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I agree, I wouldn't either. You can import directly via a DB to DB import in the platform without involving your laptop.
https://northflank.com/docs/v1/application/databases-and-per....
Some folks want to do that, others want to import a backup directly, some want to spawn a read replica and sync their DB. Different strokes for different folks, all supported on Northflank.
hey!
northflank supports the same buildpacks that you run on Heroku, so it should be fairly straightforward.
we have these docs for a more detailed walkthrough:
1/ https://northflank.com/docs/v1/application/migrate-from-hero...
2/ https://northflank.com/blog/how-to-migrate-from-heroku-a-ste...
Disclaimer: Founder of northflank.com here so very clearly biased. But if you’re looking for an alternative, reach out. If not, all good.
Heroku pioneered what a PaaS could be, alongside Cloud Foundry and others, so I’m genuinely sad to see it go down like this.
We built Northflank because we saw enterprises wanting to deploy workloads in their own VPC with Heroku-level simplicity. Over the past 5 years, our mission has been solving the graduation problem where companies outgrow their PaaS and have to eventually migrate.
Northflank runs in your VPC (AWS/GCP/Azure/OCI) with the same git-push experience. We have customers ranging from small startups to governments and public companies who would've otherwise built their own internal developer platform. They either use Northflank as-is in their own cloud or use our API to build their IDP on top of it.
Most common use cases are preview environments and production workloads. Happy to answer questions and throw in some credits if you're evaluating alternatives.
I'm a co-founder at Northflank. This is what we've spent 3+ years building. https://northflank.com.
I am sympathetic with much of Kurt's post. We spent a long time building solutions to several of the areas highlighted (managed PG, persistent volumes, secret management and service discovery).
Making radical changes to architecture on a live cloud platform is always a challenge.
On the front-end Northflank is a next-gen PaaS built for high DX, speed, and powerful capability (real-time UI, API, CLI, GitOps, IaC).
Our backend is built using Kubernetes as an OS: providing a huge amount of flexibility on service discovery, load-balancing, persistence/volumes and scale.
The benefit of using Kubernetes is a universal API across all major cloud providers. We can scale clusters and regions across EKS, GKE and AKS in seconds, either in our managed PaaS or inside our customer's own cloud account.
Our managed dataservices: MySQL, Postgres, Redis, Mongo, Minio are all built using Kubernetes Operators with a small but mighty team.
From a generous free tier to autoscaling to managed postgres and other advanced PaaS/DevOps automation workflows Northflank offers something unique.
Managed Postgres is a feature and we install it for you on your selected resource plan, replica count, version, storage and other options.
Northflank co-founder here.
You can delete your project navigating to the billing page inside a project. To delete your account you can send a support request and we can process your request (described in the privacy policy). We'd like to automate it more, however we'd like a formal opt-in via email of the account/team owner when deleting backups and stateful workloads right now.
Northflank co-founder here.
Addon disk pricing is the same as our volume pricing for services.
The disks are SSDs. We've added a margin on-top of GCP, EC2 and Azure SSD pricing so I wouldn't say they are expensive in comparison to other providers.
It's possible to configure HDD storage which is much cheaper, would be happy to enable that feature flag for you. SSD $0.30 per GB, HDD $0.15 per GB. We'll add HDD pricing to the site and start to enable it by default for everyone.
Yes, agreed with the need for improved preview workflows. For current GitOps offerings, you need a YAML degree to implement at any reasonable scale.
We currently have several customers using our API + Typescript client to provision preview environments. Create temporary databases, spawn container builds, spawn job to import dump, run migrations, deploy x micro-services, run QA and finally spin down.
The perfect situation is where the preview environments are roughly aligned with staging and production workflows. So you don't need to maintain two different systems.
Our first iteration of GitOps and template driven IaC is releasing soon. I would love to discuss your situation and how we can improve our offering. email: will at northflank.com.
(Northflank co-founder)
https://northflank.com/docs/v1/application/run/deploy-to-a-r...
Currently we support US Central, and Europe West. Which other region would you like to see added?
With BYOC (Bring your own Cloud) you can deploy in GKE, EKS and soon AKS in your chosen region.
Yes you can create a service and a postgres db in Northflank's free tier. Once upgraded there isn't a downgrade, nothing stopping you making another free project however!
The public roadmap is a good idea but highlights how stale the product has become. https://github.com/heroku/roadmap/issues Only now researching adding Cloud Native Build Packs and HTTP2.
This will reaffirm for many the sense that Heroku is being dismantled from within. Feature sunsetting and removal of a free on-ramp doesn't help.
If you're looking for a production alternative to Heroku checkout Northflank.
https://northflank.com/docs/v1/application/migrate-from-hero...
https://northflank.com/heroku-pricing-comparison-and-reducti...
Comprehensive support for stateful, ephemeral and scheduled workloads. With a generous free developer tier including build, runtime, databases and cron jobs. Always happy to help teams migrate from Heroku.
(I'm a Northflank engineer + co-founder)
There is a lot to agree on in this article. Though teams should be able to choose whatever stack (languages, frameworks, databases, queues) they want. What’s important is there is a coherent way to deploy, build, operate, scale, observe these services, without relying on one or two team members. Getting a cluster setup and a few deployments is pretty simple, however scaling that cluster, setting up secure runtime (network policies, mTLS, Kata, KVM, gVisor), prometheus, CI/CD, preview, staging and production environments is a huge investment (personnel, cloud costs, delay to production delivery).
Teams should be able to benefit from Kubernetes and the surrounding cloud-native ecosystem without directly consuming or modifying it. You don’t need to reinvent the wheel, and that’s what you could say a lot of platform teams are doing today.
That’s what we’re working on at https://northflank.com a next-generation deployment platform using Kubernetes either in a secure multi-tenant environment, traditional PaaS or deployed directly into your GKE, EKS and AKS clusters. (disclaimer: Northflank co-founder)
This looks very nice, we use KeyDB a lot. This looks like it could be a suitable alternative when there are more horizontal options.
I just deployed it on Northflank with your public docker image and wrote a guide here: https://northflank.com/guides/deploy-dragonfly-on-northflank... - works great!
Thanks!
Yes I've heard this. Lack of product releases since 2019 and the significant reduction in headcount all point to that, still making $300m-500m ARR revenue so not something you should let die lightly...
I'm working on Northflank, a production ready Heroku alternative over at https://northflank.com
Builds, deploys, stateful workloads, advanced networking, crons, API and more.
We added support for HTTP2, GRPC and streaming at Northflank recently. Could be a good choice for your team. Here is the changelog https://northflank.com/changelog/introducing-http-2-and-grpc...
Heroku users using GitHub should start rotating any secrets stored in their repos (people still do), if the OAuth has been compromised it means your repositories could have been cloned. Non-enterprise GitHub users have no detailed audit history to see if their repos were cloned/zipped.
agreed - co-founder http://northflank.com here. Heroku has slowed innovating where expectations of infra have changed. You want more power and flexibility from your PaaS - finer-grained access to metrics & logs is one step - we have added LogQL support. On more optionality on queues - we've started with Redis and managed RabbitMQ is on the way.
Whether it's API support, collaborating in real-time, or scheduling cron jobs we're working hard to make PaaS much more powerful.
Other than more queues & metrics what would you like to see in a high-level PaaS?
Northflank offers a free tier including Redis (0.1vCPU, 256MB, 4GB disk) as well as PostgreSQL, MongoDB, MinIO and more. Heroku at scale makes little financial sense for many businesses - our pricing is fair so you can scale as and when your infrastructure demands f.e 7GB on Heroku Redis costs $750 vs $72 on Northflank. (disclaimer northflank co-founder)
Hi pid, thank you for the kind words. Agreed that's not our intention. You can signup self-serve at the moment and get access to the entire platform + free developer tier with our infrastructure. On your cloud is currently a manual on-boarding with our engineers, in the new year it will be also self-service.
Yes they might suck, but that's because of its success and the complexity of the problem - it'll get better over time.
However aws-sdk doesn't need to be 70mb, the console doesn't need to be slow and they don't need over 10 unique services to deploy containers.
We're working on a much improved dev ex for cloud providers and Kubernetes at https://northflank.com - with a fast real-time console, a well documented and useable API with auto generated CLI and API clients. 30 seconds of fun - can I get a production ready CI/CD setup for a repo(s) in 30 seconds? Can I get a HA Redis, Postgres, RabbitMQ provisioned and connected to my code in 30 seconds? These are the questions and solutions that developers will be asking for more and more.
I'm a technical co-founder at Northflank https://northflank.com. A platform to deploy microservices, cron jobs and stateful databases from development to production.
I started working on Northflank to make it more simple for developers either solo or in a team to manage and automate DevOps complexity away.
We support CI for GitHub, Bitbucket & Gitlab (SaaS and self-hosted) with either Dockerfiles or Buildpacks. We have a robust and feature rich platform via UI, API and CLI. Out of the box you get end-to-end DevOps: CI/CD/CD, Horizontal and vertical scaling, persistent workloads with managed (MongoDB, Redis, Postgres, MySQL, Minio), backups, restores, real-time observability and metrics, DNS, TLS, mTLS, Teams & RBAC and more…
Let me know what you think of our offering + site!
Platform: https://northflank.com
Application Documentation: https://northflank.com/docs/v1/application/overview
API Documentation: https://northflank.com/docs/v1/api/introduction
Great job, Meteor has really helped me develop my programming skills as a beginner. It allows me to get instant feedback on the code I write. To see a real world prototype keeps me going!
One can only hope!
I'm trying to develop my skills in UI and web development, would be nice to hear your thoughts.