<p>When I <a href="https://www.digitalocean.com/blog/introducing-digitalocean-app-platform-reimagining-paas-to-make-it-simpler-for-you-to-build-deploy-and-scale-apps/">first learned</a> about the new Digital Ocean App Platform, I was pretty excited to see Heroku have some competition! We use Heroku on many projects and love its simplicity, but hate how quickly it can get expensive.</p>
<p>I attempted to set up one of our client's projects on this new platform to give it a spin. Here is my experience.</p>

<h1>Digital Ocean vs. Heroku</h1>
<div style="text-align: center;">
    <img src="/assets/images/articles/digital-ocean.png">
</div>
<table>
<thead>
<tr>
<th>Pros</th>
<th>Cons</th>
</tr>
</thead>
<tbody>
<tr>
<td>Compared to Heroku, there's quite a bit less to learn</td>
<td>No free database to test against, must pay $7/mo</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Scaling up a bit should be cheaper than Heroku</td>
<td>Very few add ons</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Fresh, has the opportunity to grow with community input</td>
<td>May not support many non-trivial apps because of lacking add-ons</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td></td>
<td>Similar to Heroku, DigitalOcean has a <a href="https://www.digitalocean.com/docs/app-platform/concepts/doctl/">cli</a> but not nearly as many features</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td></td>
<td>In its infancy still</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<p> </p>
<div style="text-align: center;">
    <img src="/assets/images/articles/do-app-platform.png" class="img-bordered">
    <small><i>Creating an app</i></small>
</div>
<h1>Add on support</h1>
<p>Currently, the Digital Ocean App Platform only has the following add ons:</p>
<ul>
<li>Managed databases</li>
<li>Object storage</li>
</ul>
<p>Compared to Heroku's <a href="https://elements.heroku.com/addons">dozens of add ons</a> that's not very impressive! For example:
what if I need to process thumbnails in the background after a user registers? Center it, optimize the file sizes, make multiple versions (i.e. thumbnail)... how do I do that?</p>
<p>To do things in the background nicely, I have to learn a new
concept: <a href="https://www.digitalocean.com/docs/app-platform/how-to/manage-workers/">workers</a>. I already have a toolchain I
like using and ways to monitor it, and all of my existing modules expect to play in this environment. I use
<a href="https://docs.celeryproject.org/en/stable/">Celery</a> + <a href="https://www.rabbitmq.com/">RabbitMQ</a> or
<a href="https://redis.io/">Redis</a> and that stack is battle-tested by thousands of other companies.</p>
<p>Another example of where lacking add ons may hurt is logging or general app analytics. Heroku has many options in
<a href="https://elements.heroku.com/addons/sentry">Sentry</a>, <a href="https://elements.heroku.com/addons/newrelic">New Relic</a>, and
<a href="https://elements.heroku.com/addons/bugsnag">BugSnag</a>. Why is your app slow? Why did that user have a problem registering
yesterday? Questions you may not be able to easily answer on the Digital Ocean App Platform at the moment!</p>
<h1>Cost</h1>
<p>The database is a minimum of $7/mo, with no free tier. A little disappointing, Heroku has a Free tier for Postgres with excellent
backups and such. It's extremely inviting to have free tiers when tinkering around. It has kept me loyal to Heroku for a
long time!</p>
<p>Scaling, though, Digital Ocean looks more attractive.</p>
<p>To get a <a href="https://www.heroku.com/dynos#:~:text=The%20containers%20used%20at%20Heroku,based%20on%20its%20resource%20demands.">dyno</a>
with >= 2gb memory on Heroku you need to spend a minimum of <strong>$250/mo</strong>. On Digital Ocean, you only need to spend <strong>$20/mo</strong>!</p>
<h1>More reading</h1>
<p>[Heroku vs AWS]({% post_url 2019-03-15-heroku-vs-aws %})</p>
<p>[Django + Cloudcube on Heroku]({% post_url 2020-03-25-django-cloudcube-heroku %})</p>
<h1>Final thoughts</h1>
<p>I'm excited to see how this pans out, but what I'd really, <em>really,</em> like to see is some
<a href="https://docs.docker.com/compose/">docker-compose</a> support! It'd be so neat to throw up a server and have new processes
managed automatically with nice defaults. Our primary concern is business logic, would love not to have to worry so much
about configuring yet-another-new-thing :)</p>

First impressions: Digital Ocean App Platform