Top 10 Platform.sh Alternatives

This article will explore ten of the best Platform.sh Alternatives. The list includes Heroku, App Engine, Red Hat Openshift, Engine Yard, Scalingo, etc.

Platform as a service – PaaS implementations have become incredibly popular among programmers as it allows them to quickly deploy new applications.

Usually accessible via a web browser and offered through a cloud service provider’s hosted infrastructure, PaaS implementations enable early access to advanced development tools, allowing developers and programmers to focus on writing and uploading the code instead of managing infrastructure.

For organisations, PaaS tools provide the essential resources required to automate backend processes and scale to respond to demand. One of the emerging yet highly popular PaaS implementations in Platform.sh, a comprehensive cloud computing platform that has been adopted by over 62,000 developers and thousands of companies worldwide.

Continue reading as we discuss a general overview of Platform.sh and take a look at some of the top Platform.sh alternatives available for developers in the market.

If you are a new developer looking to implement a PaaS tool for your next project, the following list should help you get some insight into what each of the platforms entails and what benefits it will provide to organisations.

Platform.sh Overview

Platform.sh is an end-to-end, continuous deployment, multi-cloud PaaS implementation that allows developers to add cloud hosting to websites and web apps, without having to create, manage, or maintain core infrastructure.

Programmers and organisations can build stunning websites and web apps using their preferred language as it supports several, including PHP, Node.js, Java, Python, Golang, WordPress, Drupal, Django, Angular, and React. 

One of the most sought-after features of Platform.sh is that the full production cluster of this tool for every Git branch can be cloned into a staging environment almost instantly. This rather unique feature allows developers to update, test, and deploy new features to production rapidly, eliminate bottlenecks, and makes deployments failproof.

Its triple-redundant architecture is based on a high-density grid of micro-containers running Linux, which allows Platform.sh to provide 99.99% SLAs even on the most complex use-cases.

The fully automated cloud solutions of Platform.sh is suitable for businesses of all sizes as they can scale the resources utilised to serve tens of millions of users with the help of dedicated cloud spaces running several instances over multiple infrastructure providers.

As a result, developers can focus on solving numerous customer needs across different industries without worrying about operating the infrastructure.

With the top features of the platform out of the way, we now take a look at some of the top alternatives to Platform.sh available in the market and how they help businesses realise their specific objectives and goals. 

Top 10 Alternatives to Platform.sh

Here are ten of the best alternatives to Platform.sh.

Heroku

Heroku is one of the earliest cloud PaaS implementations launched in the year 2007 and allows developers and businesses to build, deliver, monitor, and scale apps rapidly.

Similar to Platform.sh, Heroku is often called a polyglot platform as it supports multiple programming languages like Java, Scala, Node.js, PHP, Python, etc., providing consistent output irrespective of the compilation or interpretation language.

All services provided by Heroku are hosted on the EC2 platform of AWS. Apps running on Heroku get a unique domain name that is used to route HTTP requests to the correct “dyno” or app container, spread across a grid consisting of several servers. 

Redhat OpenShift

OpenShift is one of the leading on-premises, enterprise-grade PaaS tools and containerisation software products that are managed and orchestrated by Kubernetes on a version of Red Hat Linux CoreOS.

OpenShift provides developers with the ability to choose where to build, deploy, and run the apps built on it. It supports the Open Container Initiative (OCI) and enables developers with streamlined workflows and built-in Jenkins pipelines to improve the production times.

The full-stack, automated operations and self-provisioning allow developers to work more efficiently and reduce the time to market.

Acquia Drupal Cloud

Founded in the year 2007, Acquia is one of the most scalable and secure cloud platforms as a service dedicated to building, launching, and managing apps on the Drupal content management framework.

This Platform.sh alternative provides several interesting features like automatic scaling for consistent performance, delivering up to 5 times the throughput of MySQL server deployments.

Being a low code tool, Acquia lets developers create and update customer experiences rapidly using Cloud IDE on the Kubernetes native platform. The built-in platform CDN offers up to 65 points of presence in 9 regions for super-fast content delivery globally.

Google App Engine

Google App Engine is a fully managed, serverless platform as a service that allows developers to build, deploy, host, and scale backends for web and mobile apps using data centres managed by Google.

The infrastructure of App Engine eliminates any system administration and development challenge and handles code deployment and app launches as required. It primarily supports Node.js, .NET, Ruby, Python, Java, PHP, and Go, but developers can push codes in other languages using custom runtimes.

The service is free up to a specified level of resources consumed in a standard environment and charges fees for additional bandwidth, storage, and instance hours.

DigitalOcean App Platform

As the name implies, App Platform by DigitalOcean is a fully managed Platform as a Service tool which can be used by developers to create, push, and scale apps and static sites easily and quickly using the servers of DigitalOcean by pointing them to the appropriate GitHub repository without delving into the complexities of managing the infrastructure.

Developers can set up App Platform either to automatically build and analyse code from popular repositories or publish a container image uploaded to Docker Hub or Container Registry. It also offers several popular features like lifecycle management, vertical and horizontal scaling, performance monitoring, etc.

The Starter pricing tier is free for up to 3 static sites, Basic tier starts at $5, while the Professional tier starts at $12 per month per container.

AWS Beanstalk

Elastic Beanstalk is essentially an orchestration service that automates various Amazon services like S3, EC2, Elastic Load Balancers, Simple Notification Service, autoscaling, etc.

With AWS EB, developers can deploy and maintain apps on the Amazon Cloud and the platform will take care of everything – from load balancing to capacity provisioning, autoscaling, and app health monitoring.

With automatic provisioning and management, developers do not have to spend time with redundant infrastructure management, allowing them to focus on writing and deploying code.

IBM Cloud Foundry

IBM Cloud Foundry is an open-source, multi-cloud app PaaS offering that is governed by the Cloud Foundry Foundation, which allows developers to deploy cloud-native code or containers on the serverless platform.

It ensures that the build and deploy facets of coding are coordinated with any attached services, allowing developers to customise the experience as required. IBM Cloud Foundry also offers multiple features like Access Control for task authorisation, automatic placement across multiple data centres, automatic routing for your applications, and health monitoring and management.

Scalingo

Scalingo is a popular docker platform service that allows its users to deploy, manage, and scale apps quickly by transforming the code into a Docker container and running it on a cloud, making it almost instantly available.

This Platform.sh competitor offers multiple unique benefits like Integrated DevOps from popular repositories, support for open source buildpacks, rapid database provisioning and availability, and built-in security features against OS vulnerabilities, databases, and app stacks. 

Buddy

Buddy.Works is a self-hosted, web-based CI/CD software for Git developers, which can be used to build and deploy websites and apps with code from popular repositories like GitHub, Bitbucket, and Gitlab.

It supports over 30 pre-configured actions that can be modified using Linux commands to accelerate the development lifecycle of their applications. Developers can create delivery pipelines for multiple languages like React.js, Node.js, Ruby, Python, PHP, and .NET with over 100 ready-to-use actions that can be arranged in any way required.

Apart from support for third-party hosting services, Buddy also provides a native hosting solution with popular Git commands that can be reproduced into the GUI.

Engine Yard

Engine Yard is a privately held platform as a service offering that is focused primarily on Ruby on Rails, Node.js, and PHP development, deployment, and management. T

he fully managed Ruby DevOps allows developers to push the committed code to a remote repository, where it analyses the code and creates containers to run them on Kubernetes clusters. Developers get a dedicated AWS account along with a set of private, fully configured Kubernetes clusters.

A heavily sought-after feature of Engine Yard is rolling deployments, which allows developers to integrate deployment pipelines seamlessly and maximise the availability, thereby eliminating downtimes or performance degradation. It will also scale the resource utilisation to boost performance automatically based on demand.

Conclusion

There is no denying the fact that migrating to the cloud is the future of organisations and technology and cloud services make the development process simpler and more efficient.

PaaS implementations like Platform.sh can be used to streamline workflows and provide greater speed and flexibility, making it the ideal choice for developing bespoke applications, especially when multiple developers are working on the same project.

For better insights on how to choose between various options available, do not hesitate to get in touch with one of the leading app hosting companies and talk to the experts there to clear your queries.

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