[HN Gopher] Why companies move off Heroku (besides the cost)
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Why companies move off Heroku (besides the cost)
Author : jusrhee
Score : 149 points
Date : 2022-04-27 18:06 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.porter.run)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.porter.run)
| intrepidsoldier wrote:
| In the last decade, a vast majority of DevTools companies have
| positioned themselves as "A better Heroku." And yet, when people
| actually need a Heroku alternative, everything comes up short.
| This is a testament to a solid product Heroku built. It was
| definitely ahead of its time.
| leetrout wrote:
| Bingo.
|
| Porter is one of the only ones that seems to offer feature
| parity across aws and gcp.
|
| Render.com looks cool but is also AWS only.
| anurag wrote:
| (Render employee) We currently use AWS, GCP, and Cloudflare
| under the hood.
| tills13 wrote:
| This seems like more of an ad / hit-piece than a discussion
| piece.
| vmception wrote:
| Netlify do everything that I had used Heroku for, for free.
|
| In nearly one click too, instead of a dozen levers.
| hpkuarg wrote:
| On the subject of cost, I am reminded of Pinboard's tweet[0].
|
| [0]: https://twitter.com/pinboard/status/494239199038828544
| intothemild wrote:
| Other than Dokku how many other PaaS solutions can be run on your
| own hardware?
| c17r wrote:
| - piku https://github.com/piku/piku
|
| - caprover https://caprover.com/
| jnettome wrote:
| we have been using caprover for 6 months, until we got the
| first overload and I had to find what exactly was happening
| during an outage. I love the solution but decided to "go by
| myself" after this.
|
| currently using a combination of docker swarm, traefik (via
| service labels) and portainer.
|
| totally in love, doing good for our needs (1 monolith, 12
| microservices)
| arberx wrote:
| One thing this article is missing is the arbitrary "400MB slug
| size" that heroku limits your application to if you want to
| deploy.
| jacobsenscott wrote:
| FWIW that's a "soft limit". I've deployed slugs over that limit
| without trouble. Idk if they have a hard limit.
| davidkuennen wrote:
| I don't know if I'm seeing things, but Heroku seems to be more
| expensive than GCP.
|
| I get a 8 GB RAM Postgres instance for 200$ on Heroku. On GCP I
| get a 4CPU 26GB RAM Postgres instance for 280$ (Cloud SQL).
|
| What's the USP Heroku provides?
| nicoburns wrote:
| Point it at your got repo, click to choose which tech stack
| you're running, write a 1 line yaml file to tell it what
| command to run to start up, and you already have a server
| running and a build pipeline that deploys when you push your
| code.
| RedShift1 wrote:
| They were early in the devops game, and provided an easy way to
| run things without having to deal with hardware, networks,
| scaling, operating systems, maintenance, etc... yourself.
| Nowadays I think they are no longer running on innovation, but
| on inertia.
| baggiponte wrote:
| Alternatives to Heroku besides Porter?
| jamwt wrote:
| Pretty different approach, but with many application
| architectures today you can move beyond "hosting" into pure
| serverless with a stack like Vercel + Convex
| (https://convex.dev)
|
| In the news today:
| https://www.forbes.com/sites/kenrickcai/2022/04/27/convex-se...
|
| (disclosure: Convex co-founder)
| the_common_man wrote:
| Oh, I didn't realize convex was still around. How are you
| guys doing ?
|
| Edit: just read that article. "dump databases". huh, what?
| weren't you guys doing a heroku alternative in the past?
|
| Edit2: Sorry, I confused your company with convox!
| https://convox.com/
| hugg wrote:
| we're migrating to something called cloudflare pages, but i'm
| not involved in that
| ipmb wrote:
| We're building one at https://apppack.io. It's a Heroku-like
| experience in your own AWS account leveraging their suite of
| managed services.
| dimgl wrote:
| Fly.io and Render have been pretty impressive to use on
| personal projects.
| stevejb wrote:
| Preface: I work for DevGraph, which contains EngineYard.
|
| I would definitely have a strong look at EngineYard [1]. Our
| tagline: "A NoOps PaaS for deploying and managing applications
| on AWS backed with a world-class support offering." There is a
| good comparison with Heroku located here [2].
|
| Having worked with several engineers, I can personally vouch
| for the world class support. We spend a lot of time thinking
| about and implementing ways to host Ruby, Node, PHP, Java,
| Python, and other containerized workloads on AWS. EngineYard
| has been around since before Heroku, so we have a long track
| record and a lot of experience in making your applications run
| reliably, keeping costs under control, and with full 24x7
| support.
|
| Email is in the description, along with my Twitter. Please
| reach out for any questions.
|
| [1] https://www.engineyard.com/
|
| [2] https://www.engineyard.com/heroku-alternative/
| thibaut_barrere wrote:
| A couple of French-based options that I've been using as
| replacements:
|
| - https://www.clever-cloud.com
|
| - https://scalingo.com
|
| - https://www.qovery.com
| jedgardyson wrote:
| check out this post[0] on some alternatives. We missed
| engineyard and a few others but it can help give some context.
|
| [0] https://tooltip.com/reports/managed-hosting-or-paas-for-
| boot...
| safeerm wrote:
| if you're interesting in moving off Heroku to AWS without the
| complexity of Kubernetes, I would love to chat with you. safeer
| [at] tinystacks.com
| focom wrote:
| dokku on a vps?
|
| ref: https://github.com/dokku/dokku
| sascha_sl wrote:
| fly.io is promising in the direct competitor space
|
| Dokku is a good alternative for running herokuish on a single
| server with lots of control.
| josegonzalez wrote:
| Dokku Maintainer here.
|
| Dokku also supports Dockerfiles, Docker Images, Tarballs
| (similar to heroku slugs), and Cloud Native Buildpacks. I'm
| also actively working on AWS Lambda support[1] (both for
| simple usage without much config as well as SAM-based usage)
| and investigating Replicate's Cog[2] and Railways Nixpacks[3]
| functionalities for building apps.
|
| There are quite a few options in the OSS space (as well as
| Commercial offerings from new startups and popular
| incumbents). It's an interesting space to be in, and its
| always fun to see how new offerings innovate on existing
| solutions. [1]
| https://github.com/dokku/lambda-builder [2]
| https://github.com/replicate/cog [3]
| https://github.com/railwayapp/nixpacks
| kevlened wrote:
| For background tasks, we're building https://www.tasker.sh
| ywain wrote:
| Render (https://render.com/) is pretty nice.
| MikeTheRocker wrote:
| https://railway.app/ is really good. Easiest way to get a
| project up and running IMO. You can deploy from existing GitHub
| repos or a project starter in one click.
|
| Disclosure: I am an investor in Railway
| crcastle wrote:
| Small nit: I believe this is incorrect:
|
| > More recently, all Git-based deployments (which is to say,
| virtually all deployments) to Heroku were blocked and review apps
| were halted for all users as a result of a GitHub OAuth token
| leak.
|
| It should read "all _GitHub_ -based deployments". You can still
| deploy with `git push heroku main`.
| jusrhee wrote:
| Ah yup good catch - just updated the article
| rubyist5eva wrote:
| So this is more of a sales pitch for Porter - which is fine, I
| didn't know it existed and these are pretty compelling reasons to
| try it instead of Heroku.
|
| For me - the real selling point is that yes, Heroku is expensive
| - but the cost of a competent devops engineer is much, much, much
| higher. So unless it's literally impossible to do something with
| Heroku that needs a specialized skillset - the "devops as a
| service" part of Heroku is worth every penny in my opinion.
| digianarchist wrote:
| The year is 2022 and still no HTTP2 support.
|
| https://help.heroku.com/JAOCNZ25/does-heroku-have-plans-to-s...
| jacobsenscott wrote:
| Yes, this is :(, but you should be serving all your static
| assets through a CDN, which will have http2. I can't think of a
| scenario where I would want to serve anything other than the
| dynamic content off the heroku server. I don't think http2 buys
| you much there. So you should be able to get away with at most
| 2 requests - one to the heroku server, and one to the cdn.
| multiplegeorges wrote:
| Or automated SSL for wildcard domains.
|
| > Supporting wildcard domains is something we'd like to do. Up
| until March 13, 2018, this was an upstream limitation from
| Let's Encrypt.
|
| ... 2018.
| Beltalowda wrote:
| The changelog that's linked in there is depressing: only
| updates for languages/environments and an occasional minor
| update to the actual platform every few months.
| soperj wrote:
| Begs the question, what do people not like about Porter?
| aantix wrote:
| I've heard good things about using Hatchbox to deploy to AWS.
|
| https://www.hatchbox.io/
| chimen wrote:
| Why companies move on to Heroku should be the question. All
| raised issues are there since Heroku.
| dml2135 wrote:
| I'm at a small startup (about 8 engineers) and for the most part
| Heroku has been a great solution for a team of our size.
|
| However, the recent github incident was a major PITA for us, and
| has us seriously considering leaving the platform for the first
| time. We're still working on getting all of our automated
| deployments back up and running.
|
| In addition, we had just put in some work to start using the
| Review Apps feature, which now seems to be gone for the
| foreseeable future.
| rememberlenny wrote:
| Porter customer support is insanely good. If you are trying to
| migrate from Heroku to AWS, they make it incredibly easy and go
| out of their way to engineer alongside you.
|
| I was deeply impressed as a user and have nothing but positive
| things to say about their team.
| justjake wrote:
| Warning: There are a couple people in this thread mentioning
| products that they're investors in. I won't call them out
| expressly, but I think people should be direct about their
| incentive alignments. It's disingenuous and borders on
| astroturfing IMO.
|
| Background: Founder of Railway.app here.
|
| There's a lot of these companies popping up that offer a "Heroku
| replacement", and once you dive in, you realize you have to pay
| $300/mo for a Kubecluster + $200/mo for the wrapped Kube service
|
| In our experience, people move off Heroku for a couple things:
|
| - Cost: Kinda self explanatory but Heroku pricing ramps hard
|
| - Flexibility: Heroku's not great for anything beyond stateful
| monoliths
|
| - Scalability: Notoriously Heroku's SLAs aren't that great
|
| In my mind, you don't replace Heroku with a minimum $500/mo
| Kubernetes cluster. Not only is this cost prohibitively
| expensive, but Kubernetes itself is a jet engine, and if you're
| not trained to use it correctly, you can risk catastrophic
| failure (on costs ballooning, on dataloss, etc)
|
| We're working hard at Railway to provide not just a Heroku
| replacement, but a next generation, composable infrastructure
| canvas. $5/mo, 30 seconds, and you're up and running.
|
| Demo:https://user-
| images.githubusercontent.com/5499880/165187948-...
|
| Would love any feedback and thoughts people have about Heroku, my
| thoughts above, and what we're building :)
|
| EDIT: Wow, just went from 11 -> 8 upvotes. I suppose they didn't
| like the astroturfing callout
|
| EDIT2: Render isn't who I'm talking about. They're great.
| jopsen wrote:
| Just saw someone else linking to railway.app, curious how does
| the scaling work?
|
| The pricing showed a lightweight website priced at less than 1
| CPU / month -- is there some undocumented fractional scaling
| going on?
| nicoburns wrote:
| I was looking at your site earlier due to link up the page, and
| I have a question about the pricing:
|
| What exactly does 0.1 of a vCPU equate to?
| ryanSrich wrote:
| Would you be willing to go over our Heroku environment to see
| if we'd be a good fit for Railway? I can't tell from the demo
| if you have things like automated backups, rollbacks, workers,
| add-ons for logging/monitoring/performance/etc. Those are all
| tablestakes for us. But Railway certainly looks great.
| justjake wrote:
| I would love to!
|
| I can tell you a couple things off the bat:
|
| - We have automated backups but they're for our own internal
| disaster recovery. User backups are something we want to do
| but haven't put on our roadmap yet
|
| - A key thing with Railway is "It's just code". So, a worker
| is just another service. We don't have special casing for
| specific types of code. We just run the code! So, yes we do
| support them
|
| - We have a lot of stuff built in, but we also support
| deploying say, a containerized DataDog agent, or a Dockerized
| sidecar, or application level Sentry integrations
|
| We have a very particular vision of how this stuff should be
| done, so it's going to take some time. My promise is to
| always be super honest about the platform, so it would be
| more of an "Customer Discovery" vs a Sales call
|
| If that all sounds well and good, you can email me at
| jake@railway.app! Offer goes for anybody interested but
| again, I'm not here to push the platform just to gain clarity
| on what we're building :)
| heartbreak wrote:
| They've been shilling their R*nder and P*rter services on every
| single thread about this Heroku incident, and it's frankly a
| problem that HN moderators should address.
| ryanSrich wrote:
| What should HN do? People are free to downvote it until it's
| dead. That seems a more democratic way to handle it.
| justjake wrote:
| I'm such a HN normie does HN even have a downvote button? I
| can't find it
| gkoberger wrote:
| You need 501 karma points to downvote!
|
| Here's a list of all hidden HN features:
| https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-
| undocumented#downvo...
| justjake wrote:
| Oh wow I had no idea thank you!
| justjake wrote:
| It's not just them sadly. I think the only one who I've seen
| who isn't guilty of this is Fly.io.
|
| They build cool shit, they blog about their cool shit,
| because it's cool shit.
| anurag wrote:
| (Render founder) I haven't seen a single Render employee or
| investor post on HN about the Heroku incident; this comment
| is the first we've participated in any discussion on the
| topic. I'd love to see links if you can share.
| craigkerstiens wrote:
| As someone that was there at Heroku after the acquisition, I
| don't think you can state that since the acquisition it's been
| consistently downhill. There isn't much debate that things have
| stagnated in the last 5-7 years which is a longer story on why
| probably.
|
| Some examples of innovation that happened and were launched after
| the acquisition: buildpacks (at the time of acquisition Heroku
| was still Ruby only), Heroku Postgres launched
| forks/followers/dataclips all after the acquisition, review apps
| came several years after. Salesforce may have had an eventual
| hand in it, but there was still a lot of innovation happening due
| to the folks there in the near to mid-term after the acquisition
| for several years.
|
| All that said, very excited for the new crop of players in the
| space. There are a number of companies trying to be a cheaper or
| more stable Heroku. Personally I'm excited about the ones that
| are taking their own unique approach. https://www.fly.io and
| https://www.railway.app are two that to me seem to bring their
| own perspective vs. just trying to recreate Heroku as a carbon
| copy clone. There are a number more in the jamstack space that
| have become staples such as Netlify and Vercel which are also
| doing great things.
| mrkurt wrote:
| I think the most interesting part of this is the PaaS
| disaggregation. Heroku built an exceptionally good Postgres
| service. They could not have done that with multiple DBs. Even
| their redis is pretty meh.
|
| People like us (Fly.io) will end up either building very
| mediocre DB offerings or collaborating with DB companies (like
| yours: https://www.crunchydata.com/products/crunchy-bridge/) to
| ship stuff that's substantially better than RDS. I'm looking
| forward to it. Down with mediocre DB services.
| mwcampbell wrote:
| I'm curious about what "substantially better than RDS" means.
| RDS has been good enough for me for quite a while. Does it
| only matter once you get to a certain scale?
| spaniard89277 wrote:
| https://scalingo.com/ is nice too
| js4ever wrote:
| not really, it's available only in france and it's crazy
| expensive, we are talking about 115EUR/month for a container
| with 4gb of ram, so large that the offer is named 2XL. Wow
| now 2cpu/4GB of ram is considered 2XL
| WrtCdEvrydy wrote:
| I like caprover more.
| barkerja wrote:
| We're big users of Heroku Connect, which has been an incredible
| product for our use.
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| > at the time of acquisition Heroku was still Ruby only
|
| Uhhh... I don't think that's true. There were 3rd party
| buildpacks available.
| booi wrote:
| https://render.com is my favorite in this space
| qrush wrote:
| I recently moved some apps over to Render and I've been
| loving it so far. Ease of use with Heroku with some
| "infrastructure as code" style YAMLs (they're called
| blueprints). Performance is about the same and cost nearly
| halved.
| bravura wrote:
| Care to explain why you like these choices?
| kjksf wrote:
| I can only speak about render.com as I use for a mix of 10
| static websites / Go webapps + cloudflare for DNS and
| caching proxy.
|
| It sounds prosaic but "it just works".
|
| Specifically compared to Digital Ocean Apps (which I used
| before render):
|
| * the dashboard UI is better designed and faster
|
| * the builds and deployments happen faster
|
| * similar price (to Digital Ocean, much cheaper than
| Heroku)
|
| * similar capabilities (attached disks, hosted Postgres,
| hosted redis) but the velocity seems better i.e. render.com
| seems to implement features faster than DO
|
| You would think that "well designed dashboard that displays
| instantly" would be a table stakes in an offering like
| that, but sadly it isn't.
| o_m wrote:
| This article compares the two: https://render.com/render-
| vs-heroku-comparison
| simonw wrote:
| The first few years after the Salesforce acquisition were
| incredible - for quite a while I thought of Heroku as one of
| the best examples of an acquisiton where the product improved
| after the release.
|
| Sad to see that momentum eventually fade away.
| petenixey wrote:
| Agreed - not least recruiting Matz which I thought was a huge
| coup
| jimmar wrote:
| I took a few minutes to scan Porter's website. They have a free
| tier. But when I read the getting started documentation, it says
| that I have to provision everything in my existing cloud
| infrastructure (e.g.; AWS). So I'm paying for the services in
| AWS. It seems I got lost in the story. Porter doesn't immediately
| feel like a replacement for Heroku.
| jusrhee wrote:
| OP and Porter founder here. The article was meant to outline
| the most common technical limitations we see companies on
| Heroku bump up against as they outgrow Heroku. For individuals
| and teams running smaller workloads on Heroku where saving $ is
| a chief concern, Heroku is probably still a good option even
| though they're declining in market share (this unprecedented
| recent outage aside). Porter is designed for companies that are
| maturing off Heroku for the technical reasons we mention or for
| those already looking to get the automation of Heroku in their
| own AWS/GCP cloud.
| asenchi wrote:
| Make sure you are careful of their LICENSE if you choose to
| self-host. That repo is scary from a business perspective.
| gkoberger wrote:
| I'm historically a huge Heroku defender. Been using it for a
| decade now, and my company still uses it despite being quite
| large and getting a lot of traffic. It's always been a great
| product and the early Salesforce days they DID ship a ton of new
| stuff and improve rapidly (despite a narrative that they didn't).
| Like, it got REALLY GOOD the years after acquisition.
|
| That being said... it's insane that we haven't been able to
| deploy for over two weeks and nobody there seems to care. So
| we're looking to move now, since it's clear Heroku has pretty
| much just given up at this point.
| [deleted]
| krallja wrote:
| > we haven't been able to deploy for over two weeks
|
| What is stopping you? Are you unable to type `git push heroku
| master`?
| jacobsenscott wrote:
| * It was automated. Now it requires someone to pay attention
| and do it. You need to check if CI passed, and pull, and be
| sure you pulled the version that passed CI (maybe someone
| pushed since then).
|
| * Review apps, the only remaining heroku "killer feature", do
| not work at all.
|
| The fact that this has been broken for 2 weeks tells you
| everything thing you need to know about the state of their
| code base, and the resources salesforce is willing to
| allocate to heroku.
|
| Has anyone switched to AWS App Runner? Curious how it went.
| nicoburns wrote:
| Tip for your first point: make the CI server push to
| heroku.
| [deleted]
| jastr wrote:
| Heroku's github integration has been down for 2 weeks
| tommoor wrote:
| That's fine as a solo developer - but what about a team with
| CI pipelines etc?
| VWWHFSfQ wrote:
| can't you put that in the ci pipeline
| scrose wrote:
| I'm pretty confident if 'putting it in the ci pipeline'
| were a straight-forward option for most people, they
| probably wouldn't be paying Heroku to manage review apps.
| I've used Heroku review apps for years and have also
| written and taken over different custom deployment
| pipelines. Review apps have a million different ways to
| be a giant time and money sink if not planned and
| implemented properly.
| gkoberger wrote:
| I think you're underestimating the complexity of our
| codebase. Aside from the usual blockers, we have hundreds of
| repos (our Staging feature for Enterprise allows customers to
| deploy our code on their own cadence) all tied together using
| pipelines.
|
| We have our own custom release management software, which now
| doesn't work. Different repos have to go out at the same time
| so things don't break. Plus, we extensively use their review
| apps for code reviews, which we've lost access to.
|
| Lastly, not everyone has access to deploy directly to Heroku,
| so not everyone would be able to 'git push heroku main'.
|
| Could we fix all of this and get it working? Yeah. But we
| want to be focusing on building our product, which is why we
| pay Heroku a ton of money so we _don 't_ have to worry about
| this.
| nicoburns wrote:
| We were in the same position (although luckily far fewer
| repos than you!). It took a bit of fiddling, but in the end
| I found that it was actually quite easy to fix this by
| tacking on a force push to the main branch of the heroku
| git repo at the end of our existing CI process (essentially
| treating heroku got as a deploy api that happens to use the
| git protocol)
|
| Don't blame you for wanting to move, but you might find
| that approach helpful as a quick fix.
| geoffharcourt wrote:
| This doesn't work if your Git repo is above a certain size.
| Some of our apps (fortunately not production) haven't been
| able to deploy since the incident.
| ryanSrich wrote:
| I'm in the same boat. We were in the process of moving off of
| Heroku a few months back. We had to pause that migration for a
| number of reasons, but the initial jump was to save some money.
|
| Now I'm kicking myself for not pushing the migration to
| completion. I've basically had to spend the last week
| recreating much of our deployment pipeline using a very
| complicated local deployment structure that only I can execute.
| It's a complete nightmare. My only guess is that the Heroku
| team is just a handful of overworked developers. For the Github
| integration to be down this long they must just not care. Like
| at all.
| paxys wrote:
| This is just an ad for their own service. Heroku is doing fine.
| They provide exactly what they advertise, and the service has
| been rock solid for over a decade. Sure it doesn't fit everyone's
| use cases, but it doesn't need to.
|
| Ultimately platform-as-a-service has always been a dead end.
| Companies either want more control over the infrastructure (so
| use plain VMs or Kubernetes), or want to forget about servers
| entirely (opting for services like Lambda and now edge
| computing). Everything in the middle (Elastic Beanstalk, App
| Engine, Heroku) has been stagnant for a long time now.
| jacobsenscott wrote:
| Taking over two weeks to fix their GH integration is not "doing
| fine.". I've been a huge Heroku booster for years, but you
| can't ignore this. The GH breakage is a huge red flag.
| jmuguy wrote:
| Not having any sort of basic disk/storage solution has been
| painful for us. There's been a lot of situations where I would
| love to store a big blob of data on the disk while processing it
| but if that Heroku dyno reboots - poof, its gone.
| jrvarela56 wrote:
| What kind of workflow are you trying to fit?
|
| My impression is that this lack of 'instance storage' is by
| design, as well as other constraints that can be mapped to
| these: https://12factor.net/
| jmuguy wrote:
| I imagine Heroku would say the same, and thats fine. We
| deploy a bunch of Rails apps, backed by Postgres, via Heroku
| and most of the time what we're doing fits neatly into the 12
| factor definition.
|
| However what happens if you're doing something that doesn't
| really fit that definition. For instance we have a Rails app
| with some background workers doing data processing. I would
| very much like to have these workers just dump to disk, so I
| can take a big chunk of data and move it into Postgres at
| once. But I can't do that with Heroku.
|
| So basically this is something that Heroku isn't designed to
| do, but its also something I would rather not need to go one
| level of abstraction deeper, to AWS directly for instance, in
| order to do. And its also something that every single one of
| their competitors offers.
| mrkurt wrote:
| Boy howdy do I agree with this. Filesystems are immensely
| handy. We (a sometimes competitor of Heroku) shipped persistent
| volumes very early and it's been amazingly empowering. The DX
| gets difficult, but we're ironing that out over time
| mark_l_watson wrote:
| A good article, except for one big thing: this is not an end
| user, rather a direct competitor. Public articles that criticize
| competitors always run me the wrong way.
|
| I haven't used Heroku in a few years, but it has served (using
| the Hobby plan) as a really low cost way to host web apps.
|
| I have been reading through the comments on alternative
| providers, and even though I haven't used it, GCP's Cloud Deploy
| looks interesting also (a very long time ago, I used AppEngine a
| fair amount).
| killingtime74 wrote:
| Dosen't criticising competitors increase competition? "We taste
| better than x", "we have higher quality than x", "we're like x
| but cheaper?"
| elondaits wrote:
| I don't like this either. I think maybe people are more used
| to this in the US, but I personally think that if you can't
| be objective you need to be more humble in your
| communication.
|
| ... of course Coke can trash-talk Pepsi and vice-versa... but
| if I'm making a technical assessment of competing products or
| software platforms I get a bad feeling of anyone using those
| sales tactics.
| vmception wrote:
| Check Netlify
|
| Or Vercel
|
| Best scaling in their free plans
|
| Heroku hobby is a joke in comparison and hasnt been updated in
| a decade while all their addons have gotten less and less
| featured while costing more and more
|
| I host all my static assets on IPFS which practically nullifies
| the bandwidth limits of Netlify
| krthr wrote:
| GCP Cloud Build + Cloud Run is a pretty good alternative for
| Heroku
| jacobsenscott wrote:
| For all heroku's frustrations (and I agree with all of them in
| the article), it is still the only thing that "just works" for a
| standard monolith web app. Heroku is not cheap, but it is still
| cheaper than a couple full time employees + aws.
|
| It is really too bad they aren't innovating - they are just
| burning up their 10 year lead in the space. I wouldn't start a
| new project on Heroku - not because of the cost, but because I
| don't expect them to last another 10 years.
| spicybright wrote:
| It's honestly strange how no one has eaten their lunch yet.
| Besides the extra services they now offer (which you aren't
| required for hosting a simple app), you could probably have a
| team bang out the basics in a few months.
|
| You could even just be a layer on top of AWS and probably make
| profit from not many users, as long as you're cheaper.
| mixedCase wrote:
| > You could even just be a layer on top of AWS and probably
| make profit from not many users, as long as you're cheaper.
|
| Isn't Heroku exactly that?
| jacobsenscott wrote:
| There are a lot of startups that have banged out the basics
| in a few months. The are getting mentioned all over in the
| threads under this article. But the basics aren't good
| enough. Heroku looks simple, but does a lot, and pretty much
| does it all right. Their documentation alone is amazing and
| it would take more than a few months to create docs of the
| same quality.
| PenguinCoder wrote:
| Heroku is not _the only thing that just works for standard
| monolith web apps_. Plenty of others in this space, like
| netlify, vercel, firebase, etc. I don't know how they all
| compare to each other, I don't use any of them.
| DylanSp wrote:
| Netlify and Vercel are great, but they're limited for
| deploying backends. You're limited to a FaaS paradigm with
| the languages they support, and if you need a database you'll
| need to host it somewhere else. It's a long ways from the
| flexibility of running arbitrary containers + a managed
| database that's easy to connect to.
| nicoburns wrote:
| Most of those others don't offer traditional compute. And
| "functions" have a lot of limitations, and a pain to work
| with locally.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| It blows my mind that they don't provide an object store.
| Almost all web apps in my experience need an object store of
| some kind.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| What do you imagine their home-grown offering would have over
| using S3 directly?
| chrisseaton wrote:
| I thought the entire point of Heroku was that it wrapped up
| existing essential basic AWS offerings into a more
| manageable package?
|
| I'd rather not have to manage a side account for AWS, and
| set up the connections to it and things. I'd rather it was
| just there, like their database.
| jacobsenscott wrote:
| I suppose that's what this is
| https://elements.heroku.com/addons/bucketeer, but using
| S3 is really easy. And honestly I wouldn't trust most
| heroku addons are maintained outside of the most popular
| - postgres, redis, memcache.
| nicoburns wrote:
| A lot of AWS's offerings are hard to use. But s3 really
| isn't. There's also firebase storage and backblaze b2 in
| this space. And they're all easy to use standalone.
| [deleted]
| G4BB3R wrote:
| I use Bucketeer plugin on Heroku but I am planning to move to
| S3, that is around 20x cheaper.
| bradleybuda wrote:
| We're big Heroku customers; despite that, I largely agree with
| the points in this article and there's a voice in the back of my
| head asking every few months "is this worth it?"
|
| Whenever I research the new crop of Heroku clones (the one being
| hawked here, and others) the pitch is always "it's just like
| Heroku but you can run it in your own cloud". It's mind-boggling
| to me that none of the clones understands that I DON'T WANT TO
| RUN IT. Yes, I pay Heroku a premium because I like their software
| (the pipelines are great, dyno formations mostly Just Work) but
| what I'm really paying for is:
|
| * Never typing "ssh"
|
| * Never thinking about a full disk from a runaway log file
|
| * Never thinking about a load balancer or a certificate
|
| * Never waking up because a Postgres host has failed
|
| * etc, etc
|
| I have no interest in a "Heroku but you run it" PaaS but I'd pay
| though the nose for a "Heroku but it's actively developed" PaaS.
| intrepidsoldier wrote:
| I had written down some thought about the various compute
| options available to run apps. One of my takeaways was exactly
| this - "Run your own PaaS on Cloud IaaS" seems too much work
| for too little gain.
|
| https://ramansharma.substack.com/p/multiple-stops-on-the-clo...
| dontlaugh wrote:
| AWS's ECS Fargate with Aurora Serverless and AWS CA
| certificates is close.
| statico wrote:
| Indeed. I wrote about recreating what I wanted from Heroku
| within ECS Fargate. There was a lot of initial configuration
| but very, very low maintenance work.
|
| https://statico.medium.com/recreating-herokus-push-to-
| deploy...
| ketzo wrote:
| But even that stuff is gonna be more configuration than
| Heroku, right?
|
| I wanna spend literally zero hours a month on server / dev
| ops, if I can manage it. I will pay for it and accept the
| constraints of simplicity.
| maccard wrote:
| It is more configuration, yes, but it's far less than say
| ec2 and nomad. We run a very light production load on it
| and in 6 months I've had to intervene once (to bump our
| limits because we spiked slightly more than I expected us
| to)
| vlunkr wrote:
| You can invest more time up front and automate it with an
| IAC tool and and CI tool to build/deploy. Probably nothing
| will be as hands off as Heroku, but there are lots of
| measures that can get you closer.
| [deleted]
| strix_varius wrote:
| You might like render.com
| thasmin wrote:
| I recently deployed a web app on render.com and it looks it
| fits the description. I just told it to set up a PostgreSQL
| database, pointed it at my git repo and told it how to
| build/run the static site, web server, and cron job. It was
| pretty simple, it's got great features like logs, a console,
| and monitoring. The price is reasonable too.
| krthr wrote:
| GCP Cloud Run could be an alternative
| zoomzoom wrote:
| First off, I would strongly disagree with the idea that Heroku
| post-acquisition was stagnant. As well-said elsewhere, tons of
| product was shipped to industry-best standards:
| postgres/dataclips, Heroku Connect, buildpacks - as well as
| introduction of CI and preview apps. But it's clear that in the
| post-k8s and post infra-as-code world there's been a surge in new
| options for how teams manage their infra and DevOps toolchain.
|
| Of course, I'd agree with the idea that conflicts of interest
| should be disclaimed: I'm the co-founder of Coherence
| (https://www.withcoherence.com).
|
| Seems the key issues raised by the article and comments here are:
| - costs and resource control constraints when using Heroku -
| fixed base costs of k8s when using self-hosted PaaS type systems
| - flexibility constraints of heroku-similar PaaS - the desire for
| teams to get more ownership than Heroku gives them when it comes
| to configurability, reliability & security
|
| Coherence disagrees that the next generation of PaaS should be a
| black-box - like Heroku, many next-gen PaaS are not hosted in
| your own cloud and re-implement the wheel when it comes to
| functionality like persistent storage, hosted databases, and
| application support services like redis. In the end, we believe
| that building on top of the major clouds (Google, AWS, Azure,
| CloudFlare, etc...) is the right choice. It's also important to
| us that you're able to host customer data in mature systems that
| you control. This philosophy also allows Coherence to help you
| use managed services the large providers have built, like Cloud
| Run or App Runner, which at least partially mitigate the cost and
| complexity risks of k8s.
|
| Coherence is vertically integrated, composable, and opinionated,
| with a focus on developer experience. A defined workflow for
| production-quality full-stack web apps with dev and production
| built in alongside automated test environments, including CI/CD
| and cloud IDEs - all configured with one high-level YAML. We're
| in a very early private beta on google cloud right now - if
| you're interested, please check out our site above and let us
| know!
| jeremyjh wrote:
| I was just looking at AWS App Runner today and just thinking
| about how miserable it would be to figure out how to use AWS's
| proprietary build pipeline tools to replicate what I have with
| Heroku - and I've been using AWS forever - I just hate their
| UX, their docs, really every thing they do except the actual
| infrastructure services. So I was just thinking someone should
| build a product that gives me the Heroku CLI, pipelines, add-
| ons, review apps etc but implements it all on top of standard
| AWS services. No runtime services at all, just orchestrating
| configuration and metadata, service provisioning etc. I know
| there are other companies in this space but I wish someone
| would just blatantly steal the Heroku UX and then sell me that.
| zoomzoom wrote:
| Check us out! We're on GCP for v1 (AWS is coming). Sounds
| like you'd like what we're building.
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