Why I'm not migrating to Fly.io from Heroku

1

Hi guys,

I have been using Heroku for many years (>10 by my count).

There have been several problems with it recently (GitHub access token breach, no more free tier, DDoS attacks…etc…).

I used the tool to migrate from Heroku to Fly.io, which was great and got me up and running on here in no time!

However, there are several features that are missing that I would want before I fully take the plunge. I would like to share them to help the team

  1. Being able to roll back deploys in the UI. This feature was a must for our whole team to easily roll things back extremely quickly if anything goes wrong.
  2. Being able to see and edit secrets in the UI. This is a real pain to do over the command line compared to just changing it in the UI of the site (yes it’s less secure etc…)
  3. Being able to clearly see the deploy configuration from my application without me having to rebuild it manually (I am trying to get CircleCI to deploy to flyio and it looks like I need to create a fly.toml but I’m just guessing here, whereas there is no doubt a config file somewhere that I can’t see from my dashboard!
  4. CircleCI Orb for easy deployments or at least a fully working example somewhere! (this probably exists but I have not found it!)
  5. Also my build times seem to be taking quite a long time and I have no idea why! (i.e. 10 minutes on flyio as opposed to 6 on Heroku)

What other alternatives do I have to Heroku that might solve these problems better?

Thanks all!

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2

I don’t think there’s any other PaaS more complete than Fly at the moment, but you can look at railway.app that favours UI more than Fly, which relies more on the CLI (for the time being). AWS has App Runner, but it is not cheap.

Not quite the heroku replacements since limited scope (runtime-wise or deployment-model-wise) in render.com, glitch.com, convex.dev, fermyon.com etc

See also: https://github.com/debarshibasak/awesome-paas (an incomplete list).

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3

Thanks so much for this!

I spent some more time looking around and found render.com solves pretty much all of the issues:

  1. :white_check_mark: I can roll back deploys in the UI
  2. :white_check_mark: Can edit environment variables in UI
  3. :white_check_mark: I just created a webservice with ‘Node’ and it JustWorks
  4. :warning: There is a hook when you are ready to deploy which I just call after my CI job finishes
  5. :white_check_mark: Build times seem to be similar to Heroku out of the box

Pricing as far as I can tell is not too dissimilar to Heroku, but I don’t really mind that!

4

render.com is too expensive.

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