Why CommonLit moved from Heroku Enterprise to Northflank for smoother deploys in their own cloud

CommonLit, a nonprofit providing literacy curriculum for schools, transitioned from Heroku to Northflank to improve the reliability and observability of their Rails monolith during peak school hours. Facing issues with deploy reliability and visibility on previous platforms, they sought a service that allowed smooth daytime deploys without service interruptions and provided high-fidelity preview environments while adhering to strict student data regulations. Northflank enabled CommonLit to run their applications within their own AWS VPC, offering control over cloud resources, seamless integration with existing tools, and a robust observability framework that alleviated previous operational stresses. As a result, the small engineering team at CommonLit can deploy multiple times daily with confidence, ensuring the platform remains stable and responsive to high traffic demands, thus enhancing their ability to support students effectively.