They are also missing a proper managed database with point-in-time backups through the web UI like those offered by most proper PaaS services.
We did bake nixpacks into our CLI recently, they seem better for our particular environment than buildpacks. Railway.app did a great job with these: https://nixpacks.com/docs/getting-started
We're working on managed databases, but we're not doing them like Heroku did. We just launched a preview of managed Redis with Upstash: https://fly.io/docs/reference/redis/
This seems like the future of managed databases on a platform like ours. There are companies that build very good managed database services. We're getting to the size where these people will work with us. Getting well managed DBs onto the platform is basically what I'm spending all my time on these days.
Incidentally, we're a lot cheaper than Heroku because we run our own infrastructure.
If you happen to have a service beta testing anything I would be interested in joining it.
ps. are those people already at fly? shameless plug - would love to work on things like that.
Is `fly postgres create --name restoredDb --snapshot-id backupId` that hard that's it's a deal breaker?
> support for Heroku buildpacks
I haven't tried it but there's some buildpack support: https://fly.io/docs/reference/configuration/#builder
We are not Heroku. It is ok for you to not like what we're doing. We're building something different. We've never even _said_ we were a Heroku alternative, we just liked their UX for deploying apps and decided to roll with something similar.
Our app has two components, a backend on Heroku and distributed frontend on Fly. The backend relies on a managed database, and I have not had to touch it in 6 years. Heroku does a great job providing confidence that the managed database will Just Work. The current Fly Postgres offering doesn't provide this confidence.
We shipped "automated" Postgres because we couldn't get any fully managed DB providers to pay attention to us when we were small. I expect we'll have an option running on Fly infrastructure in the next six months.
Our Redis is fully managed, so you can get an idea of how it might play out: https://fly.io/docs/reference/redis/
I would rather say 'It no longer works as a business for Salesforce.'
As for the managed DBs, one of their founders was from Compose, so yeah they know how these things work. But AFAIK Fly doesn't have much interest in DBs, their focus is really in VMs.