jedwhite
We migrated microservices from Heroku to Porter, and also from standalone VMs and K8s running on AWS to Porter. As a coder trying to do both dev and devops on a tiny team, it was life changing for me.

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)

hahahacorn
We migrated from Heroku to Porter at work (at my behest). Still one of the better bets I’ve taken.

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.

latchkey
I personally don't get it. You can start on GCP today, without being tied to GCP much at all. It isn't even expensive to do so. Is there something I'm missing here?

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.

schneems
Speaking of not wanting to get locked in. I work for Heroku and we are previewing an open source buildpack that produces docker images here’s a tutorial

https://www.schneems.com/2024/05/01/build-a-ruby-on-rails-ap...

neeleshs
Cool concept. In my experience, the biggest headache/expense is data migration, and not software migration. As long as the stack is vendor neutral, it's not the long-poll, though it is gruntwork.

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)

mushufasa
I looked into porter at the time we were migrating from Heroku to AWS! I thought it would have been a great solution if it was mature when we first started on heroku.

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?

scottmessinger
Very cool! As someone pointed out, your github repo says it was archived: https://github.com/porter-dev/porter-archive Naively, I would think Porter cloud would just be a managed version of your porter-dev/porter-archive. Could you talk about how it's a different product than before? Did the code base change significantly?
pil0u
Hey thanks for sharing.

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?

seffect
I think your natural competition here is:

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.

michaelmior
Sounds like an interesting tradeoff. I noticed that the link to GitHub in the footer 404s however. I was hoping this was OSS.
malyk
At HomeLight we migrated from Heroku to Porter and it has been great. The team has been super helpful, the platform as stable as you can get, and the cost savings have been tremendous.

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.

schappim
This is a great idea.

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).

[1] https://hatchbox.io

bkitano19
Had this exact problem (Heroku Postgres to RDS) at my old co. Data migration went as bad as it possibly could (dropped indices, foreign keys, everything but the data itself). This would have saved us months of pain.
tmaier
I wonder how that category of services, which Porter provides could be called.

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?

dockerd
I don't understand the developer's pricing (new offering) which is as below:

$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?

wmab
Congrats on the launch guys! This is a great feature, in a world where most companies try to increase lock in!

Huge fans of Porter, we've been using them for a number of years at Woflow and they've helped us scale effortlessly.

bshul-silkline1
Please support AWS GovCloud!
sosodev
Is the eject button the only thing that makes Porter more appealing than something like Fly.io or Render? They too automate a lot of stuff but for a better price.
highmastdon
Would this be something to use over Docker containers when running a single host homelab server? What would be the cons/benefits?
MobileVet
I have never quite understood this value proposition (maybe I am not the target audience?) The point of PaaS is to avoid DevOps... making a PasS with an eject just feels orthogonal to the value prop of the main business. Ejecting seems like a low probability event as they CHOSE PaaS in the first place. (unless the money got really high)

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.

rgrieselhuber
Any plans to support Hetzner?
kiney
Any plans to support eject to on-prem or bare metal hosters like Hetzner?
davedx
It's a great idea, but the pricing seems high - $30/month minimum? I'm running 3 apps on Fly.io and I'm still so low in the pricing that they're invoicing me $0. I will pay for the convenience of a PaaS - but not that much.
adenta
talk to me about GPU’s? I saw some gpu_node config stuff in your documentation a couple days ago.

If Porter can host GPU’s, that’s a superpower render.com doesn’t have.

PapaPalpatine
I highly recommend checking out Northflank. Their pricing is a lot friendlier.

https://northflank.com/

localfirst
How does this compare to Coolify/CapRover
terpimost
Why just big 3? How about Digital Ocean?
liuxiaopai
Can I use it on DigitalOcean?
paulcarroty
Credit card paywall, so I'd recommend to check Render or Koyeb for these people who prefer to save their time.
palashkulsh
Really good concept