[zoomzoom]

First off, I would strongly disagree with the idea that Heroku post-acquisition was stagnant. As well-said elsewhere, tons of product was shipped to industry-best standards: postgres/dataclips, Heroku Connect, buildpacks - as well as introduction of CI and preview apps. But it's clear that in the post-k8s and post infra-as-code world there's been a surge in new options for how teams manage their infra and DevOps toolchain.

Of course, I’d agree with the idea that conflicts of interest should be disclaimed: I’m the co-founder of Coherence (https://www.withcoherence.com).

Seems the key issues raised by the article and comments here are: - costs and resource control constraints when using Heroku - fixed base costs of k8s when using self-hosted PaaS type systems - flexibility constraints of heroku-similar PaaS - the desire for teams to get more ownership than Heroku gives them when it comes to configurability, reliability & security

Coherence disagrees that the next generation of PaaS should be a black-box - like Heroku, many next-gen PaaS are not hosted in your own cloud and re-implement the wheel when it comes to functionality like persistent storage, hosted databases, and application support services like redis. In the end, we believe that building on top of the major clouds (Google, AWS, Azure, CloudFlare, etc…) is the right choice. It’s also important to us that you're able to host customer data in mature systems that you control. This philosophy also allows Coherence to help you use managed services the large providers have built, like Cloud Run or App Runner, which at least partially mitigate the cost and complexity risks of k8s.

Coherence is vertically integrated, composable, and opinionated, with a focus on developer experience. A defined workflow for production-quality full-stack web apps with dev and production built in alongside automated test environments, including CI/CD and cloud IDEs - all configured with one high-level YAML. We’re in a very early private beta on google cloud right now - if you’re interested, please check out our site above and let us know!

[jeremyjh]

I was just looking at AWS App Runner today and just thinking about how miserable it would be to figure out how to use AWS's proprietary build pipeline tools to replicate what I have with Heroku - and I've been using AWS forever - I just hate their UX, their docs, really every thing they do except the actual infrastructure services. So I was just thinking someone should build a product that gives me the Heroku CLI, pipelines, add-ons, review apps etc but implements it all on top of standard AWS services. No runtime services at all, just orchestrating configuration and metadata, service provisioning etc. I know there are other companies in this space but I wish someone would just blatantly steal the Heroku UX and then sell me that.

[zoomzoom]

Check us out! We're on GCP for v1 (AWS is coming). Sounds like you'd like what we're building.

[simpsond]

I feel like you are on to something. I’ll keep an eye out for AWS support.