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Decisions about Google App Engine, Heroku, and Red Hat OpenShift
Alex Parker
I'm transitioning to Render from heroku. The pricing scale matches my usage scale, yet it's just as easy to deploy. It's removed a lot of the devops that I don't like to deal with on setting up my own raw *nix box and makes deployment simple and easy!
Clustering I don't use clustering features at the moment but when i need to set up clustering of nodes and discoverability, render will enable that where Heroku would require that I use an external service like redis.
Restarts The restarts are annoying. I understand the reasoning, but I'd rather watch my service if its got a memory leak and work to fix it than to just assume that it has memory leaks and needs to restart.
Pros of Google App Engine
Pros of Heroku
Pros of Red Hat OpenShift
Pros of Google App Engine
- Easy to deploy143
- Auto scaling108
- Good free plan80
- Easy management64
- Scalability58
- Low cost36
- Comprehensive set of features33
- All services in one place29
- Simple scaling23
- Quick and reliable cloud servers20
- Granular Billing5
- Easy to develop and unit test4
- Monitoring gives comprehensive set of key indicators3
- Create APIs quickly with cloud endpoints2
- Really easy to quickly bring up a full stack2
- Mostly up1
- No Ops1
Pros of Heroku
- Easy deployment703
- Free for side projects460
- Huge time-saver374
- Simple scaling348
- Low devops skills required261
- Easy setup189
- Add-ons for almost everything174
- Beginner friendly153
- Better for startups149
- Low learning curve133
- Postgres hosting47
- Easy to add collaborators41
- Faster development30
- Awesome documentation24
- Simple rollback19
- Focus on product, not deployment18
- Easy integration15
- Natural companion for rails development15
- Great customer support11
- GitHub integration7
- No-ops6
- Painless & well documented5
- Just works3
- Free3
- PostgreSQL forking and following2
- I love that they make it free to launch a side project2
- Great UI2
- MySQL extension2
Pros of Red Hat OpenShift
- Good free plan97
- Open Source61
- Easy setup45
- Nodejs support41
- Well documented38
- Custom domains31
- Mongodb support27
- Clean and simple architecture26
- PHP support24
- Customizable environments20
- Ability to run CRON jobs10
- Easier than Heroku for a WordPress blog8
- Good balance between Heroku and AWS for flexibility6
- PostgreSQL support6
- Easy deployment6
- Autoscaling5
- Shell access to gears4
- Free, Easy Setup, Lot of Gear or D.I.Y Gear4
- Great Support3
- Overly complicated and over engineered in majority of e2
- Golang support2
- Its free and offer custom domain usage2
- because it is easy to manage1
- No credit card needed1
- Autoscaling at a good price point1
- Easy setup and great customer support1
- This is the only free one among the three as of today1
- Meteor support1
- Great free plan with excellent support1
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Cons of Google App Engine
Cons of Heroku
Cons of Red Hat OpenShift
Cons of Google App Engine
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Cons of Heroku
- Super expensive22
- No usable MySQL option6
- Not a whole lot of flexibility6
- Storage5
- Low performance on free tier4
Cons of Red Hat OpenShift
- Decisions are made for you, limiting your options2
- License cost2
- Behind, sometimes severely, the upstreams1
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What is Google App Engine?
Google has a reputation for highly reliable, high performance infrastructure. With App Engine you can take advantage of the 10 years of knowledge Google has in running massively scalable, performance driven systems. App Engine applications are easy to build, easy to maintain, and easy to scale as your traffic and data storage needs grow.
What is Heroku?
Heroku is a cloud application platform – a new way of building and deploying web apps. Heroku lets app developers spend 100% of their time on their application code, not managing servers, deployment, ongoing operations, or scaling.
What is Red Hat OpenShift?
OpenShift is Red Hat's Cloud Computing Platform as a Service (PaaS) offering. OpenShift is an application platform in the cloud where application developers and teams can build, test, deploy, and run their applications.
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What companies use Google App Engine?
What companies use Heroku?
What companies use Red Hat OpenShift?
What companies use Google App Engine?
What companies use Heroku?
What companies use Red Hat OpenShift?
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What tools integrate with Google App Engine?
What tools integrate with Heroku?
What tools integrate with Red Hat OpenShift?
What tools integrate with Google App Engine?
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Blog Posts
Jan 15 2020 at 11:37AM

Rafay Systems
What are some alternatives to Google App Engine, Heroku, and Red Hat OpenShift?
Amazon Web Services
It provides on-demand cloud computing platforms to individuals, companies and governments. It offers reliable, scalable, and inexpensive cloud computing services.
DigitalOcean
We take the complexities out of cloud hosting by offering blazing fast, on-demand SSD cloud servers, straightforward pricing, a simple API, and an easy-to-use control panel.
AWS Lambda
AWS Lambda is a compute service that runs your code in response to events and automatically manages the underlying compute resources for you. You can use AWS Lambda to extend other AWS services with custom logic, or create your own back-end services that operate at AWS scale, performance, and security.
Kubernetes
Kubernetes is an open source orchestration system for Docker containers. It handles scheduling onto nodes in a compute cluster and actively manages workloads to ensure that their state matches the users declared intentions.
AWS Elastic Beanstalk
Once you upload your application, Elastic Beanstalk automatically handles the deployment details of capacity provisioning, load balancing, auto-scaling, and application health monitoring.
Interest over time
How much does Google App Engine cost?
How much does Heroku cost?
How much does Red Hat OpenShift cost?
News about Google App Engine
Our Los Angeles cloud region is open for business
(cloudplatform.googleblog.com)
Jul 16, 2018
Cloud Spanner adds import/export functionality to ease data movement
(cloudplatform.googleblog.com)
Jul 17, 2018
Top storage and database sessions to check out at Next 2018
(cloudplatform.googleblog.com)
Jul 18, 2018
Introducing commercial Kubernetes applications in GCP Marketplace
(cloudplatform.googleblog.com)
Jul 18, 2018
Now shipping: ultramem machine types with up to 4TB of RAM
(cloudplatform.googleblog.com)
Jul 18, 2018
News about Heroku
How to Host a Python and Flask Facebook Messenger Bot on Heroku
(twilioinc.wpengine.com)
Feb 7, 2018
Scaling ipify to 30 Billion Requests and Beyond on Heroku
(blog.heroku.com)
Jan 23, 2018
Heroku Postgres PGX: Bigger Databases, Improved Infrastructure, Same Price
(blog.heroku.com)
Jan 17, 2018
The 2017 Heroku Retrospective: Advancing Developer Experience, Data, and Trust
(blog.heroku.com)
Jan 12, 2018
Announcing the New Heroku Partner Portal for Add-ons
(blog.heroku.com)
Jan 11, 2018
News about Red Hat OpenShift
Minishift and the Enterprise: Installation
(blog.openshift.com)
Feb 16, 2018
Take Our Survey to Help Us Improve the OpenShift Developer Experience
(blog.openshift.com)
Feb 7, 2018
[Podcast] PodCTL #24 – The Blurred Line Between Containers and Applications
(blog.openshift.com)
Feb 5, 2018
OpenShift Online 3 Questions and Answers
(blog.openshift.com)
Feb 5, 2018
Partner Spotlight: Dynatrace
(blog.openshift.com)
Jan 25, 2018