I agree 100% on the misdirection happening on many of these so-called Heroku replacements.
Offering me 'kube-as-a-service' over a layer of AWS or whatever on top of some massive cloud provider isn't really a heroku competitor. Thats just throwing some plywood over a ball of mud and trying to offer some hand holding with all the rough edges. I don't wanna have to decide between AWS or GCP (see one of the first docs on Porter: https://docs.porter.run/getting-started/provisioning-infrast...), or even think about them. I don't want to learn k8s to spin up some side-projects, and ultimately if you go with one of these the abstractions _will_ leak. I don't wanna go look at AWS UIs to see the status of my database (see https://docs.porter.run/deploying-addons/postgresql#persiste...).
The fact is if you need k8s, then you probably need a team of smart people setting it up and continually managing it who are very knowledge about your app and its specific needs, because you better have the scale that requires. Because if you are spinning up a k8s cluster for a monolith or a few microservices w/ 200 customers, you are just going to burn thru dev time and cash.
Heroku has been constantly praised since it took off because it does massive amounts of things behind the scenes to abstract away all the operations you don't want to worry about. You can launch a tiny prototype or small to medium startup in under an hour. You can add a DB and Redis w/ snapshots and automated backup and monitoring all w/i the Heroku API or UI. Does it expose the full power of the datastore and let you do everything you can do with RDS or a VPS? Of course not, but thats a totally valid trade off when you are just trying to get something shipped to see if it has traction.
So if you are looking for Heroku alternatives: know that things like Porter aren't really direct competitors, no matter how much they are marketing themselves as. From what I've seen Render and Railway are much more in line to be the next Heroku-replacement.
edit to mention, since the parent brought it up: I have no horse in this race. I'm still a fan of Heroku and use it daily, but don't work for anything to do with dev tools or PaaS.
Offering me 'kube-as-a-service' over a layer of AWS or whatever on top of some massive cloud provider isn't really a heroku competitor. Thats just throwing some plywood over a ball of mud and trying to offer some hand holding with all the rough edges. I don't wanna have to decide between AWS or GCP (see one of the first docs on Porter: https://docs.porter.run/getting-started/provisioning-infrast...), or even think about them. I don't want to learn k8s to spin up some side-projects, and ultimately if you go with one of these the abstractions _will_ leak. I don't wanna go look at AWS UIs to see the status of my database (see https://docs.porter.run/deploying-addons/postgresql#persiste...).
The fact is if you need k8s, then you probably need a team of smart people setting it up and continually managing it who are very knowledge about your app and its specific needs, because you better have the scale that requires. Because if you are spinning up a k8s cluster for a monolith or a few microservices w/ 200 customers, you are just going to burn thru dev time and cash.
Heroku has been constantly praised since it took off because it does massive amounts of things behind the scenes to abstract away all the operations you don't want to worry about. You can launch a tiny prototype or small to medium startup in under an hour. You can add a DB and Redis w/ snapshots and automated backup and monitoring all w/i the Heroku API or UI. Does it expose the full power of the datastore and let you do everything you can do with RDS or a VPS? Of course not, but thats a totally valid trade off when you are just trying to get something shipped to see if it has traction.
So if you are looking for Heroku alternatives: know that things like Porter aren't really direct competitors, no matter how much they are marketing themselves as. From what I've seen Render and Railway are much more in line to be the next Heroku-replacement.
edit to mention, since the parent brought it up: I have no horse in this race. I'm still a fan of Heroku and use it daily, but don't work for anything to do with dev tools or PaaS.