Reliability: It’s not great

This is, indeed, the exciting part. As Heroku fans, we never really felt like it needed a replacement. And if it did, it seemed like Render was the natural Heroku v.next.

One thing we've noticed, though, is that people do actually want Heroku but close to users. It's not exactly edge compute. In some cases, it's "Heroku in Tokyo". In others it's "Heroku, but running in all the english speaking regions".

I think the thing that ate up most of our energy is also the thing that might actually make this business work. We built on top of our own hardware. That's the thing that made it difficult to build managed Postgres. We put way more energy into the underlying infrastructure than most nü-Heroku companies. The cost was extreme, but I'm like 63% sure this was the right choice.

Just partner with Neon or other similar companies in this space. Scale-to-zero distributed databases is well understood technology.

https://neon.tech/

Yes, we are partnering with many companies like Hasura and Replit to help with managed Postgres. Since Neon scales to 0 and also autoscales to your workload it very economical for the long tail of low usage customers.

> As Heroku fans, we never really felt like it needed a replacement.

If Salesforce kept investing in heroku, it might not. But there is a huge loss of confidence in heroku's future going on among heroku's customers right now, which is part of what you're seeing, as I'm sure you know. (Also I think to some extent you are being political/kind towards heroku... if heroku's owners were still investing in heroku for real, adding 'edge' functionality like fly.io is focusing on is what one would probably expect...)

And frankly... your tool seems more mature and... not to be rude to competitors but seems to have more of that certain `je ne sais quoi` of Developer Experience Happiness that heroku _used_ to have and other potential heroku competitors don't really quite seem to have yet. Does what you expect/need in a polished and consistent way.

I think work you put into the underlying infrastructure definitely shows there, and was the right choice. Tidy infrastructure helps with tidy consistent developer experience.

So I understand why people are looking to you as a heroku replacement. I am too! (And I don't really need the edge compute stuff; although I could potentially see using it in the future, and it shows you folks are on top of things).

And while I kept reading fly staff saying on HN comments that you didn't want to be a heroku replacement, so were unconcerned with the few places people were mentioning where you still felt short of it -- when I saw your investment in Rails documentation and tools (and contribs back to Rails), I thought, aha, i think they've realized this is a market looking for them, which they are only a couple steps from and it would make sense to meet.

When you mention in OP a "heroku exodus" to you... I'm curious if that was all people who left when heroku ended free tier stuff, and they've all come to you for your free tier stuff... becuase that does seem dangerous, such a giant spike in users who are not paying and don't bring revenue with them! I don't personally use very much heroku free tier stuff. I hope if that's a challenge, it's one you can get over. I don't think you are under any obligation to offer free stuff that can be used for real production workloads indefinitely -- although, as I'm sure you know, free stuff is huge for allowing people to try _before_ they buy, and whatever limits you put on it to try to prevent indefinite production use get in the way of someone's "try before you buy" too... and at this point, _reducing_ your free offerings is a lot harder PR-wise than having started out with less in the first place. :(

I shared your post with Render's engineering team and it got a lot of love because we know the struggle and can truly empathize because of our own Heroku-accelerated growth. What Fly and Render are doing is hard, but someone needs to do it.

If the market is big enough to support AWS/GCP/Azure as $N00B businesses each, it’s not a leap to imagine a future where both Fly and Render are incredibly successful, loved, and independent businesses spanning decades. Let's keep at it.

Does Neon support triggers and subscriptions?

Can you please explain what the Vault related failure is about? Is this about timing out services failing to start within an acceptable time range?

yes to triggers - it's full postgres. logical replication is not exposed just yet, but soon

will subscription work with scale to zero?

Subscriptions should still work with scale to 0. NOTIFY/LISTEN doesn't: https://neon.tech/docs/reference/compatibility.

We will have an option to not scale all the way to 0 to support this scenario.

It sounds like you built the right product on the wrong technology stack, at the lower levels. For example, I have never heard a Nomad success story, but this might be colored by interviewing engineers desperate to escape it.

Something like linkerd on Kubernetes would be stronger, I suspect. But I don't know the exact nature of your problems.

I've just started using Render and it's great!

Goodbye Heroku. :(

Your margins are going to end up being a lot better than any other PaaS that's built on top of the big cloud providers.

Yeah, basically that. One of the servers in our Vault cluster failed and prevented Vault agents from receiving secrets. For Nomad apps, this showed up as "allocation failures" and failed deploys. Machine based apps took an abnormally long time to start and caused other issues.

Awesome!

> I have never heard a Nomad success story

There's a lot of Nomad at , just won't get any publicity but that's different.

Doesn't Vault self-promote in the case of single node failure?

I noticed you mention Vault lives in the US, I'm sure you've already heard of this pattern, but Vault (Enterprise) supports [multi-region clusters for performance and DR](https://developer.hashicorp.com/vault/tutorials/day-one-raft...)

Thanks!