What is our preferred PaaS?

[stevepolitodesign]

We currently recommend Heroku, but the recent news is cause for concern.

Do we have an alternative PaaS we'd recommend to our clients?

[stevepolitodesign]

I guess there's also a case to be made that we don't need to recommend a PaaS, given that Rails 8 now ships with Kamal.

[jaredlt]

I still think most of our clients will be better off with managed applications and databases. One less thing to worry about, especially as they're just starting up. Plus, many folks won't have the technical knowledge to resolve things when they go wrong.

[cpytel]

I agree with @jaredlt

[jaredlt]

Render seems to be the "new kid on the block" with the most clout.

I also quite like the look of Railway.

I've not used either.

I would avoid Fly at the moment due to client-reported unreliability.

[stevepolitodesign]

Maybe a good next step is to see how easy it is to deploy a Suspenders application to Render. I just need to fix #1327 first.

[cpytel]

Maybe a good next step is to see how easy it is to deploy a Suspenders application to Render.

I recently did this, it was straightforward and took less than 30 minutes to have the (simple) app up and running. I ended up not sticking with it because I ran into a blocker with the fact that Render cron jobs run in an entirely different context than your application, which means in order to run a rake task that connects your database, for example, you need an entirely new deployment of your entire rails app. Either that or their recommended solution is to have a cron job that does an http request to your main application which triggers the task.

While not insurmountable, it was an unexpected hurdle that caused me to end up falling back to Heroku for this particular app (this was before the Heroku announcements).

We are planning to migrate thoughtbot.com off of AWS. I was originally planning on going back to Heroku. If not for the announcement, we would have gone back to Heroku. While I recognize that going into maintenance mode means we'll still likely have years of runway on Heroku, the hamfisted corporate speak of that announcement doesn't leave me with confidence.

I think what we're going to do is give Railway a try and bring up a staging env of the site online to see how it goes and what we learn.

[stevepolitodesign]

Here's the official guidance from Railway.

[cpytel]

We experimented with migrating thoughtbot.com staging from AWS to Railway was positive and we're feeling good about it. Our current plan is to migrate production there soon.

[cpytel]

Quick update: We went live with thoughtbot.com production on Railway on Friday. Things look very good so far. From my brief experience with Render and Railway they are very similar platforms.

People with Heroku experience may be slightly more comfortable with the way Railway works but both are straightforward to pick up.

Barring any stability issues or something like that with Railway, I'm not sure that I would have a compelling recommendation of one over the other. That may be ok, it might just be "this is our default, but this is good too".

I think we should give it some time on production and with real usage by us before making anything official.

[louis-antonopoulos]

After reading the Heroku message, I'm not sure I understand the status of things. It sounds like they are going to continue supporting both existing and new customers. Is it that they're not developing new features anymore?

[jimmythigpen]

@jaredlt curious about the client-reported unreliability. Does anyone else have experience with Render, Fly, or others besides Heroku? If we want to start experimenting with these should we work on adding them to our approved services list?

[cpytel]

If we're just experimenting, we don't need to go through service approval. https://hub.thoughtbot.com/handbook/policies/security.md#online-services

[jaredlt]

@jimmythigpen primary driver for their migration away from Fly was infrastructure instability. A secondary one for them was lack of managed postgres. It looks like they do sort of have managed postgres now but it lacks some pretty significant features like "Security patches and version upgrades" 😅 The infrastructure instability was unplanned downtime, enough to make them move off the platform. I suspect this is mostly all "growing pains" for Fly as they suffer from their own success. I'm definitely open to the fact that Render and Railway may be just as bad. Equally, I assume Fly will get more stable over time.