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Yes, Coherence supports multiple services as part of one app, which all have to live in one repo. You're also able to integrate across multiple Coherence apps (in one or more repos) by treating them as an external dependency of each other. They can all deploy into the same cloud project, of course. We don't currently support automatically doing things like service discovery across apps, but in general better support for micro services and more complex features along these lines are definitely on our roadmap. We'd love to talk about your use case and learn more about how we could support it.

Appreciate the feedback and question! And please do check us out and let us know how we can make it work for you...

Hi Adam, for now we're offering 6 months free (you pay your own cloud usage). We will always have a free tier and will charge a platform fee as your usage scales, as well as a per-minute fee for usage of the cloud IDE (which will also have a free usage tier). Thanks for checking us out!

This is a thread filled with great insight and experience, so thanks for starting it. If you're looking to move from Heroku/PaaS into your own cloud account on GCP or AWS, please take a look at Coherence (withcoherence.com) [I'm a cofounder]

Coherence configures managed services in your own cloud such as Cloud Run in GCP or Fargate/ECS in AWS, while adding in all the missing pieces these providers don't include out of the box, such as load balancer/SSL/DNS configuration, database/redis orchestration, CI/CD integration, Cloud IDEs for development, VPC/networking best practices, long-running workers and cron tasks - all with one simple configuration.

Coherence itself has a free tier that fits most projects, but you will need to use credits or pay for you usage of your cloud resources. We'd love feedback and are happy to answer any questions, feel free to ping hn@withcoherence.com!

There’s a universe of tools that aim to provide simpler abstractions over infra as code these days. One of them is provided by my company, withcoherence.com. While many of the advantages such as automated per branch ephemeral environments, accrue to teams, solo builders in some ways get more leverage from infra abstractions that let them focus on their own application.

It's amazing how many really interesting and deeply thought-out dev platforms are being built right now. We're lucky! Aside from these 3, replit is doing unique things by integrating the development experience from writing code all the way through hosting, and while they don't compete with a full PaaS like fly for hosting complex apps, for smaller services they are better than people realize already.

I would also be remiss not to mention Coherence (withcoherence.com) [I'm a cofounder] where we're trying to deliver some of the same magic as the best in class PaaS's above, but we are running your workloads in your own AWS or GCP account. We're really excited about the potential future of a great developer experience that can be delivered as a service instead of rebuilt over and again by platform teams in-house.

Withcoherence.com is one new option (I’m a cofounder). Would love your thoughts if you get a chance to check it out - hn@withcoherence.com…

IMO it’s also about choosing the right things to integrate vs. build. I agree that with Space in particular, the choice of what they integrate vs. build does not make sense for maximizing developer experience and value. At Coherence (withcoherence.com // I’m a cofounder) we are also building a more integrated set of tools for building software, but we don’t feel that GitHub and Slack or JIRA/Asana/linear are the tools to bite off, or that the world needs yet another CI syntax and hosting platform. Those are all great places to choose integration with existing popular tools. We do agree with the Space product thesis in that the Cloud IDE is a central piece of the next generation platform - we just think that tying it deeply to the deployment and cloud infrastructure workflows provides the most developer value.

Of course, we’re huge fans of JetBrains products, and them and the other companies mentioned above have so much credibility and such vast resources that they are going to deliver widely-used and powerful products. We hope to integrate with them where it makes sense!

If you are curious to learn about about Coherence, please check out our free beta at the link above or feel free to reach out to hn@withcoherence.com… We appreciate any and all feedback from the HN community.

Yes! The integration of the development environment back into the platform (Heroku actually did this in their very first product as well) is what makes replit so magical, in my view.

At Coherence (withcoherence.com) we are looking to go beyond the NewCloud companies you mention here (which are all awesome), to provide the same kind of integrated experience with Cloud IDE, CI, and Deployment all in one configuration, but running in your own cloud account using managed services. (Disclosure // cofounder)

Would love to hear more about why you think that is the case. For example Cloud Run on GCP is one of the best developer experiences in the cloud provider world, yet still has some key issues (some are solved by Herkou and some aren't). For example: - long-running workers, crons (they're just fixing this in beta with jobs but still has a lot of limits) - ability to get a shell to run arbitrary commands (e.g. SSH) - having multiple environments, auto-configuration of sql/redis connections for each, secrets for each. - Then if you're doing a "real" production-grade app you have to deal with how you orchestrate multiple cloud run instances behind a load balancer (e.g. frontend/backend) and all the DNS/SSL/VPC configuration here - how you deal with CI/CD across multiple environments (e.g. staging/branch previews) for multiple services, both in terms of configuring CI appropriately and in terms of which services trigger which jobs - matching up deployed envs with dev environments

ECS or App Runner on AWS has many of the same issues. 100% agree that many of the k8s-based environment automation solutions are a mismatch for a Heroku replacement. But I do believe there is room for tools that help solve these problems on top of cloud providers (disclosure, working on one at withcoherence.com...)

Please check out withcoherence.com (I'm a cofounder). We manage the nuts and bolts of apps using ECS/fargate on AWS and Cloud Run/GKE on GCP. We also integrate managed cloud IDEs and managed CI/CD pipelines using the same simple configuration, and put a dashboard on top of it!

Thanks! And appreciate the context here...

Tyler, don't forget about Coherence! (withcoherence.com)

Totally agree that in practice you often need several configurations for the same systems across different environment types. For example, you probably also need a different docker-compose for running in CI when compared to dev or a deployed environment. The same applies for k8s and terraform, and many others.

Managing all these different configurations and the matrix of interactions between them is why we're trying to integrate the SDLC into one configuration at Coherence (withcoherence.com). [disclosure... I'm a cofounder]

As someone working on a roughly similar product (withcoherence.com), I would highlight a few key reasons to prefer to a TF module: - maintainability (better to not have to maintain, audit, improve TF and keep up to date with best practices) - multiple environments (how do you create pipeline, CF distros, etc up to date with all your active branches). Even more - enhancements like using spot instances automatically for test envs. Maybe you already did that improvement or plan to do it, but a good example of where a platform might get ahead of your own fork. - discoverability/SPOF on team - how do you train a new dev on how to use these tools? much easier to train them on a nice UI. what if the person who forked that TF repo leaves the company? - integration to other environment types - Coherence is unique in this respect but how does your cloud footprint map to CI/CD testing envs, development envs, etc? Along with other open questions like how do you provide SSH access to the team across environments when needed? More stuff to fork and maintain... With something like Coherence, all of these questions are answered for you in one sane way (we configure a Cloud IDE and Cloud Shell automatically for all your environments) - Cross-cloud and cross-region support. Migrating your app to another provider or service is easier if supported by the automation tools. Coherence supports GCP and AWS for example.

All in all, buy vs. build is a tough question but generally SaaS wins once it is a viable option for real-world teams. In developer experience, we are still in the early innings on convincing folks it's worth it not to reinvent the wheel in-house.

Would love anyone interested to check out our free trial and feel free to ping hn@withcoherence.com with feedback or questions!

This is a great list, thanks for sharing! Always fun to see these kinds of run-downs...

Wanted to just note that there is a robust space of companies like quovery, porter, and other k8s management/abstraction tools. Lots of them are great products. I would specifically mention architect.io, garden.io, and ReleaseHub.

At Coherence (withcoherence.com) [I'm a cofounder] - we would highlight some key differences in our approach: - Not k8s based, but rather using cloud managed services like Cloud Run on GCP and ECS/Fargate on AWS - Using managed services for builds instead of doing them on our own platform (GCP Cloud Build, AWS CodePipeline) - Extending all the way to dev - and not by using QA environments as dev environments, but rather by offering per-user, per-branch Cloud IDEs built on the same configuration as the rest of the product - Integrated a per-environment cloud shell for one-off commands - Managing separate production and review GCP projects/AWS accounts for the same application within one dashboard and SDLC

A few other comments on the list: - Documentation - ReadMe still has a powerful product - Backoffice, something like retool often has a use case, along with things like typeform and airtable. Glide for light no-code apps integrated into these systems is also an awesome tool! - Analytics/BI - we have been using glean.io as an alternative here - it sites between something like meta base and something like Looker/Tableau/PowerBI, and integrates more of the data ops flow into the configuration. Worth checking out if you're looking in the space.

Generally, from teams we talk to at Coherence (withcoherence.com), it seems to be a mistake to try to run stateful workloads in Kubernetes. As much as the cost savings compared to managed services like AWS RDS or GCP Cloud SQL are attractive, the configuration time and maintenance are just not worth it. Our perspective is that container orchestration tools should be used to manage stateless workloads, and that stateful workloads should delegate to managed services where volume reliability, scalability, and backup can be handled with purpose-built tools.

If you're at a company that doesn't have a Platform team, but that still struggles with wanting centralized guardrails and best practices, and a consistent set of patterns across services and teams, the answer to this question might be a developer experience platform like what we're building at Coherence (I'm a cofounder). In this case, someone else writes the terraform, and you just tell us how to map it onto your code. This lets us give you nice things like a dashboard to manage deployments, cloud IDEs, branch preview environments, etc. while still giving your dev/devops folks total control and visibility, since it runs in your own cloud...

Would love anyone interested to give it a spin at withcoherence.com and please feel free to ping hn@withcoherence.com with any feedback or issues!

Thanks!

In general we’re not targeting a 1:1 migration from netlify, so while yes we have equivalents for all of the pieces you mention, they work differently and would require migration work to use Coherence.

Coherence offers full-stack containerized application support, so any functions could be run as a backend service - with additional functionality such as databases/redis and wider framework support available (while still getting the benefits we offer such as Cloud IDE and preview environments).

As well, we have our own `coherence.yml` file that would replace the `netlify.toml` one.

As for redirects, we don’t have anything baked in on that front, but very open to adding equivalent support if it was something our users needed. That’s a good call-out! In the meantime, given our ability to run containers as well as static sites, running an nginx or something with the redirects in the config file would be possible as a stopgap.

Thanks for the thoughts!

If anyone on this thread is looking for an alternative, I’m a cofounder of Coherence (withcoherence.com).

We offer a netlify-like experience (managed CI, preview environments) built on top of your own cloud account. And we also offer an integrated Cloud IDE for use as a development environment. Today we support GCP but AWS is coming soon. To address one comment I’ve seen here with other alternatives, we don’t have the DNS/custom domain limitations of Cloudflare pages.

For a static site, migration should be very straightforward and we are happy to help if you run into any issues. Feel free to ping hn@withcoherence.com!

If you wanted to set up a static site backed by a CDN in your own cloud account, check out withcoherence.com (I’m a cofounder). We also offer a built in Cloud IDE. Should be very simple to migrate from netlify and there won’t be any surprise bills since it’s your own cloud billing directly!

Wrote up some thoughts last month on serverless vs. containers here: https://www.withcoherence.com/post/containers-and-the-server...

My 2c is that for most people using containers on a "serverless" runtime like Cloud Run is the best of both worlds...

At Coherence (withcoherence.com - I'm a cofounder) we generally agree that GKE and other managed k8s are best used for stateless workloads. Rather than move stateful workloads back, leveraging managed services will yield the best results in the long term. In the case of Redis on GCP, something like Memorystore is going to be a better fit than managing a nest of node pools over time (think about version upgrades, resources differences across environments, etc...) However, the complexity of managing the different kinds of configuration across GKE and managed services can be a nightmare.

That's a problem we're hoping to help solve, where you define your application and it's dependencies, and we help run it in the right way to leverage managed cloud services across environments without passing that headache on!

This is awesome and in general I couldn’t be more excited about platforms that integrate the loop from building to deploying in one place. Similar tools include glitch, replit, codesphere.

I’m the cofounder of Coherence (withcoherence.com) which is in early beta to bring the same experience to a more typical VSCode cloud IDE/infra as code in your own cloud/CI setup that a software team working on full stack containerized apps would use.

Our developer experience platform, Coherence, just opened up a free beta for Google Cloud Platform (AWS coming soon) at withcoherence.com. We will always offer a free plan…

It’s a great way to get the most out of a cloud’s free tier - we help you deploy a production-quality app onto the cloud infrastructure in your own cloud account. And we add integrated cloud IDE, cloud shell, and a dashboard on top of it. Feedback welcome!

This is a strong overview of the leading contenders for the "modern Heroku" that come up often on HN and twitter for the best available platform as a service.

I believe that when looking at this space in 2022, you have to consider the burgeoning "Heroku in your own cloud" space that includes companies doing devops automation, mostly using kubernetes in AWS. I also think you have to look at how the deployment platform fits into the life of building and deploying an app, things like dev environments, testing, CI/CD, and collaboration.

One option I'd love the author to compare to these platforms is Coherence (disclosure - I"m a cofounder) - which goes from dev to deployment in a production-ready way, from Cloud IDEs to automated full-stack branch environments and UI for release/observability on a dashboard. We do this in your own cloud, today we support GCP with AWS coming soon. Check out https://withcoherence.com (or https://docs.withcoherence.com/docs/coherence-vs-other-softw...) to sign up for free and give it a try!

The hardest part of this cycle for most teams are steps 2 & 3, getting a consistent development environment and build system across projects just does not happen. The loop is interrupted by the process of reviewing outdated docs, finding the people with the knowledge, and chatting with them to get a development environment running and helping with deploys to various QA/test environments before merging.

At Coherence, we agree that code search and code review, along with automated code intelligence, are a huge step forward. Tools like sourcegraph, graphite, codeapprove are all solving important problems in the cycle. But we believe that the general approach of “building” vs “buying” development infrastructure for these key steps is holding teams back.

Check us out at withcoherence.com if these sound like problems your team faces, too! (Disclosure, I’m a cofounder)

I'm also a bit confused by the terms used here. Is Replicated (https://www.replicated.com) an example of the kind of "control plane" you're referencing?

Wrote up some of my own thoughts on this one: https://www.withcoherence.com/post/the-future-of-code-and-no...

Bottom line up front, I believe that we don’t want to lose the proven expressiveness of code.

At withcoherence.com, we agree that leaning on managed runtimes for as long as possible makes a ton of sense. I’ve also seen that hiding the complexity of transforming code into deployed containers by fully abstracting away dockerfiles and CI/deploy scripts can lead teams into a tough spot at a bad time to learn what’s really happening.

But the appeal of k8s is often the ecosystem of tools that solve real problems these runtimes leave on the table: managing multiple environments, load balancing across services, SSL/TLS, SSH, long-running tasks, managing multiple versions, integrating tests into pipelines. Coherence is working to solve these problems and create a great developer experience without hiding what’s really going on under the hood.

(Disclosure, I’m a cofounder)