Why I created Utopiops (Heroku on your AWS?)

It was a few years that I was dealing with cloud, specially AWS, in my various roles that I realized I'm working on similar stuff in every job to set up the infrastructure.

Whether it was a startup or a large organization, AWS was offering services that we were setting up the same way, and they were just so scalable that it could handle workloads of a tiny startup to a multi-million user enterprise.

One day I decided to automate all those stuff and offer it as a SaaS service at an insanely low fee and make profit from the economy of scales.

It would be profitable for me and definitely for the users too. They would no longer need to spend time and money on setting up the majority of the common infrastructure components they use, or CI/CD, etc., so I believed it can be a win-win situation.

Fast-forward 2.5 years, and that idea is called Utopiops now.

After multiple user interviews these are the reasons I can mention about why to use or not to use Utopiops:

Why not to use Utopiops:

• Highly unique and customized system architecture

• Using cloud providers other than AWS (Azure and GCP are in pre-alpha)

• Particular regulatory constraints (for example if you're and alternative for Stripe)

• Cannot find certain feature and cannot wait for it to be implemented

Why to use Utopiops:

• It's easier, faster and more cost effective (a lot), to host and release your applications (front-end, back-end)

• Simple pricing model

• No need to set up your CI/CD

• Logical organization of the platform into environments

• Being on your own cloud provider, meaning you can use the other services offered by the cloud provider easily (e.g. SQS, SNS, etc.)

• If we have downtime, you still have access to your platform directly from your cloud provider

• Clear understanding of your expenses, setting budget limits, and getting notifications to avoid bill shocks (Alpha)

• Out of the box monitoring and notification to monitor the status of the applications

• Integrations with Jira and Sentry to better track the issues and progress, pre-defined granular access policies for users and groups, and incident management (Beta)

• Avoiding vendor lock-in (everything is on your own cloud)

• Using cloud provider grants such as AWS Activate

• Close to zero learning curve

• Fast support irrespective of your plan