DigitalOcean App Platform

DigitalOcean App Platform is a PaaS built and run by DigitalOcean on top of their droplets. Like the other cloud provider PaaS offerings, it focuses more on the infrastructure side than the application side, however it's more developer friendly than other cloud provider PaaS features.

When a cloud provider offers a PaaS, you usually use their database as a service or block/object storage features as well as their CDN and other facilities to build your entire infrastructure that serves your application. As these "auxiliary" services add up to compliment the PaaS feature, the simplicity of the total solution is reduced, which is something you might want to consider.

On the surface, you can run anything on DO AppPlatform. Under the covers, however, they use containers and Kubernetes internally to run the applications. To get your specific app framework up and running, you’d need to make tweaks and adjustments so your app works on their Platform. Something that we didn’t have to do much on Heroku. This is an issue with all cloud providers building a PaaS on top of their servers: their focus is infrastructure and not the application that runs on top of it. They use generic tools and practices to reduce product complexity, essentially pushing the complexity up the stack to the application and, therefore, to the developers.

Pros

• New and more focused product than Azure and Google’s
• Still more developer-friendly than other cloud provider PaaS offerings.

Cons

• Diluted value by focusing on infrastructure rather than the application, making things more complex for developers.
• It can get expensive quickly.
• The simplicity of App Platform is reduced as you add more services like databases and storage to the mix.