Assuming you’re a company (as opposed to an individual), if you want a PAAS, there are a few different options that in my view are sustainable which I think is the key criteria for adopting something for your platform.
- Heroku. Sure it’s a bit expensive but it’s still super easy if you’re a dev.
- OpenShift. If you’re a really big enterprise, OpenShift is a reasonable choice for PAAS. But only if you’re huge.
- Kubernetes. Yes, it’s complicated. Yes, it has a steep learning curve. But it’s open source, has a huge and growing ecosystem, and it has less lock in than any other PAAS-like thing that I can think of.
The main downside of Kubernetes beyond its complexity is that you still have to build abstractions on top of it for your developers. But that world is improving regularly.
I went through this evaluation process again recently for an open source project for a client and came to the conclusion that, for small projects, Heroku provides immense value. Given the features and free-tier add-ons it’s definitely worth the 7p/m and I don’t know if I would class it as expensive anymore when taking all it’s features into consideration. I’d like to see http2 support though.
Watching and waiting for https://render.com to mature a little as it seems slightly better value.
- Heroku. Sure it’s a bit expensive but it’s still super easy if you’re a dev. - OpenShift. If you’re a really big enterprise, OpenShift is a reasonable choice for PAAS. But only if you’re huge. - Kubernetes. Yes, it’s complicated. Yes, it has a steep learning curve. But it’s open source, has a huge and growing ecosystem, and it has less lock in than any other PAAS-like thing that I can think of.
The main downside of Kubernetes beyond its complexity is that you still have to build abstractions on top of it for your developers. But that world is improving regularly.