Scalingo the European alternative to Heroku

June 28, 2021 - 15 min read
Scalingo the European alternative to Heroku

Looking for a European alternative to Heroku?

You have come to the right place!

We are going to present you Scalingo the leading European Platform as a Service. For almost 10 years, we enabled hundreds of customers to host their applications and data in Europe without the pain of handling servers nor infrastructure.

Here are the key advantages of Scalingo :

  • As easy to use as Heroku
  • Heroku compatible: you can migrate from Heroku to Scalingo in minutes
  • Data hosted in Europe (in France 🇫🇷 with 3DS Outscale, a subsidiary of Dassault Systèmes)
  • Responsive customer support (Median Response Time: 10 minutes)
  • First European PaaS certified ISO 27001 and HDS (Health Data Hosting)
  • 30 days free trial for all

Find everything you like about Heroku on Scalingo...

Deploy your application in 2 minutes

Like Heroku, Scalingo allows you to deploy any application in a few seconds. Simple and fast!

A simple git push is enough:

$ git push scalingo master
Enumerating objects: 11, done.
Counting objects: 100% (11/11), done.
Delta compression using up to 8 threads
Compressing objects: 100% (7/7), done.
Writing objects: 100% (9/9), 2.79 KiB | 2.79 MiB/s, done.
Total 9 (delta 4), reused 0 (delta 0)

Your deployment has been queued and is going to start...
<-- Start deployment of my-app -->
Fetching source code
Build complete, shipping your container...
Waiting for your application to boot... 
<-- https://my-app.osc-fr1.scalingo.io -->
To ssh.osc-en1.scalingo.com:my-app.git
 + 6a7365f...72c6c36 master -> master

The advantage of a Platform as a Service like Scalingo is that you don't have to manage servers and you can focus 100% on the development of your application.

No infrastructure or servers to manage, we take care of everything!

Heroku Compatibility

Scalingo is entirely compatible with Heroku's buildpacks. This enables you to migrate quickly without any change in your project (5 minutes migration time).

If your code works on Heroku, it will work on Scalingo.

Migration from Heroku is quick and easy. You can refer to our documentation which explains how to migrate from Heroku to Scalingo).

Moreover Scalingo also supports Procfile. If you are a Heroku user, you probably know that the Procfile is a file that explains how the platform should start your containers.

To better understand how Scalingo supports the Procfile, we have written a full documentation article on the Procfile.

Scalingo offers integration with GitHub (and GitLab!) to automatically deploy the project with each new commit. This also allows automated Review App creation (see below).

Scaling quickly and easily

With Scalingo, you can start quickly with an MVP and scale up as you need.

Even better: consumption is charged by the minute!

This means that you can start with a prototype and scale up according to your needs.

Whether you have a peak load or want to create your MVP, you can do it in a few clicks.

Even better, all it takes to deploy your application to the world is a simple git push.

Moreover, with the autoscaling function, you can automatically scale up according to criterias that you define beforehand.

Autoscalingo Scalingo PaaS

Moreover, you can even do Function as a Service from the Scalingo platform as Studo does.

Finally Scalingo is also integrated with GitHub and GitLab.

50+ hosted technologies

Scalingo offers a hosting solution for every programmation languages and framework. Whether you prefer Node.js hosting, Python hosting, Ruby on Rails hosting or any other technology, the platform adapts and hosts over 50 different technologies.

You can see the list of officially supported technologies on Scalingo here.

Available technology on Scalingo

Moreover with the Buildpacks (see next part) or the One-click deploy you can deploy any kind of application on Scalingo.

If you have some time, you can have a look at this Awesome Scalingo which is a list of resources you can use with Scalingo. This list was written entirely by our community.

Even better: Buildpacks

A buildpack is a set of scripts that has three purposes:

  • Detect the language of your application
  • Install the dependencies of a project
  • Define how the application should start

Moreover, there are different types of buildpacks: - Officially supported buildpacks (Ruby, Node.js, PHP, Python...) - Buildpacks available for specific uses - Custom buildpacks.

You can find open source buildpacks or create your own buildpack. We explain in detail how to do this in our documentation: How to use and create a Custom Buildpack?

As you can see, this means that almost any technology can be hosted on Scalingo.

The complete list of official buildpacks is available in our documentation.

Review Apps

Scalingo also offers a collaboration tool for developers for free called Review Apps.

As the name suggests, Review Apps are ephemeral applications that you can share to get feedback from your collaborators.

Review Apps are deployed automatically each time you open a Pull Request (GitHub) or Merge Request (GitLab).

This is very useful when you want to develop a new application.

Review app Scalingo

Database and high availability

Scalingo hosts the most popular databases on the market and offers a high availability cloud platform (99.96% SLA).

Among the databases we host we propose MySQL hosting, PostgreSQL, Redis, Elasticsearch, InfluxDB and MongoDB.

We also offer these databases in high availability when you choose the "business" type plans. This means that we offer a 99,96% SLA.

By the way, if you want to know how we manage your database data, its replication and backups, you can read our article on Scalingo data resilience.

Databases Scalingo

Support for all your projects

On Scalingo you can host your APIs, your web applications, your cron jobs, and your workers.

Scalingo is a versatile Platform as a Service that supports all your use cases.

... And also what differentiates Scalingo

Scalingo the European PaaS

Data sovereignty (business secrecy, economic intelligence, American protectionism) is of growing importance for all European companies.

Since our creation, we have been committed to offer a Sovereign European Cloud that offers an alternative to the web giants and protects your data within the framework of the laws in presence.

Our vision is not only to offer a Sovereign Cloud but also to offer a product that combines operational excellence, product excellence and support excellence.

Scalingo has the mission to deliver this sovereignty to as many people as possible thanks to its easy-to-use and RGPD compliant Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Database as a Service (DBaaS). Scalingo became the first European PaaS HDS certified (Health Data Hoster) and ISO 27001 since September 2022.

Your data is hosted in datacenters located in France by 3DS Outscale, a strategic subsidiary of Dassault Systèmes.

This datacenters are fully certified to the highest standards (ISO 27001-2013, 27017 and 27018). Also 3DS Outscale is a responsible and transparent player recognised by the LUCIE ISO 26000 label.

Finally, choosing a French hosting company also means supporting the French and European ecosystem to make it prosper and become competitive.

Therefore, with Scalingo, the whole IaaS and PaaS chain is sovereign through 3DS Outscale. Many of our tools were entirely developed in-house such as our orchestrator.

A human and accessible quality customer support composed of DevOps experts

At Scalingo, we support you throughout your journey on the platform. Our team of experts answers all your questions as quickly as possible (median response time: 10 minutes!)

At Scalingo we have developers available on the support to answer your questions. You can contact us by e-mail or directly on our chat!

Scalingo support has always been invaluable to us. It's amazing to go through real humans via the dashboard chat without having to go through a ticketing system. Jérémie Loosfelt, CTO agency 9troisquarts

Let's say it again: Median response time: 10 minutes!

  • Thanks to the expertise of our teams, the support also provides you with advice and analysis to make you more autonomous in the future on similar problems.
  • Documentation. Because good support starts with good documentation, Scalingo makes sure that it meets all your needs and that it is regularly updated.

A changelog is also available to keep you up to date with the latest software updates.

The serenity of hosting your projects with Scalingo

  • Scalingo offers the possibility to be hosted in SecNumCloud certified datacenters: Scalingo also offers you the possibility to host your web projects with a SecNumCloud certified host (3DS Outscale, subsidiary of Dassault Systèmes).

Moreover, Scalingo is now ISO 27001 and HDS certified and preparing and aiming for SecNumCloud certification from 2022.

  • Stability.

Scalingo is a high availability cloud platform with up to 99.96% SLA. We host market leading databases in high availability (MySQL, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Redis, Elasticsearch)

  • Longevity.

Scalingo exists as a fully self-financed and profitable company. We have been around for almost 10 years now.

Your data is in good hands with Scalingo. By the way, we are fully transparent about the hosting of your data and you can have a look at our article on data resilience.

State of the art continuous deployment platform

  • Integration with your preferred tools: From the beginning at Scalingo, we have been working hard to develop a state-of-the-art platform. To achieve this, we have integrated all your favourite tools: GitHub, GitHub Enterprise, hosted GitLab and custom GitLab.
  • GitLab integration: we are one of the only PaaS that offers GitLab integration.
  • Let's Encrypt certificate included. When you host an application on Scalingo, the Let's Encrypt certificate is automatically included.

In fact, we were the first to implement the Let's Encrypt certificate (long before Heroku!)

  • Recording one-off traces:

A one-off container is a copy of your production environment. This environment is automatically destroyed once you have executed your task.

If you want to find out what you can do with a one-off container, we prepared a video for you.

Above all, Scalingo offers an extra feature: the recording of one-off traces.

This allows you to find the audit logs in your app's timeline and find out which commands were executed.

By the way, we have written a complete article on the subject: One-off container audit logs.

  • A platform at the cutting edge of technology!

We were the first PaaS to offer application and data hosting in a SecNumCloud compliant datacentre.

In addition, we share our latest technological innovations on our blog.

Conclusion

You have understood: Scalingo is a complete alternative to Heroku.

Our ambition has always been to offer an alternative to the American giants for European developers.

We offer the possibility to host projects in Europe with a solution that combines operational excellence and sovereignty.

If you want to know more, we offer a 30-day free trial of our platform. You can also get a sales contact if you wish.

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Luca Fancello
Luca Fancello
Luca Fancello is the Head of growth at Scalingo. That means that he is responsible for the blog you are currently reading among many other tasks. Apart from that Luca is also a blogger on personal projects to pursue his passion of SEO.

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