In sysadmin-land, all my pain comes from software that was never written with management in mind. Assumptions like 'all TCP ports are open, all the time, betwee

In sysadmin-land, all my pain comes from software that was never written with management in mind. Assumptions like 'all TCP ports are open, all the time, between all servers', 'we can put things wherever we want in the filesystem' ... One good thing about Heroku, though, is that you essentially have to do a lot of these things properly from the beginning because they enforce a shared nothing, tiered architecture. For instance, you can't write to the filesystem, you can't set up some poorly secured e-mail server, you can't have arbitrary daemons running. In general, every process that isn't core to the web stack must be executed in a completely different tier. Obviously you can still shoot yourself in the foot with poorly written SQL and other things, but a lot of the "sys-admin" type mistakes are avoided by enforcing best practices when you start with Heroku.