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Am I correct that this represents a 10x cost over an IaaS provider like Digital Ocean? What features in the Heroku platform justify that? Not trolling, but look

Am I correct that this represents a 10x cost over an IaaS provider like Digital Ocean? What features in the Heroku platform justify that? Not trolling, but looking for some brief and logical input that'll give me that 'aha' moment

detaro 11y ago
Takes away quite a bit of administration work, which isn't exactly free either, especially if you don't have the expertise for it in your team. Especially for smaller projects deploying them on heroku instead of worrying (and spending time on) about setup, deployment, patches, ... is an attractive option.
res0nat0r 11y ago
Dead simple stack deployment and automation. People are very willing to pay 10x the amount just to git init, git push and heroku add apps to their stack without worrying about anything else under the hood.
alexchamberlain 11y ago
Just try it I'd say. Professionally, I do no Web development and software often runs on big iron machines. I tried out Heroku to inspire me on where I want my deployment process to be, and I might use it for the odd hobby project at home.
eli 11y ago
Isn't Digital Ocean just a VPS provider? I'd encourage you to give Heroku a try (it's free to play with). It's pretty cool that with really minimal planning on your part you can "git push heroku" and have a working app. I don't know if this is an "aha" moment for you -- it might depend on how much you enjoy provisioning servers yourself -- but when it works it's pretty cool. I suspect there are people who are running apps "themselves" on heroku that would otherwise require them to pay a server administrator.
- passiveincome 11y ago
  That's the disconnect for me. There have to be prebuilt Amazon AMIs with push to deploy functionality for various stack flavors. I guess the simplicity and allure of Heroku's git integration makes it easy for developers to forego research on those. It still seems one hell of a price to pay especially when coupled with vendor lock-in (Disclaimer: I don't know if Heroku PaaS locks you in as much as say, GAE)
  - nothrabannosir 11y ago
    Disclaimer: I don't know if Heroku PaaS locks you in as much as say, GAE In my (limited) experience: not by a long shot. Heroku setups may seem locked in, but GAE is obscene. No outgoing HTTP requests, no normal DB, basically everything is GAE specific. Heroku is not the most generic thing out there, but, by God, it's still miles better than GAE.
    - matchu 11y ago
      The key is that Heroku is trying to support all major web app frameworks, whereas GAE only supports the GAE framework. The tradeoff is super interesting: using their framework allows them to hella optimize the instance for you, but you're pretty darn stuck with it :/
    - arihant 11y ago
      No outgoing HTTP requests? GAE has URL Fetch API from first day. Also, GAE can now run docker and also connect to MySQL running on Google Cloud infrastructure, which is a separate offering.
      - nothrabannosir 11y ago
        Sorry for not being explicit. My point was: you need to use a special API to do outgoing HTTP requests. This leads to vendor lock-in. In Heroku, you just do it.
        11y ago
amorphid 11y ago
Basically it comes down to time. I used to run a small business that depended on a Rails app. It was much easier to let Heroku manage the headaches of sys admin type duties than to manage servers myself. Below a certain scale, the money cost of using a platform-as-a-service like Heroku is cheaper than the dollar cost of managing servers and/or having an ops person.
superuser2 11y ago
"git push origin master" is effectively 100% of your DevOps. Running a web application reliably and at scale on IaaS requires effort and skill; Heroku will make it so you effectively don't have to have those skills or spend that effort, for a fee. Cheaper than hiring a DevOps team. Most large tech companies with an infrastructure/DevOps team are trying to create an "internal Heroku" - and, at best, coming pretty close.
matchu 11y ago
Heroku's value-add is that you don't need a system administrator: if they support the services your app needs, then they automate system administration for you. Digital Ocean will sell you a VPS (essentially a machine) and grant you root-level access to it. You can run whatever you want, and deploy and manage it however you want. Heroku will sell you a dyno (essentially a worker process) and grant you access to a set of deployment and management tools. You push your application code up to Heroku, and it automatically sets up the front-facing web server, the database, the cache service, etc., according to the add-ons you've selected. If you need to scale up, just purchase more dynos. For complex apps, Heroku might not meet your needs and you might want some VPSs instead. In terms of price, though, you'd need to include system administration man-hours when comparing.
- 67726e 11y ago
  Not as feature rich as Heroku, but AWS' Elastic Beanstalk was so much easier for me to get my Java/Spring application up and running. I had endless headaches on Heroku. Elastic Beanstalk was simple upload a WAR and off to the races. Considering most folks probably wind up with AWS as a deployment target and EB is at no additional cost over the normal AWS costs, it's probably worth looking into right off the bat.
airza 11y ago
I wonder if the 2 cores presented are dedicated on DO? It's all kind of opaque.
biot 11y ago
Digital Ocean, Linode, etc. are do-it-yourself platforms. If you have the time and knowledge to install, configure, secure, monitor, etc. etc. all the services that go into a typical application, then spending the time yourself will save you money. On the flip side, if you have the money but lack time, knowledge, or desire to manage all that complexity just pay Heroku to do it for you... or any other PaaS for that matter. I've never used Heroku, but long ago I reached a point where dealing with hardware, services, networking, server racks, etc. got really boring. Today, I expect computing resources to be little more than appliances where I can effectively say "Here's the code I want you to run. Make it happen." and not have to even think about firewalls, scalability, failover, backups, software conflicts/compatibility, security updates, and a hundred other things. If you're managing all that yourself, you're basically doing a job that a computer ought to be doing on your behalf based on a specification you've provided.
- felicianotech 11y ago
  Don't forget that with Docker, Vagrant, Salt, Puppet, StackScripts, etc you can turn DigitalOcean or Linode into your own platform. Best of both worlds.
coldtea 11y ago
>What features in the Heroku platform justify that? Not having to care about deployment that much.
hkmurakami 11y ago
It reduces the number of engineers you have to hire to maintain your DO / AWS deployments. As engineering talent becomes more scarce and expensive, the appeal of such a solution ironically increases.
dlss 11y ago
PaaS solutions are worth more than IaaS I think -- someone is applying security patches, autoscaling your app, load balancing, etc. For a more apples to apples comparison: It's 5x the cost of Elastic Beanstalk... 250 / (0.067 * 24 * 365 / 12) = 5.11 -- though this is misleading because the closest instance was an m3.medium, which has 3 vcpus and 3.75gb of ram. You can also get a major discount if you go reserved. It's 0.68x the cost of App Engine F4 instances (the biggest available).. 250 / (0.20 * 2.5 * 24 * 365 / 12), though those only have 1G of ram, so that's assuming you somehow buy 2.5 of them :p It's 2.2x the cost of AWS Lambda... 250 / ((0.000001667 + 0.000002501) * 10 * 60 * 60 * 24 * 365 / 12) = 2.28, though this is misleading because it'm adding up a 1.5gb instance and a 1gb instance. Also it's likely much cheaper as Lambda only charges you for used time, and almost all traffic loads are TOD / DOW dependent.
- passiveincome 11y ago
  It seems like they still struggle with Security exploits--It's not a perfect system. For example: https://blog.heroku.com/archives/2013/1/9/password_hijacking_security_incident_and_response https://blog.heroku.com/archives/2013/1/9/password_hijacking... Also, you could get pretty solid protection and faster response time with something like unattended-upgrades https://help.ubuntu.com/community/AutomaticSecurityUpdates https://help.ubuntu.com/community/AutomaticSecurityUpdates I think the value proposition mostly lies in the autoscaling, but seems like a waste in aggregate since most apps never hit any sort of scale.
  - dlss 11y ago
    In fairness to Heroku you're citing a security issue with the heroku.com webapp, not an issue with the platform they're selling. Also: as long as traffic spikes remain a thing, autoscaling isn't wasteful... The alternatives are your site going down or buying bigger servers than you need in the first place... (That's not to say I approve of heroku though, the foundation it supplies is horrible, and missing basic things like [gzip'd asset transfers](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/12326191/any-way-to-serve-gzip-assets-from-heroku https://stackoverflow.com/questions/12326191/any-way-to-serv...)...)
milest 11y ago
I started with Heroku because it was so fast to get started. The documentation is very good and there are a lot of features that have allowed me to spend more time on building our app as opposed to doing devops/sysadmin. Some things I can do with one command: zero downtime deploy, rollback a release, add/remove dynos, provision a database. The list goes on. I've had several aha moments. My first rollback was a pretty big deal. I had a bunch of dynos running (12 or so) and I pushed a bad deploy. With one command, I was running the previous (working) version of the app. Actually, it was more like a "phew" moment. Everyone here is right about the costs. It's very expensive. Especially compared to AWS and DO. But how much is your time worth to you? If I have to spend an extra $300 a month on hosting, that's fine--as long as I'm saving more than, say, 3 hours of time not doing sys admin. The dynos are expensive, but you don't have to provision machines and setup autoscaling groups. The database is expensive, but backups and upgrades take only minutes. The addons are all expensive, but... you get the idea. I've run into limitations of Heroku and we now use AWS as well. I really like AWS, but it's a lot more work. The documentation takes more effort to read, initial setup is more complicated (AMI, IAM roles, Elastic IP, key pairs, etc). AWS is cheaper and the product is great and it does things Heroku can't, but I spend much more time on it.

detaro 11y ago

Takes away quite a bit of administration work, which isn't exactly free either, especially if you don't have the expertise for it in your team. Especially for smaller projects deploying them on heroku instead of worrying (and spending time on) about setup, deployment, patches, ... is an attractive option.

res0nat0r 11y ago

Dead simple stack deployment and automation. People are very willing to pay 10x the amount just to git init, git push and heroku add apps to their stack without worrying about anything else under the hood.

alexchamberlain 11y ago

Just try it I'd say. Professionally, I do no Web development and software often runs on big iron machines. I tried out Heroku to inspire me on where I want my deployment process to be, and I might use it for the odd hobby project at home.

eli 11y ago

Isn't Digital Ocean just a VPS provider? I'd encourage you to give Heroku a try (it's free to play with). It's pretty cool that with really minimal planning on your part you can "git push heroku" and have a working app. I don't know if this is an "aha" moment for you -- it might depend on how much you enjoy provisioning servers yourself -- but when it works it's pretty cool. I suspect there are people who are running apps "themselves" on heroku that would otherwise require them to pay a server administrator.

passiveincome 11y ago
That's the disconnect for me. There have to be prebuilt Amazon AMIs with push to deploy functionality for various stack flavors. I guess the simplicity and allure of Heroku's git integration makes it easy for developers to forego research on those. It still seems one hell of a price to pay especially when coupled with vendor lock-in (Disclaimer: I don't know if Heroku PaaS locks you in as much as say, GAE)
- nothrabannosir 11y ago
  Disclaimer: I don't know if Heroku PaaS locks you in as much as say, GAE In my (limited) experience: not by a long shot. Heroku setups may seem locked in, but GAE is obscene. No outgoing HTTP requests, no normal DB, basically everything is GAE specific. Heroku is not the most generic thing out there, but, by God, it's still miles better than GAE.
  - matchu 11y ago
    The key is that Heroku is trying to support all major web app frameworks, whereas GAE only supports the GAE framework. The tradeoff is super interesting: using their framework allows them to hella optimize the instance for you, but you're pretty darn stuck with it :/
  - arihant 11y ago
    No outgoing HTTP requests? GAE has URL Fetch API from first day. Also, GAE can now run docker and also connect to MySQL running on Google Cloud infrastructure, which is a separate offering.
    - nothrabannosir 11y ago
      Sorry for not being explicit. My point was: you need to use a special API to do outgoing HTTP requests. This leads to vendor lock-in. In Heroku, you just do it.
      - 11y ago

amorphid 11y ago

Basically it comes down to time. I used to run a small business that depended on a Rails app. It was much easier to let Heroku manage the headaches of sys admin type duties than to manage servers myself. Below a certain scale, the money cost of using a platform-as-a-service like Heroku is cheaper than the dollar cost of managing servers and/or having an ops person.

superuser2 11y ago

"git push origin master" is effectively 100% of your DevOps. Running a web application reliably and at scale on IaaS requires effort and skill; Heroku will make it so you effectively don't have to have those skills or spend that effort, for a fee. Cheaper than hiring a DevOps team. Most large tech companies with an infrastructure/DevOps team are trying to create an "internal Heroku" - and, at best, coming pretty close.

matchu 11y ago

Heroku's value-add is that you don't need a system administrator: if they support the services your app needs, then they automate system administration for you. Digital Ocean will sell you a VPS (essentially a machine) and grant you root-level access to it. You can run whatever you want, and deploy and manage it however you want. Heroku will sell you a dyno (essentially a worker process) and grant you access to a set of deployment and management tools. You push your application code up to Heroku, and it automatically sets up the front-facing web server, the database, the cache service, etc., according to the add-ons you've selected. If you need to scale up, just purchase more dynos. For complex apps, Heroku might not meet your needs and you might want some VPSs instead. In terms of price, though, you'd need to include system administration man-hours when comparing.

67726e 11y ago
Not as feature rich as Heroku, but AWS' Elastic Beanstalk was so much easier for me to get my Java/Spring application up and running. I had endless headaches on Heroku. Elastic Beanstalk was simple upload a WAR and off to the races. Considering most folks probably wind up with AWS as a deployment target and EB is at no additional cost over the normal AWS costs, it's probably worth looking into right off the bat.

airza 11y ago

I wonder if the 2 cores presented are dedicated on DO? It's all kind of opaque.

biot 11y ago

Digital Ocean, Linode, etc. are do-it-yourself platforms. If you have the time and knowledge to install, configure, secure, monitor, etc. etc. all the services that go into a typical application, then spending the time yourself will save you money. On the flip side, if you have the money but lack time, knowledge, or desire to manage all that complexity just pay Heroku to do it for you... or any other PaaS for that matter. I've never used Heroku, but long ago I reached a point where dealing with hardware, services, networking, server racks, etc. got really boring. Today, I expect computing resources to be little more than appliances where I can effectively say "Here's the code I want you to run. Make it happen." and not have to even think about firewalls, scalability, failover, backups, software conflicts/compatibility, security updates, and a hundred other things. If you're managing all that yourself, you're basically doing a job that a computer ought to be doing on your behalf based on a specification you've provided.

felicianotech 11y ago
Don't forget that with Docker, Vagrant, Salt, Puppet, StackScripts, etc you can turn DigitalOcean or Linode into your own platform. Best of both worlds.

coldtea 11y ago

>What features in the Heroku platform justify that? Not having to care about deployment that much.

hkmurakami 11y ago

It reduces the number of engineers you have to hire to maintain your DO / AWS deployments. As engineering talent becomes more scarce and expensive, the appeal of such a solution ironically increases.

dlss 11y ago

PaaS solutions are worth more than IaaS I think -- someone is applying security patches, autoscaling your app, load balancing, etc. For a more apples to apples comparison: It's 5x the cost of Elastic Beanstalk... 250 / (0.067 * 24 * 365 / 12) = 5.11 -- though this is misleading because the closest instance was an m3.medium, which has 3 vcpus and 3.75gb of ram. You can also get a major discount if you go reserved. It's 0.68x the cost of App Engine F4 instances (the biggest available).. 250 / (0.20 * 2.5 * 24 * 365 / 12), though those only have 1G of ram, so that's assuming you somehow buy 2.5 of them :p It's 2.2x the cost of AWS Lambda... 250 / ((0.000001667 + 0.000002501) * 10 * 60 * 60 * 24 * 365 / 12) = 2.28, though this is misleading because it'm adding up a 1.5gb instance and a 1gb instance. Also it's likely much cheaper as Lambda only charges you for used time, and almost all traffic loads are TOD / DOW dependent.

passiveincome 11y ago
It seems like they still struggle with Security exploits--It's not a perfect system. For example: https://blog.heroku.com/archives/2013/1/9/password_hijacking_security_incident_and_response https://blog.heroku.com/archives/2013/1/9/password_hijacking... Also, you could get pretty solid protection and faster response time with something like unattended-upgrades https://help.ubuntu.com/community/AutomaticSecurityUpdates https://help.ubuntu.com/community/AutomaticSecurityUpdates I think the value proposition mostly lies in the autoscaling, but seems like a waste in aggregate since most apps never hit any sort of scale.
- dlss 11y ago
  In fairness to Heroku you're citing a security issue with the heroku.com webapp, not an issue with the platform they're selling. Also: as long as traffic spikes remain a thing, autoscaling isn't wasteful... The alternatives are your site going down or buying bigger servers than you need in the first place... (That's not to say I approve of heroku though, the foundation it supplies is horrible, and missing basic things like [gzip'd asset transfers](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/12326191/any-way-to-serve-gzip-assets-from-heroku https://stackoverflow.com/questions/12326191/any-way-to-serv...)...)

milest 11y ago

I started with Heroku because it was so fast to get started. The documentation is very good and there are a lot of features that have allowed me to spend more time on building our app as opposed to doing devops/sysadmin. Some things I can do with one command: zero downtime deploy, rollback a release, add/remove dynos, provision a database. The list goes on. I've had several aha moments. My first rollback was a pretty big deal. I had a bunch of dynos running (12 or so) and I pushed a bad deploy. With one command, I was running the previous (working) version of the app. Actually, it was more like a "phew" moment. Everyone here is right about the costs. It's very expensive. Especially compared to AWS and DO. But how much is your time worth to you? If I have to spend an extra $300 a month on hosting, that's fine--as long as I'm saving more than, say, 3 hours of time not doing sys admin. The dynos are expensive, but you don't have to provision machines and setup autoscaling groups. The database is expensive, but backups and upgrades take only minutes. The addons are all expensive, but... you get the idea. I've run into limitations of Heroku and we now use AWS as well. I really like AWS, but it's a lot more work. The documentation takes more effort to read, initial setup is more complicated (AMI, IAM roles, Elastic IP, key pairs, etc). AWS is cheaper and the product is great and it does things Heroku can't, but I spend much more time on it.