Took me a moment to understand that "Magic Containers" here are a product offered by bunny.net https://bunny.net/magic-containers/

I think whoever came up with this at Bunny is missing the magic sauce of Heroku. That magic sauce is Devs don't have to think about container builds/finding a container registry and creating a Dockerfile. They just fling code at Git and shows up running in production if Heroku supported the language and framework. Bunny just created their version of Cloud Run.

As SRE, one of most frustrating aspects of my job is dealing with that behavior.

Magic containers can only pull images from DockerHub or Github, no other registry is supported. I wish they supported private registries (or BitBucket). These limitations make me reluctant to use it, and I wonder what else is missing.

We have an app on Heroku and obviously the writing is on the wall there. We looked around a bit and picked Digital Ocean as our next host:

* their app hosting product is similar to Heroku.

* very easy onboarding and controls for modest complexity apps. Unlike the extreme hoop-jumping required to do anything on one of the major cloud providers.

* everything looks reasonably up to date.

* it's an actual operating profitable company that's been around a while and probably will be for a long time... not a startup burning capital.

That said, this magic containers thing looks more analogous to Google Cloud Run, which I think is an absolutely fantastic offering. Unlike almost everything else out there, Cloud Run and presumably Magic Containers can do things like have a whole bunch of versions of your app up and running ready to come to life when a request arrives, but scaled to zero in the meantime. This category of hosting should be far more popular than it is, and it is wonderful to see another company offer it.

I wonder where this sits when compared with Cloudflare's product offerings. CF Containers seem like it, but the pricing gap is huge. The bunny.net spend (if run 24/7) comes to almost a dollar an hour. Which is easily ~$700 a month.

You can have a CF implementation for as little as $70-80 a month (running 24/7).