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.
We've been very happy with Northflank's blend of ease-of-use with configurability when you want it. (We're running BYOC AWS.) Running several workloads and it's the best preview-environment-per-PR setup I've encountered across PaaS options.
I've been incredibly happy with Northflank since moving over a few years ago after Heroku got unreliable. Felt like an upgrade from Heroku and the support and reliability have been great.
Looks like that still has downtime for a Postgres migration- you're suggesting going into maintenance mode and just doing a dump/restore. I've seen that take hours once you hit the terabyte scale, depending on hardware.
I've had pretty good luck setting up logical replication from Heroku to the new provider and having a 10-15 minute maintenance window to catch up once it's in sync. Might be worth considering.
You might also want to add a warning about Postgres versions. There's some old bugs around primary key hash functions that can cause corruption on a migration. I've seen it twice when migrating from Heroku to other vendors.
Sorry, but telling people to take a logical backup of their database, and then download it onto their local work station is insane for a production application. First, a logical backup at any decent scale will fail, and second, I don't even have enough local storage to do that -- even ignoring the compliance issues with downloading a full copy of production data onto a work station.
For a company like Northflank, I'd expect actual production-grade documentation for migrating, not instructions that are only applicable to a toy app.
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.
Crunchy Bridge will help you migrate. They did a great job for us. We had a minute or so of downtime to let the read replica catch up and cut across. The team knows Heroku well, and some of them built it. (No affiliation, just a happy customer.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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'd like to +1 for Northflank. I've been using it for a few months for smaller projects and experiments, and the dashboard and overall experience has been great. Free tier is good enough to run small apps, and pricing is very competitive.
Also got a lot of rapid email support from the Northflank staff when I ran into issues.
Is the free plan comparable to heroku? So I could get a free Dyno (equivalent) with postgres dB on Northflank? And you can't scale back down to free once you go paid?
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!
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)
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.
As a Heroku customer, I'd appreciate a migration guide from Heroku to Northflank in your docs. What are the equivalent services (nodejs dynos, worker, scheduler, postgres, papertrail) and what are the steps to move. Thanks
Had to look it up so here it is, from the TV show, The Expanse:
"Belter is a term used to refer to persons born in the Asteroid Belt or the Moons of the outer planets. An inner usually refers to someone who originated from the Inner planets of the Sol system, but usually meaning from Earth, Luna, or Mars."
No, it didn’t. PG made HN after funding and using Reddit.
Reddit had invite-only subreddits at that time and Joel Spolsky’s even had some traction. PG considered doing something similar but decided it wasn’t flexible enough for his needs and made HN.
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.