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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 off

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.

airstrike 8mo ago
I find render.com basically as good as Heroku and certainly much better than fly.io's unpredictable pricing
- lngric006 8mo 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.
- ragall 8mo ago
  In what way is Fly's pricing unpredictable ?
  - airstrike 8mo ago
    It varies based on usage
    - ragall 8mo ago
      Isn't that how things should be ?
      - airstrike 8mo ago
        From a consumer's standpoint, why would I choose that?
        ragall 8mo ago
        It's a natural law to pay based on what you consume. Whenever that isn't required, you're typically being subsidized in a form or another, but don't be surprised when it goes away.
almost 8mo 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 8mo 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.
- nathanappere 8mo ago
  But their offering is "frontend oriented", what you describe doesn't work for django / laravel / rails / etc, no ?
  - fabianlindfors 8mo ago
    Yes. We are taking a stab at the entire infrastructure like Heroku did but with a focus on a coding agent-centric workflow: https://specific.dev https://specific.dev
  - ned 8mo ago
    Have a look at Scalingo, it's a good mix of simplicity and maturity. https://scalingo.com/blog/heroku-alternative-europe-scalingo-migration https://scalingo.com/blog/heroku-alternative-europe-scalingo...
    - esfandia 8mo ago
      This looks nice! Wish they had a no-credit-card-required version for educational purposes. For the course I teach we use Spring Boot, and life was good with Heroku till they discontinued the no-credit-card version, and then the only choice we had (with support for Spring Boot) was to move over to Azure, which works but is a bit overkill and complicated for our purposes. I guess we could just use Docker and then many more platform would become available, but I'd rather not add one more step to the pipeline if possible.
ghaff 8mo 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 8mo 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 8mo 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.
ljm 8mo 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 8mo 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?

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.

airstrike 8mo ago

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

lngric006 8mo 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.
ragall 8mo ago
In what way is Fly's pricing unpredictable ?
- airstrike 8mo ago
  It varies based on usage
  - ragall 8mo ago
    Isn't that how things should be ?
    - airstrike 8mo ago
      From a consumer's standpoint, why would I choose that?
      - ragall 8mo ago
        It's a natural law to pay based on what you consume. Whenever that isn't required, you're typically being subsidized in a form or another, but don't be surprised when it goes away.

almost 8mo 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 8mo 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.

nathanappere 8mo ago
But their offering is "frontend oriented", what you describe doesn't work for django / laravel / rails / etc, no ?
- fabianlindfors 8mo ago
  Yes. We are taking a stab at the entire infrastructure like Heroku did but with a focus on a coding agent-centric workflow: https://specific.dev https://specific.dev
- ned 8mo ago
  Have a look at Scalingo, it's a good mix of simplicity and maturity. https://scalingo.com/blog/heroku-alternative-europe-scalingo-migration https://scalingo.com/blog/heroku-alternative-europe-scalingo...
  - esfandia 8mo ago
    This looks nice! Wish they had a no-credit-card-required version for educational purposes. For the course I teach we use Spring Boot, and life was good with Heroku till they discontinued the no-credit-card version, and then the only choice we had (with support for Spring Boot) was to move over to Azure, which works but is a bit overkill and complicated for our purposes. I guess we could just use Docker and then many more platform would become available, but I'd rather not add one more step to the pipeline if possible.

ghaff 8mo 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 8mo 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 8mo 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.

ljm 8mo 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 8mo 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?