Aptible has a new look. But more importantly, we want to talk about the future of platform as a service, and how we intend to rapidly expand the value our platform delivers to you. Also, it’s the Aptible platform’s birthday!

You might’ve noticed a few changes on aptible.com, in our docs, and in our product. Our visual design, how we talk about ourselves, our pricing page, and the product dashboard. What’s going on you ask?

Aptible has been fortunate to experience steady growth in our user base for the last 10 years, thanks primarily to the resilience and growth of our customers. Today marks the Aptible platform’s 9th official birthday. It also marks the beginning of the future for Aptible.

We’re proud of how far we’ve come since the platform launched on March 21, 2014. But there’s so much more ground to cover if we’re going to achieve our vision of making it possible for any developer and company to launch and scale products without building and managing infrastructure.

Over the years we’ve gotten countless suggestions and ideas on how to improve our PaaS. The most useful source of feedback has been the hundreds of calls we’ve had with existing customers, and the many we’ve had with prospective customers as well. We intend to continue these discovery processes and, in fact, we intend to accelerate our pace of learning further.

Today’s changes are just a step in that direction. While we plan to rapidly expand the value our product provides to customers, and to iterate quickly, what we are “soft launching” today is just the first in a long line of changes we anticipate making. All with the same end goal in mind: continually improving how we eliminate the pains of building and managing infrastructure for companies like yours.

Upcoming changes that we’re particularly excited about are:

But that’s just three changes. What’s guiding our focus moving forward?

While we’ve long delivered different user interfaces for our PaaS–CLI, Terraform, Dashboard–the developer experience, especially of our Dashboard, has become a bit dated. It certainly wasn’t the “magical” experience developers expect, or the one we want to deliver to make good on our promise to eliminate the pains of building and managing infrastructure.

We’re just at the beginning of this journey to deliver a magical developer experience. Our team is completely reimagining how developers use Aptible, making it more like this: 

At the same time, we continue to tackle the really hard scaling problems we’ve worked with hundreds of fast growing companies to solve. Problems such as: optimizing resource costs via autoscaling, right-sizing, and instance class tuning, deploying complex architectures just as easily as monolithic web apps, and finding and fixing performance bottlenecks in distributed systems.

Building for all startups–and every company

Hundreds of digital health companies have used Aptible to go from 2 developers in a garage to unicorn status, successful acquisition, and even IPO. But few outside of digital health know of Aptible. 

Aptible has great security and compliance benefits that are, in truth, industry agnostic. While we’ll continue to ensure we’re the best PaaS for digital health startups, we know our PaaS can be useful to every startup, regardless of industry focus.

Thinking longer term, the reason Aptible exists is to enable every developer to focus on ideas, not infrastructure. We want to empower all developers to build valuable products for their customers, without dealing with the pain of building or managing infrastructure. This goes for all developers, from those working at early stage startups to those on enterprise product teams.

We believe that “No Infrastructure” is the future of software development. You’ll hear us talk about our “No Infrastructure” vision of the future more and more as we go forward. 

While it may not feel as substantial as our plans to deliver magical developer experiences and tackling the scaling problems companies face, we’ve also updated our brand look and feel. We wanted a new, bright look that complements our optimistic outlook and commitment to our No Infrastructure vision. 

Of course, we love the Aptible arrow logo and didn’t want to replace it. So we turned to our friends at 

, who helped us with our previous successful visual redesign. We went through several (SEVERAL) versions while we collaboratively iterated towards the look and feel that most resonated with our team and the value we want to bring to our customers. 

We hope you agree that this is a much needed improvement to our brand without straying too far from what worked well.

Aptible pricing has stayed consistent for about a decade. We’re investing in ways to help companies manage costs on Aptible. The first two changes, while smaller, are a strong platform we can use to continue to improve how we help customers manage costs. Initially, we are releasing:

With Limits, companies can be sure to limit their infrastructure costs without running the risk of downtime. If you select a Limit (today, you’d select a Limit by picking a Plan), Aptible will ensure you don’t provision resources that would raise you above the max limits–and the max invoice–you’ve chosen.

Plans are the primary vehicle we are (currently) using to experiment with Limits. The point is to make it easier for companies to “choose” where they want their infrastructure spend to be based on the size, scale, and maturity of their project. 

For now, all existing Aptible customers will be grandfathered on their current pricing plan, and will not have Limits enforced. Going forward, based on your feedback, we may make Limits accessible beyond the first set of Plans we’ve implemented, making them available across the customer base. Beyond that, we anticipate continuously releasing cost optimization tools to help you control your Aptible invoice.

We’re still the same Aptible that hundreds of companies and thousands of developers have trusted to run their infrastructure for the past decade. We’re just making some changes, seeking to accelerate investment in our PaaS, ensuring we are continuously improving on how we deliver our “No Infrastructure” vision, and being the best PaaS for both starting and scaling a company on, without the pain of managing infrastructure.

Don’t hesitate to reach out to any of us or your account manager if you have any questions, suggestions, or requests. We’d love to hear your thoughts, and any ideas you have on how we can better deliver the best possible PaaS.

And most importantly, thank you to all of our customers for their support, product usage, and continuous feedback. We love working with each of you and plan to continue to earn your trust and make good on our “No Infrastructure” vision so we can run your infrastructure (so you don’t have to) for many years to come.

Aptible’s New Look, and the future of PaaS

At Aptible, we’re always focused on making it easier for engineering teams to manage their cloud infrastructure. This month, we’re excited to introduce a new set of features designed for better management of user permissions as you scale.

We are excited to announce Granular Permissions for fine-tuning user access on the Environment level! Formerly, Aptible had a simple read/write permission scheme, but as part of this release, we've introduced 2 new read permissions and 6 new write permissions, which can be assigned using Custom Roles. 

This month, we provisioned our 100,000th database! We feel extremely grateful for the teams using Aptible (

). To celebrate, we want to celebrate what we've all accomplished together. In 2022, the teams using Aptible provisioned:

While Aptible did the work behind the scenes:

 we've ever had in a single year, and a 2023 roadmap designed to make magic happen. ✨

This month, we’re excited to introduce a new set of features designed for better management of user permissions as you scale.

What’s new with Aptible: Feb 2023

At Aptible, we are committed to building the platform as a service that grows with your company—from start to scale. Today, we’re excited to continue to deliver on that commitment by announcing Granular Permissions, a new and improved permission model which allows fine-tuning User access.

Until now, Aptible had a simple but powerful system: read-only or full write-access to a given Environment. The simplicity of this system for role-based access controls enabled developers to avoid more complex and error-prone IAM systems, like AWS’s. As teams scaled on Aptible, we saw some of the ways this system was too simple for complex use cases. Some examples include:

To make Aptible work even better for teams at scale, we’ve introduced Granular Permissions for Custom Roles. When implementing, we recommend considering the following so you can ensure your team has the right level of permissions:

“We’ve tested and implemented Tunnel Only permissions. This works great for locking down database access by providing tunnel access without sensitive information like database credentials. It gives us much more flexibility in what we can do!” - DevOps Engineer @ 

Users are assigned Roles which define the level of access they have within your Aptible account. The three types of Roles on Aptible:

TIP: As you scale your team, Custom Roles become more useful for maintaining least-privileged access. Since Roles define what Environments Users have permissions to, we highly recommend multiple Environments to design a least-privileged access principle.

To give Users read permission to a given Environment, you can assign one of the following permissions: 

To give Users write permission to a given Environment, you can assign the following permissions: 

TIP: You can also set up monitoring for key security events like Database Tunneling and SSH Sessions. 

To get started using our new permissions, navigate to the Roles tab within the 

Want to see a new permission be added in the future? 

For a comprehensive list of what’s next with Aptible, and to request features that would benefit your growing team, visit 

Introducing Granular Permissions: For Fine-Tuning User Access

At Aptible, we’re always focused on making it easier for engineering teams to manage their cloud infrastructure. This month, we’re excited to introduce a new set of features designed for greater reliability and security.

. Twingate is a modern alternative to VPNs, enabling you to securely access Apps, provide an additional layer of security to your Endpoints, and adopt and maintain a Zero Trust networking model. Twingate can be deployed in minutes—we did it in 7 minutes—and is free to try. They’ve even put together a guide on how to set it up with 

This month, we’re excited to introduce a new set of features designed for greater reliability and security.

What’s new with Aptible: January 2023

At Aptible, we’re always focused on making it easier for engineering teams to manage their cloud infrastructure. This month, we’re excited to introduce a new set of features designed to automation easier with the use of Terraform!

Pre-built Grafana Dashboards and Alerting

Start instantly monitoring your Aptible resources, all hosted within your Aptible account! Use the 

 to seamlessly provision Metric Drains with pre-built Grafana dashboards and alerts for monitoring RAM & CPU usage for your Apps & Databases.

Guide to minimizing downtime from AWS Outages

We've refreshed our Business Continuity guide to include recommended actions to minimize downtime caused by AWS outages. Start planning today!

This month, we’re excited to introduce a new set of features designed to automation easier with the use of Terraform!

What’s new with Aptible: October 2022

At Aptible, we’re always focused on making it easier for engineering teams to manage their cloud infrastructure. This month, we’re excited to introduce a new set of features designed to accelerate automation.

Accessing operation logs just got a whole lot easier.

We released support for downloading logs for completed operations from the Aptible Dashboard or CLI, and also for attaching to real-time logs via Aptible CLI by providing the operation ID. This feature is great for Terraform users!

A new disaster recovery option unlocked 🔓.

With our new S3 Log Archiving functionality, you can now configure log archiving to an Amazon S3 bucket owned by you! This feature is designed to be an important complement to Log Drains, so you can retain logs for compliance in the event your primary logging provider experiences delivery or availability issues.

This month, we’re excited to introduce a new set of features designed to accelerate automation.

What’s New With Aptible: September 2022

With Aptible’s Dedicated Stacks, your infrastructure resources are already dedicated to you and protected from noisy neighbors—by default, 

 run on single-tenant host machines with network segregation. Now, when Enforced Resource Allocation is enabled, you can ensure that the individual services you have deployed within that single stack don’t negatively impact one another.

In the past, Dedicated Stacks on Aptible have not enforced CPU Limits, which provides surge capacity for the individual services within your Dedicated Stack. With a lack of CPU Limit enforcement, if there was excess CPU capacity on the host machines where the stack was deployed, any service deployed in that stack could take advantage of those unused resources.

However, without enforced CPU Limits, a container from one of your services can be starved of CPU by other containers deployed to the same stack and allocated to the same host, causing timeouts, errors, and alerts that don’t even reflect an issue with the app that’s generating these errors! Moreover, the underlying events that trigger these errors may not even be visible to you—such as an ephemeral SSH session causing CPU starvation of the stack’s NAT Gateway, negatively impacting all outbound traffic from your app.

Enforced Resource Allocation—meaning CPU Limits and Memory Limits are enabled and enforced for a Stack—prevents 

 by ensuring your containers do not use more resources than they are allocated.

Because there is a risk that Apps without enforced CPU Limits are presently relying on resources beyond their nominal allocation, transitioning your Dedicated Stacks to Enforced Resource Allocation is not trivial. Before enabling CPU Limits on your existing Dedicated Stacks, ensure that you don’t have any critical Apps which rely on CPU beyond their current nominal allocation.

New, Flexible Deployment Options to Optimize Costs

To make it easier to ensure your containers have the memory and processing resources they need, we are also excited to introduce a variety of new Container Profiles. These profiles can help you optimize your resource allocation and per-service costs by providing various ratios of CPU to RAM across a large range of sizes. The three types of Container Profiles currently available are as follows:

 about these new Container Profiles and how they use Enforced Resource Allocation to ensure your services have the resources they need.

How do I enable Container Profiles and Enforced Resource Allocation?

On all Shared Stacks and new Dedicated Stacks, Enforced Resource Allocation is already enabled by default. To enable Enforced Resource Allocation features on an existing Dedicated Stack, you can make a request to 

 has everything you need to know about these new features!

We are excited to announce that Container Profiles and Enforced Resource Allocation are now generally available on Aptible!

Optimize your resource usage with Container Profiles and Enforced Resource Allocation

5 Ways to Reduce Costs and Optimize Spend on Aptible

Cloud infrastructure costs can naturally grow over time as you scale to meet demands. Aptible helps organizations save on infrastructure costs by managing and maintaining secure, compliant infrastructure that would otherwise require hiring additional engineers.

I'm not sure what we would do without Aptible. We would have to hire 3 more people and we still would not have the high level of support and tooling that Aptible provides.

Mark Siemers, Software Engineering Manager @ 

Beyond helping our customers save on salary costs, we provide flexibility and support to effectively manage ongoing cloud infrastructure costs. That’s why we’ve outlined our top tips for reducing costs on Aptible.

Before you start, we recommend reviewing your monthly invoices to determine what resources you are currently consuming; this will help you identify the biggest areas for savings.

1. Review Your Container Usage and Rightsize Where Possible

Right-sizing resources is typically the most impactful way to reduce costs. You can review your usage within your 

. This report will provide you with scaling recommendations based on your usage patterns of the past two weeks.

 can only be scaled down by performing a dump and restore to a smaller database.

To ensure there are no performance issues as a result of scaling downward, it’s recommended to set up alerts and monitoring using data from your Metric Drains.

2. Review You Backup Retention and Reduce Where Possible

A quick way to reduce your backup costs is by customizing your 

. By default, all Aptible environments have the following backup retention policy:

Reducing the total number of retained daily backups will have the most significant impact to your costs (even more so than disabling cross-region copies). For staging/testing environments, you may want to consider generously reducing the backups retained (e.g. 7 dailies, 0 monthlies, disabling cross-region copying, and disabling final backup retention).

Reducing the backup retention policy will purge all backups that fall outside of the set policy.

3. Use RAM- and CPU-Optimized Container Profiles for More Accurate Scaling

As of July 2022, Container Profiles are now 

Aptible is offering a new limited-release feature called Enforced Resource Allocation, which is designed to enhance your ability to control your containers by offering:

To learn more about Enforced Resource Allocation and our new Container Profiles, have a 

4. Consider a Volume Pricing Agreement for Discounted Pricing

Aptible provides discounted pricing by offering volume pricing agreements for all customers. Volume agreements require a commitment to a monthly spend level:

5. Add a Secured by Aptible Badge to Your Website for $100/month Discount

Build trust with customers (and grow your business!) by deploying your application on Aptible, then sharing your security and compliance posture with a Secured by Aptible Badge on your website. 

Whether you are an early-stage startup or a large enterprise company, Aptible can help you maintain the costs of cloud infrastructure. 

 to talk more about how Aptible can help you with cost optimization.

If you are considering Platform as a Service (PaaS) alternatives to Heroku and have regulatory or compliance requirements—or you are just generally concerned with the security of your infrastructure and the privacy of your users’ data—Aptible should be at the top of your list.

While you focus on building out your app, Aptible accelerates your dev workflow by handling the hard parts of deploying secure, compliant infrastructure. Here’s why you should consider using a security-focused PaaS for your next deployment.

We help you deploy safe-by-default infrastructure

Aptible handles the hardest parts of implementing rigorous infrastructure security controls and lets you focus on building applications.

In the context of regulation-compliant deployments, the bulk of Aptible’s 

 is operating the infrastructure security controls required to comply with those regulatory frameworks.

Of course, the controls we implement are not unique to securing healthcare data under HIPAA regulations! While protected health information (PHI) has rigorous minimum standards for security controls, a dedicated stack that enforces rigorous security controls helps keep all private user data private.

Some of the most important infrastructure security controls are also the most difficult to implement. We take care of those hard things:

All of these security controls, critical for maintaining secure infrastructure, are provided by default with 

We help you understand how your infrastructure is secured

It’s difficult to understand the many pieces you need to have in place to have secure, compliant infrastructure. As a developer advocate, I believe it’s important to understand the challenges developers face. At Aptible, developing that understanding has meant spending significant time broadening my knowledge of HIPAA and other compliance requirements.

It’s not fun. But understanding how to deploy applications that satisfy the requirements of the HIPAA Security Rule is, however, the exact area where Aptible excels.

When your resources are deployed to a Dedicated Stack on Aptible, you’ll have access to 

 , which surface the necessary security controls in a single dashboard.

Every 24 hours, Aptible automatically performs hundreds of checks to ensure that critical security and availability requirements have been configured correctly.

When you deploy with Aptible, you’ll have peace of mind that your application’s infrastructure is free of misconfigurations that put your users’ data at risk.

We provide a more secure platform with less friction

Our fully Docker-based app deployments can integrate into your existing workflow as the destination for CI/CD processes. Likewise, our managed open-source database offerings expose the database to your application with end-to-end encryption in transit, with no proprietary wrappers needed to connect.

Aptible is built on open-source tools and well-adopted workflows, so you don't need to learn a new paradigm to deploy secure infrastructure.

It can be hard to determine which risks you may even face when using a PaaS, because a PaaS, by definition, is an abstraction of more generalized infrastructure. In fact, this abstraction can increase the attack surface for a given vulnerability, because it naturally increases the underlying complexity of a system.

That's why it's critical for security to be a fundamental part of any PaaS product, rather than an add-on service or enterprise offering. We're building a security-focused platform that makes security more convenient for everyone—because secure infrastructure and a developer-friendly workflow aren't mutually exclusive!

 loaded with $500 in credits and deploy securely in 5 minutes or less.

Blog

Aptible’s New Look, and the future of PaaS

What’s new with Aptible: Feb 2023

Introducing Granular Permissions: For Fine-Tuning User Access

What’s new with Aptible: January 2023

What’s new with Aptible: October 2022

What’s New With Aptible: September 2022

Optimize your resource usage with Container Profiles and Enforced Resource Allocation

5 Ways to Reduce Costs and Optimize Spend on Aptible

You need a security-focused platform

Focus on innovation.
Not Infrastructure.

Product

Resources

Support

Company

Blog

Aptible’s New Look, and the future of PaaS

What’s new with Aptible: Feb 2023

Introducing Granular Permissions: For Fine-Tuning User Access

What’s new with Aptible: January 2023

What’s new with Aptible: October 2022

What’s New With Aptible: September 2022

Optimize your resource usage with Container Profiles and Enforced Resource Allocation

5 Ways to Reduce Costs and Optimize Spend on Aptible

You need a security-focused platform

Focus on innovation.Not Infrastructure.

Product

Resources

Support

Company

Focus on innovation.
Not Infrastructure.