[HN Gopher] The Decline of Heroku
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       The Decline of Heroku
        
       Author : tacon
       Score  : 40 points
       Date   : 2021-04-12 17:10 UTC (5 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.infoworld.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.infoworld.com)
        
       | ksec wrote:
       | Render [1] was started just because Heroku stopped innovating.
       | 
       | [1] https://render.com
        
         | jokull wrote:
         | Love Render!
        
         | downrightmike wrote:
         | Well, yeah salesforce bought them a decade ago. really just a
         | play at lock in for salesforce devs.
        
         | cultofmetatron wrote:
         | I'm also impressed by render and am planning to use it fo my
         | next side project. I use elixir heavily and render actually
         | supports having teh nodes be connected to form a mesh.
         | 
         | Neither dokku, heroku or any other PAAS that I know if supports
         | this and its really important for some of the more interesting
         | features the beam offers such as pupsub without having to use
         | redis. In my startup, we're using horde to manage a cluster of
         | dynamically spawned children. We setup a kubernetes cluster on
         | aws for this. Today I would look at using render instead.
        
         | bizzleDawg wrote:
         | I was looking at render as an alternative to heroku the other
         | day and I think that the only thing that made me think that I
         | would definitely stick with heroku for now was the point-in-
         | time restores for heroku postgres, which render seems to lack
         | at present.
         | 
         | A point-in-time restore really saved me once (allowed recovery
         | of important data after an accidental delete), but I am
         | interested to know if other think I am over-blowing their
         | significance in a production system? Are there other strategies
         | which make PIT backups less important?
        
           | anurag wrote:
           | (Render founder) PITR is critical, and it's up there on our
           | 2021 TODOs along with HA Postgres.
        
       | vmception wrote:
       | What's wrong with Heroku? It hasn't changed much, like the
       | article says, and that's fine.
       | 
       | The pricing model isn't ideal but it has a place for some
       | projects.
        
         | tdeck wrote:
         | For me the notorious price tag of Heroku is enough to keep me
         | from using it for new projects, even though I like the Heroku
         | workflow and I think it's perfectly suited for many web apps.
        
           | watermelon0 wrote:
           | Heroku is comparable to AWS Fargate/RDS pricing in many
           | cases, but easier to setup/understand/maintain. IMO it seems
           | reasonably priced in a lot of situations, where we are
           | talking about business use.
           | 
           | However, for personal use, if you have a few small (web)apps,
           | it's way too expensive compared to a DigitalOcean or similar
           | VPS.
           | 
           | For example, 3 applications with Postgres DBs cost 3x(7+7) =
           | 42$/month, whereas it's entirely possibly to run this on a 5$
           | DO droplet.
        
             | tdeck wrote:
             | > it's entirely possibly to run this on a 5$ DO droplet.
             | 
             | In fact I do exactly this using Dokku, and have several
             | small apps running in the same $5 droplet.
        
               | mromanuk wrote:
               | Alternatively, you can scale with caprover, which can
               | deploy to many servers using Docker swarm
        
         | willio58 wrote:
         | I love Heroku, I still use it to this day for a couple
         | databases. That being said, when a company stops innovating you
         | know it's just a matter of time until they're left in the dust.
         | The thing is, Heroku is currently increasing profits, they
         | could use that money to innovate if they wanted to. They just
         | seem stagnant, which is never appealing as a customer (at least
         | to me).
        
       | runningmike wrote:
       | The best: https://12factor.net/ legendary. The worst: sold to
       | salesforce. Salesforce smells like enterprise software, no room
       | for fast and simple software hacks using heroku.
        
         | mssundaram wrote:
         | I don't understand the jump from the 12 Factor paradigm to
         | being sold to Salesforce.
        
       | 1123581321 wrote:
       | Good article. I would say Heroku's problem is that developers are
       | comfortable with more operational complexity now, fifteen years
       | later, than when it launched. Much of this credit, of course,
       | goes to AWS. Heroku serves an abstraction level that appeals to a
       | smaller share of developers. It has also not grown beyond the
       | Ruby world as much as was hoped for, as indicated by the mention
       | of the Java ecosystem.
        
         | itsjustme2 wrote:
         | I use it pretty heavily for node.js apps. Every time I see the
         | newest Rube Goldberg contraption for deploying code, my first
         | thought is trying to figure out why they didn't do something
         | simpler, like Heroku. Being comfortable with complexity isn't a
         | good excuse for making things more complex than they need to
         | be.
        
         | ritchiea wrote:
         | Possibly but particuarly on a small team there is a cost to
         | operational complexity even if you're comfortable. If the team
         | could be developing features but is dealing with an
         | infrastructure problem that could easily be dealt with via an
         | abstraction layer then you still lose overall developer
         | productivity.
         | 
         | And Heroku was never a great solution once you reached a
         | reasonable level of scale because it became expensive and your
         | Heroku infrastructure became subject to unexpected issues in
         | resource sharing within shared instances. Shared instances are
         | a problem across all cloud providers but pure-AWS-sans-Heroku
         | is easier and has more options to switch to private instances.
        
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       (page generated 2021-04-12 23:01 UTC)