There is definitely still some more devops overhead compared to Heroku, and I wish the product was a bit more mature. But even at ~$18k/mo on Heroku spend we’re now spending less than half with Porter. Other than myself and the other engineer who were responsible for the migration, the rest of the team really got to keep their work flows and there was little impact except for swapping some tools.
We had a messy, poorly documented web of micro services and shit too, the Porter team made the migration surprisingly easy all things considered. I’ll work with them again if I ever scale past a $10k/mo Heroku bill (post enterprise contract) with another team.
Cloud Functions are just a http handler with no hard dependencies on GCP.
Cloud Tasks are just a handler and the tasks just hit your Cloud Functions.
Cloud SQL is just postgres.
You connect your github with actions that CI/CD auto deploy to the above.
If you do it that way, you're pretty much dependency free and can move anywhere else if you need to.
https://www.schneems.com/2024/05/01/build-a-ruby-on-rails-ap...
In the SaaS world, maybe this will be useful to run managed cloud services? (That is, customer A wants a private instance in AWS and customer B wants it in Azure)
At this point, I have to ask: what's your business model? The reason heroku never made it easy to migrate is the incentive you point out.
What's yours?
You mention 3x cheaper than Heroku, but the pricing page specifies $10 per month GB RAM, $20 per month vCPU.
I'm having a hard time to compare with Heroku with that information. Also, what about Postgres hosting?
1. Things like Digital Ocean that make it easy and can scale up
2. The PaaS offerings of the major clouds for example Microft Azure Appspaces.
I think your advantage might be that you could eject into something more enterprise ready perhaps with Terraform/k8s etc. You could also sell consulting time to help the ejector transition to cloud. Because rearchitecting is part of the issue but the new devops and maintenance load is another issue people will need to deal with.
I’d highly recommend Porter as the place to go to get started these days. I don’t see any reason that we will migrate away in the next few years, if ever.
For our startup, we instead use Hatchbox [1]. It provides us with that one-click PaaS experience while allowing us to run on your preferred platform (AWS).
I would put the following services in that category:
- Porter - Cloud66 https://www.cloud66.com - Hatchbox https://hatchbox.io
They all manage infrastructure on your behalf within a larger Cloud Service Provider.
Terms I could think of are "DevOps as a Service" or "Platform Engineering as a Service".
How would you call this?
And what alternatives do you see?
$10 per month GB RAM
$20 per month vCPU
As compared to standard pricing which is:
$6 per month GB RAM
$13 per month vCPU
Isn't the developer pricing for small project expected to be less than standard? If its costly than standard pricing then what is the benefit of developers pricing?
Huge fans of Porter, we've been using them for a number of years at Woflow and they've helped us scale effortlessly.
We included Porter in our post-Heroku research and chose Render. We have loved Render and expect to be with them for quite a while (as we were with Heroku). If they happen to go south as Heroku did, we will find another PaaS... we will not 'eject' to bare metal or self configuration on AWS.
If Porter can host GPU’s, that’s a superpower render.com doesn’t have.
The key benefits for a small startup team are:
1. Effortless CI/CD: Deploying services on K8s clusters across different clouds becomes trivial. Setup a dockerfile in your repo, point Porter at it, deploy. We mostly run APIs behind AWS API Gateway.
2. Startup credits: You can use your existing credits on AWS, Azure etc.
3. Zero lockin: You can deploy in parallel and switch service providers.
4. Devops expertise: The Porter team have given us next-level hands-on support and help to figure out how to run things optimally. A lot of sensible defaults are built in. As a coder, they have knowledge of how to scale services effectively that (to be blunt) I couldn't match no matter how much time I spent trying to learn it as a lay person.
If you're a K8s and devops master, you probably don't need this. If like me you're a programmer with limited devops skills looking for the fastest and easiest way to just solve deployment and scaling, Porter is close to magic. Plus they have one of the most helpful and friendly teams I've worked with anywhere.
(edit for typo)