We've had a number of folks migrate over to Crunchy Bridge [1] from Heroku, the only main feature we're missing at this point is dataclips which is coming. We can also help with pretty much no downtime migration even for larger databases. And the team over here is pretty much same team that built the original Heroku Postgres.
One thing that I have really come to like with Heroku is the pipeline. fly.io doesn't have one (I don't think?) and render isn't the same; it rebuilds for different stages and there's no concept of 'promoting' the same slug.
Well hopefully once it's gone the competition will be able to get more market share to build quality product. Heroku has been starving the entire ecosystem for years.
I don't have experience with any other PaaS's so I can't recommend one, but what you say is what I commonly hear.
Your solution is:
1. move off to the competition who are offering a subpar service;
2. then wait until they eventually catch up in (how many years? who knows..);
3. then profit?
Heroku is around, because there is no other service that offers the ease and convenience. I looked at Fly.io and Render and they are nowhere close and mature to Heroku at the moment.
For example, here is Fly.io's "Solution" for Redis:
> Setting up Redis requires launching it as a separate app.
..
So while I kind of see where are you coming from, unfortunately all these alternatives fall short. Not to mention that Heroku has hundreds of integrations built-in.
I'm simply telling you Heroku is not a stable platform that you can trust. It's up to you to figure out what to do. I haven't offered any solutions.
Just because it's a slick product to get going doesn't mean that you can trust it to be a reliable and secure host—or be around for the long-term.
I think it's obvious an ecosystem without a Heroku will help the upstarts. I understand that doesn't help you get a new host today. I'm not telling you to just go to another PaaS and expect them to be the next Heroku in a couple of years—chances are they won't be.
This makes no sense. Heroku have had no competition because nobody has built a better product. They’ve not been starving anyone or anything. Given the biggest and most common complaint most lay against Heroku is that it’s too expensive, if anything the lack of innovation for years has created a huge window for a competitor. And yet here we are. Still.
tl;dr: Heroku is taking customers away that if competitors had it: they would be able to receive more capital
It's not unlike Google Search. Google Search has atrophied over the years but because it's still the best in the market, it's used by almost everyone. Competition is hard to build because it has to be better than Google Search in order to bother using it.
Heroku competitors have struggled in part because Heroku is a fully featured platform. It's relatively easy to build a platform that ticks a couple of boxes really well but building something that matches Heroku in feature parity is a daunting task. In order for competition to get there they need customers and funding, and funding is way easier to get the more customers come in through the door.
Once Heroku dies (perhaps already since this incident) we'll start to see real competition in this space because their competition will be getting used. The PaaS space needs that oxygen Heroku is taking up.
I agree although I literally just started using heroku again after many years. I haven't seen alternatives that support the idea of multiple buildpacks. Which seems sort of a must have for any non-js backend because a frontend js stack is going to exist no matter what.
I guess I would need to place the extra node steps and python build steps into a single build file and then point the render.yaml at that custom script? I wanted to tell from the docs if it was possible before even starting on a prototype to demo it. Is there an example app that fulfills this. Thanks for your time.
Exactly, you can use any command or script to build your app, and you would select Python as the native Render environment and run your Node build as part of your build script. Here's a quick example: https://render.com/docs/deploy-django#create-a-build-script
Plenty of folks I respect absolutely love fly.io--I have less hands-on experience there, but they've got a fantastic crew, too.