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Comment by intellix | Hacker News Reader

Unfortunately I also had to waste my time learning containers when all I wanted was Heroku without the insane prices for addon services. For delivering just apps I think Cloud Native Buildpacks solve that: https://buildpacks.io/

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What does "delivering just apps" means?

And what's buildpacks? Seems like a more specialized docker.

Buildpacks predate Docker. They're standardized build scripts for popular app runtimes. Heroku created the concept and applied it for their PaaS years before Docker was a thing. They're not a competitor to Docker containers. They are perhaps a competitor to Dockerfiles.

They detect the kind of app and then basically do everything required to build and run that app from pushing a repository. So it'll detect that it's a NodeJS application because there's a package.json file in the root and essentially: install node modules, run the build script and then do npm run start to run it.

All you need to know how to do is: supply a build + start script and push your repository and now it's built and running in the Cloud to scale from 0 to unlimited.

It's basically Heroku but buildpacks are a standardised way to do it on any Cloud.

Render.com is like Heroku but cheaper and handles static sites as well as distributed applications (nodes can talk to each other).

Have you tried Dokku? Very similar to Heroku. I run it on a DO server without any issues.

You can also try Cloud 66

Used them years ago when we moved from AWS to bare-metal (losing Elastic Beanstalk that we were using in AWS in the process)

I seem to recall a few minor issues here and there, but I'd totally use them again.

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