I've used the DO App platform, generally it's pretty solid but getting up and running was miserable. The documentation is really thin and there's a bunch I just had to discover along the way, in particular while getting up and running with a DB as it's not clear how the certs are delivered into the environment variables etc.
It's been solid since I got up and running but took me about a day to get a simple CRUD app moved over to it.
If they can improve the documentation it'll be much better. Right now I'm not considering it for future projects though just because platforms like Fly.io and Render seem to have better docs and additional functionality that DO Apps doesn't have yet.
Heroku alternatives have gone in a few different directions:
- next-gen PasS that are more opinionated and offer wider range of services. Also can be cheaper. examples are Digital ocean, Railway or render
- Performance-focused PaaS like fly.io
- "Heroku in your own cloud" like porter.dev, architect.io or quovery
- k8s tooling like garden.io, ReleaseHub, even gitlab - these are often geared more towards internal DevOps teams at larger orgs when compared to the very low-lift PasS providers
- serverless providers - like cloudflare functions, AWS lambda, GCP Cloud Run
- Vercel/Netlify - SPA + serverless with a great developer experience
- Replit - kind of in a category of their own but they have integrated hosting/datastores/user auth
Lots of awesome products here, I'd argue that only replit is a true 10x change from the Heroku innovations in terms of providing a next-gen developer experience.
I'm the cofounder of a new company called Coherence, that we think creates a new direction and offers a better platform for the next leap forward. By integrating from dev to prod and capturing the whole SDLC, as well as by operating in your own cloud, we're focused on delivering the best developer experience possible, without compromising anywhere else. Check us out at https://www.withcoherence.com. We're in an early closed beta so not yet a fit for all teams, but feedback is welcome!
(Render founder) Stuff like ^ worries me even more. What keeps me sane is our engineering team obsessing over reliability, and learning from every single incident, no matter how small. We're improving every day.
