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You'd need a full time devops staff, but you can run your stuff on heroku? I very much doubt it. This just comes across as you vastly over-estimating how hard

You'd need a full time devops staff, but you can run your stuff on heroku? I very much doubt it. This just comes across as you vastly over-estimating how hard it is to run a server. Most of the time it's painful, you take a day or two to write a build script, then everyone forgets about it because it's fully automated.

drchiu 11y ago
Agreed. I run my SAAS on bare metal infrastructure. I don't anticipate my software to suddenly go viral, but have a steady growth. If I had to use Heroku, I wouldn't be able to run my projects for profit because of the number of resources I'd need.
orf 11y ago
That's an unpopular opinion on HN but quite valid.
- icebraining 11y ago
  The good thing about unpopular opinions on HN is that they're so widespread among its userbase.
jonesb6 11y ago
I think it depends on how hard your software pushes the hardware. If complex configuration / maintenance is needed then the likelihood of a human-error bringing the system down is much higher. Service disruptions can have costs much higher then a dev-ops salary (or several) so if a PAAS solution can cause you to avoid that..
steveklabnik 11y ago
It's not about difficulty, it's about time and money. I _can_ manage a server. But for $25/month to just forget about it? I'll take that tradeoff any time. (And have, back when I had production machines myself. And will, if I have time for that side project again sometime soon...) And for stuff that needs more than one dyno, well, if we assume $100k/year for an ops person, that still gives you sixteen of Heroku's beefiest instances for the same price? I still think it makes sense.
- kyllo 11y ago
  Exactly--it's about what your time is worth to you and what you would prefer to spend it on. These services make it possible to just be a software developer and not have to either hire or be a sysadmin. But if you can't afford PaaS or enjoy being your own sysadmin, that option is still open to you.
- spdionis 11y ago
  But... but... another person on the team increases your valuation! /s
- shubhamjain 11y ago
  Why to assume that any kind of server setup would need a dedicated Ops guy? It is reasonable to assume that once a server is provisoned, all you need is to have familiarity with tools and how things work to resolve issues. I know I might be oversimplifying but the decision is not always simple as "we save one hire". Seeing many articles on the web, PaaS bills rake up more quickly than anyone expects.
  - Kaizyn 11y ago
    PaaS bills are OpEx, so you get to write them all off on your taxes.
    - AznHisoka 11y ago
      ... And so are employee salaries.
    - mifreewil 11y ago
      Yes, you pay less in taxes because your expenses are higher and now have less profit to be taxed.
  - steveklabnik 11y ago
    Yes, but then you have to actually do the work to resolve the issues. Again, it's not about skill, it's about time and money. What you're paying for is just not having to think about it.
simonw 11y ago
... and then six months later your server runs out of disk space and collapses because you hadn't configured proper graphs, and you spend several hours frantically trying to fix it. And then two months later your RAID controller fails and you realise that your backups stopped working when disk space ran out you never fixed them again. And then when you rebuild the server you realise you documented/automated 95% of the setup of the original machine, but that last 5% has you totally screwed because a package you were depending on has been deprecated by your Linux distribution and you need to figure out how to build it from scratch. Running a server in a production environment across multiple years is hard. One of the hardest part is when everyone forgets about it because it's fully automated... and then it breaks.
- Bromlife 11y ago
  Raid... controller ? Your servers are virtualised with redundant hardware (if they're not IaaS in the first place). There's no "rebuilding" of the server. Have you ever actually managed a production environment in the last 10 years? We're not even talking about a lot of money here. A raid controller dying should either a) not bring down production or b) not be your problem anyway.
seanwilson 11y ago
> I very much doubt it. This just comes across as you vastly over-estimating how hard it is to run a server. What about security updates? Log alerts? Rollbacks? Monitoring? Support for multiple servers? Load balancers? Automated deployments from Git? Atomic web code updates? Ability to destroy and recreate the server from scratch? Setting up a similar staging site with the same versions of everything? None of this is trivial to automate reliably yourself. I'm not saying it hard to get it working, but it's hard to make it work reliably and scale well. Comparing Heroku to e.g. manually setting up a Digital Ocean instance that you rsync the code across to is missing out on a huge number of details.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- ocean3 11y ago
  I do all of them along with coding and managing project members. But i use Rackspace cloud which has most of them built in. One you have the basic configuration set up rest if easy. You can use ansible to automate it or same images.
  - seanwilson 11y ago
    What are you paying for that though? My point was people compared cheap VPSs to more expensive managed services and don't take into account the automation they're missing out on.
    - ocean3 11y ago
      1GB server comes to £73 which includes $50 service support. We do use a dedicated server for DB. Recently moved our ap servers from dedicated to cloud. I could have used Digital Ocean as well they have similar setting. I can now easily use the ansible scripts to setup on any other server.

drchiu 11y ago

Agreed. I run my SAAS on bare metal infrastructure. I don't anticipate my software to suddenly go viral, but have a steady growth. If I had to use Heroku, I wouldn't be able to run my projects for profit because of the number of resources I'd need.

orf 11y ago

That's an unpopular opinion on HN but quite valid.

icebraining 11y ago
The good thing about unpopular opinions on HN is that they're so widespread among its userbase.

jonesb6 11y ago

I think it depends on how hard your software pushes the hardware. If complex configuration / maintenance is needed then the likelihood of a human-error bringing the system down is much higher. Service disruptions can have costs much higher then a dev-ops salary (or several) so if a PAAS solution can cause you to avoid that..

steveklabnik 11y ago

It's not about difficulty, it's about time and money. I _can_ manage a server. But for $25/month to just forget about it? I'll take that tradeoff any time. (And have, back when I had production machines myself. And will, if I have time for that side project again sometime soon...) And for stuff that needs more than one dyno, well, if we assume $100k/year for an ops person, that still gives you sixteen of Heroku's beefiest instances for the same price? I still think it makes sense.

kyllo 11y ago
Exactly--it's about what your time is worth to you and what you would prefer to spend it on. These services make it possible to just be a software developer and not have to either hire or be a sysadmin. But if you can't afford PaaS or enjoy being your own sysadmin, that option is still open to you.
spdionis 11y ago
But... but... another person on the team increases your valuation! /s
shubhamjain 11y ago
Why to assume that any kind of server setup would need a dedicated Ops guy? It is reasonable to assume that once a server is provisoned, all you need is to have familiarity with tools and how things work to resolve issues. I know I might be oversimplifying but the decision is not always simple as "we save one hire". Seeing many articles on the web, PaaS bills rake up more quickly than anyone expects.
- Kaizyn 11y ago
  PaaS bills are OpEx, so you get to write them all off on your taxes.
  - AznHisoka 11y ago
    ... And so are employee salaries.
  - mifreewil 11y ago
    Yes, you pay less in taxes because your expenses are higher and now have less profit to be taxed.
- steveklabnik 11y ago
  Yes, but then you have to actually do the work to resolve the issues. Again, it's not about skill, it's about time and money. What you're paying for is just not having to think about it.

simonw 11y ago

... and then six months later your server runs out of disk space and collapses because you hadn't configured proper graphs, and you spend several hours frantically trying to fix it. And then two months later your RAID controller fails and you realise that your backups stopped working when disk space ran out you never fixed them again. And then when you rebuild the server you realise you documented/automated 95% of the setup of the original machine, but that last 5% has you totally screwed because a package you were depending on has been deprecated by your Linux distribution and you need to figure out how to build it from scratch. Running a server in a production environment across multiple years is hard. One of the hardest part is when everyone forgets about it because it's fully automated... and then it breaks.

Bromlife 11y ago
Raid... controller ? Your servers are virtualised with redundant hardware (if they're not IaaS in the first place). There's no "rebuilding" of the server. Have you ever actually managed a production environment in the last 10 years? We're not even talking about a lot of money here. A raid controller dying should either a) not bring down production or b) not be your problem anyway.

seanwilson 11y ago

> I very much doubt it. This just comes across as you vastly over-estimating how hard it is to run a server. What about security updates? Log alerts? Rollbacks? Monitoring? Support for multiple servers? Load balancers? Automated deployments from Git? Atomic web code updates? Ability to destroy and recreate the server from scratch? Setting up a similar staging site with the same versions of everything? None of this is trivial to automate reliably yourself. I'm not saying it hard to get it working, but it's hard to make it work reliably and scale well. Comparing Heroku to e.g. manually setting up a Digital Ocean instance that you rsync the code across to is missing out on a huge number of details.

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
ocean3 11y ago
I do all of them along with coding and managing project members. But i use Rackspace cloud which has most of them built in. One you have the basic configuration set up rest if easy. You can use ansible to automate it or same images.
- seanwilson 11y ago
  What are you paying for that though? My point was people compared cheap VPSs to more expensive managed services and don't take into account the automation they're missing out on.
  - ocean3 11y ago
    1GB server comes to £73 which includes $50 service support. We do use a dedicated server for DB. Recently moved our ap servers from dedicated to cloud. I could have used Digital Ocean as well they have similar setting. I can now easily use the ansible scripts to setup on any other server.