costs. For something that would generate revenue I'd go PaaS instead of playing sysadmin. But for my hobbies it's not worth it. I want a tiny postgres db, a tiny redis instance, a tiny bit of object storage...basically a tiny bit of everything. Maybe I'm not a good customer, I can accept that. I'm just happy it's possible to pay $5 and get a VM with 512 MB ram and 25GB of SSD storage, that would have been unthinkable $15 years ago. I have to manage everything on my own but I can run a few apps on that one VM. To steal an old saying, VMs are cheap if your time is worth nothing. My time on weekends is worth nothing. Shrug.

lloydatkinson 6y ago

Disappointing to not see .NET Core support in 2020

raphaeljlps 6y ago
Completely agree! I mean not even Java, which are two of the most used Languages/Platforms in the world.
- lloydatkinson 6y ago
  All these new platforms seem to solely focus on JS/TS/Node (fair enough), Python (hmm I suppose that has a reasonable market share) and Go. Really, Go? It's barely used!

ev0xmusic 6y ago

Qovery helps any company to have a state of the art deployment platform on top of AWS, GCP, Azure, and Digital Ocean as well. More info here https://www.qovery.com/business https://www.qovery.com/business

erulabs 6y ago

Heh - this is extremely close to the company I am building! Shared Kubernetes is a great starting point, but unless the PaaS can be installed on _any_ Kube cluster I wonder how much of a step forward this really is. That said, auto-configuration guessing based on the contents of a GitHub repo is probably the future - Automatically get a redis server when you've installed a redis driver, etc.

EgoIncarnate 6y ago

Why are the bandwidth costs 10x higher than Droplets, Kubernetes, Spaces...?

bit_logic 6y ago

I looked at the page and FAQ but can't find a clear answer for this: does this have billing limits? That's the main reason why I don't use AWS or any major cloud for personal projects because there's potential for unlimited cost if something goes wrong. I would rather have a hard billing limit that just shuts down everything if it reaches the limit.

nathanstitt 6y ago
Not sure about the other cloud providers, but AWS has billing limits with email warnings when you approach them. https://docs.aws.amazon.com/awsaccountbilling/latest/aboutv2/budgets-managing-costs.html https://docs.aws.amazon.com/awsaccountbilling/latest/aboutv2...
- anamexis 6y ago
  They aren't limits though, the email warnings is the only thing they actually do.

pier25 6y ago

The only way this would make sense is if Digital Ocean offered the PaaS layer for free (or very cheap) to boost the sales of their underlying services (droplets, spaces, etc). Otherwise, what's the point? It simply won't be able to compete. For example, static sites should be included for free on top of Spaces. There's no way this offering will be able to compete with Vercel, Netlify, or Firebase which all offer static sites for free with CDN. Vercel even includes 1TB of traffic per month, for free.

I_am_tiberius 6y ago

I would love to see an interface to Gitlab as well.

Matheus28 6y ago

$0.10/GiB bandwidth. Ouch. That's 10x what they charge for droplets exceeding their included bandwidth. Seems to follow the trend of grossly overcharging for bandwidth that most other PaaS providers do.

atymic 6y ago
Yea, that was my thought exactly. It's nuts, considering they offer Space (S3 alternative) with 1TB out outbound for $5/m (ignoring the fact that they are providing 250gb of storage as well). I was really keen on on until I saw that section.
GordonS 6y ago
That's insane - it's more than even Azure charge! They say in this very article how simple their pricing is, but that's just dishonest of they are charging for bandwidth (and through the nose at that).

Aeolun 6y ago

In terms of cost this seems silly. They say that it won’t get more expensive as you grow bigger, but that’s because it’s essentially a pre-deployed droplet. The benefit of PaaS offerings is generally that you pay per request. The bandwidth limits on this also seem incredibly out of whack with standard droplets.

antoncohen 6y ago

> The App Platform is one of the few PaaS products built on a shared Kubernetes platform. I wonder how they are doing this from a security standpoint. For customer workload isolation is every container actually a VM? The pricing/sizing kind of makes it look like that. > App Platform provides predictable, easy-to-understand pricing How? Outbound network is charged per-GB. I know autoscaling isn't supported yet, but hopefully they support setting a max number of instances. One of the things people like about DigitalOcean over other cloud services is that you can sign up to pay $X per month and know that is what exactly what you will pay, no surprises. > Upcoming features The list of things not supported yet includes auto-scaling and VPC. It is hard to imagine using a PaaS without autoscaling. And I wouldn't want to build out a microservices-like architecture without VPC. Overall I really like the concept of the offering. Simple PaaS, with custom container support, Kubernetes (for what it is worth in a PaaS, I don't know), and predictable pricing. That all sounds really good.

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llacb47 6y ago

Please change the URL to https://www.digitalocean.com/blog/introducing-digitalocean-app-platform-reimagining-paas-to-make-it-simpler-for-you-to-build-deploy-and-scale-apps Yours is tracking clicks.

garrison 6y ago

I tried deploying a static site. DO App Platform makes the file page1/index.html available both at /page1 and at /page1/. If the page contains any relative links or images, it is impossible for both URLs to reference these links correctly. Most web servers handle this by redirecting /page1 to /page1/ before serving it. Netlify does this as well. Vercel works the same as DO in its default mode, but it allows the user to configure the trailing slash behavior to get the redirect. Hugo, for one, assumes all files are served with a trailing slash.

MarxOk 6y ago

Is it just me or is Heroku mostly dead now? Most people I know have given up on "PaaS" and gone back to plain EC2 etc. It's just not that hard to spin up an instance and deploy a rails/django or whatever app, especially with Docker now.

trustfundbaby 6y ago
I think its just you. Lots of people use Heroku, I have like 4-5 apps deployed on it, and I know quite a few smaller companies that were completely on it last I checked.
colesantiago 6y ago
> Is it just me or is Heroku mostly dead now? Not just you, I think Heroku is getting a bit pointless. After all, writing k8s yaml files and automating my infrastructure instead of focusing on my product gets me up in the morning, that's the real excitement. I shouldn't be the only one who is ecstatic about this. So anyway, why would anyone what to use a PaaS?

wolfgang000 6y ago

Nice initiative but I'm gonna stick with Dokku for now, after jumping between google app engine, heroku, plain old tar over scp and other custom solutions I find dokku the perfect option for small and side projects. dokku manage to hit that sweet spot of making everything easy and convenient but still let you do fine tweaks if you need it

simonw 6y ago

I tried this out today and figured out how to run a custom Python application there. You only need two files in a GitHub repo for that: a requirements.txt listing your dependencies and a Procfile that starts a process listening on port $PORT and IP 0.0.0.0. My Procfile looks like this: web: datasette . -h 0.0.0.0 -p $PORT Full notes here: https://til.simonwillison.net/til/til/digitalocean_datasette-on-digitalocean-app-platform.md https://til.simonwillison.net/til/til/digitalocean_datasette...

vdfs 6y ago
This is built on top of Heroku runtime, more info on Procfile here: https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/procfile https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/procfile Also, note that you shouldn't use SQLite, at least with heroku, because apps should be stateless https://12factor.net/processes https://12factor.net/processes
- lolinder 6y ago
  Please avoid prescribing best practices without understanding the architecture OP is working with. First, you don't actually know that using SQLite would make the OP's app stateful—if datasette is set up in immutable mode, then the .db files are no more indicative of a stateful process than a static CSV or a JSON or YAML config. Second, not every app needs to be a 12 factor app, and you're not in a position to understand the trade-offs OP is dealing with. "Best practices" rarely are best in every circumstance, and often conflict.
- simonw 6y ago
  I'm deliberately using SQLite here because my use-case is read-only. https://fivethirtyeight.datasettes.com/ https://fivethirtyeight.datasettes.com/ is a demo that I've been running on Heroku for over a year now - the trick is that if your data never changes you can package up the SQLite .db file as part of the deployment.

nirui 6y ago

$5 a month for the cheapest option? I mean, the cheapest Droplet is $5 a month with 1GB of Memory, 1 vCPU, 1TB transfer and 25GB storage. While the same tier of App Platform only gives you 512MiB of Memory and 40GiB Outbound transfer, plus you have to pay extra for the storage/db. Why the price varied this much? Kubernetes was that expensive?

AnonC 6y ago

Seems like someone from DigitalOcean is reading and responding to comments here. I won’t touch or recommend DigitalOcean to anyone unless it employs some humans to address and respond to queries instead of sending the same automated replies. The very first time I created an account, it charged my card for verification and then blocked my account (the charge was also immediately reversed) since its systems believed this was fraud. There was no way to get to a human, get any additional verification done and get my account reinstated. All I got was a string of automated replies with the same text. I decided then that this is not a company to rely on. I don’t mind fraud protection measures, and am willing to provide additional verification based on what’s asked for and relevance. But there’s no such process with this company. Later I see large scale layoffs in DigitalOcean, and I don’t think the situation could get any better. I know the same kind of lack of customer service could be said of Google and certain other companies too. But DigitalOcean made my very first experience a bitter one and to advocate against it.

waheoo 6y ago
Hah I had the opposite effect of getting to deal with a rude gatekeeper when I needed to create more than the I itial 5 instances they limit you to. I moved to lightsail. It has problems but at least AWS support treats you like a human.
- tommica 6y ago
  I've had a different experience in regards of their communication - they've been nice to answer my questions in a timely fashion, for example about the instance amount, while running just a few servers
aerovistae 6y ago
By contrast, as a free user of heroku I've gotten support from _actual engineers rather than support staff._ AS A NON-PAYING USER!! literally never happened to me before. Love them.
kanwisher 6y ago
Surprised you need to post anonymously ;/ I just had an issue and I got a support staff to respond to me within a day. Maybe bad luck.

cabalamat 6y ago

Does this work with MongoDB? The documentation seems to imply you can only use MySQL, Redis, or PostgreSQL.

ilmiont 6y ago

I was really excited about this when I got the email a few weeks ago with a beta invite but after two minutes I realised I’d be unable to use it, and still can’t now it’s launched... Why oh why is GitHub now considered the single place where code lives? Even as alternative providers gain in popularity. It’s really sad to see DigitalOcean requiring this for some reason. Please either allow use of arbitrary Git repositories (e.g. self-hosted GitLab in my use case) or provide a stand-alone CLI tool to enable deployment of anything, like Firebase does. Disappointing so far.

edem 6y ago
Maybe 95% of people use it and it made sense to them, who knows?
RikNieu 6y ago
I hope this is in the backlog, because I'm not switching for GitLab for this.
SifJar 6y ago
From article: > You can deploy the source code directly from your GitHub repositories (support for GitLab and Bitbucket is coming soon). Naming specific git hosts suggests it may not be available on "arbitrary Git repositiories" in the near future, but looks like they are at least planning to broaden the options for where to have your code live
- capableweb 6y ago
  Such a weird approach that seems repeated by many. Instead of building something general that works for most cases and is easier to implement, they focus on specialized cases of specific SCM platforms. If they started with support Git Remotes and then supporting specific platforms, they would have covered all use cases from the get-go, albeit with slightly poorer UX. But instead they chose to only support specific platforms, missing plenty of people who actually want to use this, but can't.
  - 6y ago

desmap 6y ago

Why are people upvoting this? Serious question. An easy and proprietary deploy layer isn't anything new. Docker makes it already quite easy to deploy anything, either to a single machine with docker-compose or k8s for multiple nodes. Former isn't much harder than any "app platform", is enough for most, you aren't vendor-locked-in and hosting costs are at the lowest since it's bare-metal. You want something easier? There are already gazillions other (proprietary) options. Maybe I missed something but I don't get what makes DO any special here.

taytus 6y ago

So this is something that in theory would compete with Laravel Forge but more expensive? I have more than 30 sites with Digital Ocean and I manage them via Forge. Total I pay is about $100/month including the droplet. I would have to pay $150/month ONLY for the apps without including the droplet if I use this system? Am I missing something?

leoplct 6y ago

What are the differences with Cloud66?

02020202 6y ago

Free plan has 1 Gib/month egress => 1 Gib / 8 = 125 MB / 30 days = 15,6 MB / 86400 seconds = 0,0001808 MB/s Basic plan has 40 Gib/month egress = 0,0001808 * 40 = 0,00723 MB/s Professional plan has 100 Gib/month = 0,0001808 * 100 = 0,0018 MB/s That's not much if you need to server some actual content. This is really just to run cheap workers that don't require much cpu/ram and networking. And even then it might be cheaper to just get a vps.

abol3z 6y ago

Jelastic PaaS did this a long time ago, and in much better form. It is possible to automatically scale your apps horizontally or vertically without any additional configs. I really don't understand why it is not that popular, It is the smoothest cloud experience I had compared to any other PaaS I tested.