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Comment by gonational | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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).

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.

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.

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

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.

In what way is Fly's pricing unpredictable ?

It varies based on usage

Isn't that how things should be ?

From a consumer's standpoint, why would I choose that?

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

But their offering is "frontend oriented", what you describe doesn't work for django / laravel / rails / etc, no ?

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

Have a look at Scalingo, it's a good mix of simplicity and maturity.

https://scalingo.com/blog/heroku-alternative-europe-scalingo...

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.

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