Remember how Heroku was a big break through when it was first released? Qovery wants to do it again by building an abstraction layer between your code and your cloud infrastructure. You push code in a git repository and Qovery manages your services for you.
“It’s a container-as-a-service platform for developers. Like on Heroku, you just have to put a .qovery.yml file to describe the dependencies you need,” co-founder and CEO Romaric Philogène told me.
Essentially, Qovery sits in-between your git repository and your cloud infrastructure account — the company doesn’t take care of cloud hosting itself. You can connect your Qovery account with your GitHub, GitLab or Bitbucket account so that it automatically gets triggered when you push new code.
After that, Qovery automatically spins up new servers, managed databases and brokers (Kafka, RabbitMQ) for you. There are some ways to automate your deployment already with Terraform and continuous integration/continuous delivery software. But Qovery makes it easy to get started.
More importantly, Qovery is building integrations with multiple cloud providers. It already works with Amazon Web Services and the team is currently working on DigitalOcean and Scaleway support. Next up, Google Cloud and Microsot Azure are on the roadmap.
Interestingly, you can design your own infrastructure for each branch. For instance, if you have a development branch to try out new features or a staging branch, you can spin up new servers for this branch without having to recreate your production environment from the start.
And that’s arguably Qovery’s most important feature. According to the startup, cloud hosting will become commoditized. Each provider will provide managed databases, message brokers, etc. It comes down to reliability, pricing and support level. You can imagine having a production application on AWS and a development branch running on another cloud provider.
Behind the scene, Qovery relies heavily on Terraform and Kubernetes, with an additional layer on top of them. When you compare it with Heroku’s monolithic philosophy, it scales more efficiently as it has been designed around micro-services from the ground up.
Qovery costs $15 per application per month. Many companies have dozens of applications running at the same time to handle different parts of a service. So if you switch everything over to Qovery, you’ll pay $15 for each application.
If you already have a CI tool that works with your development team, you can use it instead of Qovery’s built-in CI service. And there’s no lock-in effect — you can stop using it if you now have your own DevOps team.
The company has raised $1 million from Techstars and a long list of business angels.
Image Credits: Qovery