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Comment by aosaigh | Hacker News Reader

Interesting (or maybe not?) that the App Platform and Spaces pricing hasn't changed. I've been migrating as many projects as possible over to App Platform + Managed DB + Spaces recently. Although it's been frustrating due to their documentation being lacking, I've found it great for simple projects and static websites once you get your head around it. It's certainly more expensive than running plain Droplets, but the convenience is worth it. Their costs must be better covered on the App Platform over Droplets.

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I was a big fan of Nanobox (the company DigitalOcean acquired and then turned into App Platform). And Pagoda Box before that. I've never found any PaaS that was as easy to use as those — especially because it came with a local environment for development that would match the production environment.

I'm very interested to try App Platform for my next side project. In fact, I still have a server running on DigitalOcean that was set up through Nanobox a few years ago. I need to move that over to App Platform at some point.

It might be different for you having come from the predecessor, but I found it quite hard to get started with the App Platform. There is a conflict between DO's attempt to have a web interface that allows you to create and manage apps, and the underlying YAML/Buildpacks that actually model your apps. While the web interface is OK for seeing your apps at-a-glance, it's definitely not OK for creating and configuring new apps. For that you need to use the YAML config files and probably doctl (their CLI app). It took me a long time to understand this. Their docs don't do a good job at explaining the App Platform at a high-level. That said, I've still found it very useful for "simple" webapps.

It’s always nice to hear that someone liked Pagoda Box. I worked there way back in 2011 before the Nanobox change, and it was really fun working with containers, dynamic load balancers, and the `git push` workflow before those were widely known.

Nothing was as magical as having a site up a running a few seconds after doing `git push pagoda`.

Of course I am biased though :)

App Platform is a great concept, but we hit a dealbreaking road block when trying to migrate some Python apps with job queues. Their runtime (gVisor) doesn't support semaphore locks, which is used by Pythons multiprocessing and in turn used by most job runners (we discovered it with django-q, but I think most, if not all of them including Celery, rely on this, see link below).

The build times for Dockerfiles are also atricious… our build failed after 40 minutes by running out of memory and the multi-stage Dockerfile really wasn't anything special. We would have just used the images hosted on Github Container Registry, but App Platform only supports a limited range of Docker registries too. Note: the images build in 3 minutes on Github Actions.

As far as I can see it is also not possible to add any block storage too. While I mostly work on projects that use object storage anyway, SOME things just need persistent block storage. Which is annoying, since DigitalOcean HAS block storage… just not for App Platform.

I really wanted to use it, but man they make it hard.

https://github.com/Koed00/django-q/issues/522#issuecomment-1...

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