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What you are going through is why “Just use Heroku” is still great advice from wise people. There are so many options out there that until you actually hit the

What you are going through is why “Just use Heroku” is still great advice from wise people. There are so many options out there that until you actually hit the point where Heroku is too expensive or no longer makes sense...Heroku is your best option (if AWS is an option).

asdkhadsj 8y ago
I'm hoping to keep it cheap though, and cloud deployment services scare me a bit on price. We're a ~15y old company (of which I'm recent) and in a domain where margins are fairly thin. I'd rather spend the sweat learning this (or hiring for it) than paying Heroku, fwiw. Plus lock-in scares me.. a lot.
- brightball 8y ago
  Oh, Heroku doesn’t lock you in. It’s just running your code on containers. There’s even an open source library called Dokku that uses their open source build packs to give run the same thing in Docker containers. The minute you price out the time and training investment to factor into your deployment solution, Heroku starts winning in a landslide. Existing scale certainly changes things, but the fact that it forces you to go ahead and build for 12 factor makes moving elsewhere pretty simple.
  - asdkhadsj 8y ago
    Good to know, thank you! On that note, we have some odd ball legacy machines that are dictated/required by our customers. Things like WinXP. So I'm surveying Nomad now as a potential to support non-traditional OSs (though I wouldn't be surprised in Nomad doesn't support WinXP). Do you recommend anything for odd deployment needs like this? I imagine we'll write custom plugins to handle the odd ones, since who the hell releases builds for WinXP or Win95 these days lol. Nevertheless, I figured I'd ask. Especially since broader solutions like Heroku are not going to help our WindowsX deployment woes. (note, they're physical machines currently, though virtualization might be possible)
    - brightball 8y ago
      For Windows XP, I have no idea. Windows deployments are something I’ve never had to worry about (both by chance and on purpose).
  - derefr 8y ago
    Heroku locks you in in the sense that Heroku has this huge ecosystem of "add-ons" that often can't be replicated 1:1 outside of the Heroku environment, or if they can, require 100x the configuration management that Heroku does. Much of the task of moving a project from Heroku to e.g. AWS is taking all those "add-ons" and going through the whole process of converting the Heroku-bound account (where everything is managed through your Heroku dashboard) to a separate, full-fledged account with the same service provider. If that add-on is a data storage provider, that also often entails a data migration.
    - brightball 8y ago
      I suppose that is true if using the add on store. I always went direct to the services anyway so it wasn’t ever really an issue.
Benjamin_Dobell 8y ago
Don't forget Dokku - https://github.com/dokku/dokku https://github.com/dokku/dokku Dokku is extremely flexible Heroku alternative, and a good introduction to dev-ops. You can start-out treating it like a "dumb" Heroku host, but install plugins and customise to your heart's content. You can easily migrate from apps/buildpacks to Dockerfile's one app at a time etc. Whilst it's great for getting your apps up and running, and learning basic dev-ops at your own pace. It's not really designed for scale/reliability. So if your small business/app/service starts to take off, you'll quite likely need to migrate to K8s, Docker Swarm, Amazon ECS, if not for scale, for redundancy/reliability.
- StavrosK 8y ago
  I rented a 10 EUR VPS from Hetzner and put Dokku on it. It currently runs ~10 side-projects and I couldn't be happier.
wenc 8y ago
This is something I've been hearing. I have a small dev team that deploys many small (but important) apps internally. We feel we need to hire more ops folks to help us with maintenance and troubleshooting, but people keep telling me that instead of increasing headcount, to just outsource my ops to PaaS like Heroku. After reading the comments here, I may look into this more.
- brightball 8y ago
  As somebody who was used to running my own servers when I was first forced to use Heroku on a project...I'll go ahead and tell you there is an adjustment period. But after using then going back to the alternatives, there's a lot more that I miss about it than the other way around. You take for granted how much stuff you no longer have to deal with, until you have to again. There will be a moment when you'll be irritated about some very low-level knob that you want to turn that you can't get access to but when that happens, don't take for granted all the other ones you're not dealing with. And it simplifies life for developers tremendously.

asdkhadsj 8y ago

I'm hoping to keep it cheap though, and cloud deployment services scare me a bit on price. We're a ~15y old company (of which I'm recent) and in a domain where margins are fairly thin. I'd rather spend the sweat learning this (or hiring for it) than paying Heroku, fwiw. Plus lock-in scares me.. a lot.

brightball 8y ago
Oh, Heroku doesn’t lock you in. It’s just running your code on containers. There’s even an open source library called Dokku that uses their open source build packs to give run the same thing in Docker containers. The minute you price out the time and training investment to factor into your deployment solution, Heroku starts winning in a landslide. Existing scale certainly changes things, but the fact that it forces you to go ahead and build for 12 factor makes moving elsewhere pretty simple.
- asdkhadsj 8y ago
  Good to know, thank you! On that note, we have some odd ball legacy machines that are dictated/required by our customers. Things like WinXP. So I'm surveying Nomad now as a potential to support non-traditional OSs (though I wouldn't be surprised in Nomad doesn't support WinXP). Do you recommend anything for odd deployment needs like this? I imagine we'll write custom plugins to handle the odd ones, since who the hell releases builds for WinXP or Win95 these days lol. Nevertheless, I figured I'd ask. Especially since broader solutions like Heroku are not going to help our WindowsX deployment woes. (note, they're physical machines currently, though virtualization might be possible)
  - brightball 8y ago
    For Windows XP, I have no idea. Windows deployments are something I’ve never had to worry about (both by chance and on purpose).
- derefr 8y ago
  Heroku locks you in in the sense that Heroku has this huge ecosystem of "add-ons" that often can't be replicated 1:1 outside of the Heroku environment, or if they can, require 100x the configuration management that Heroku does. Much of the task of moving a project from Heroku to e.g. AWS is taking all those "add-ons" and going through the whole process of converting the Heroku-bound account (where everything is managed through your Heroku dashboard) to a separate, full-fledged account with the same service provider. If that add-on is a data storage provider, that also often entails a data migration.
  - brightball 8y ago
    I suppose that is true if using the add on store. I always went direct to the services anyway so it wasn’t ever really an issue.

Benjamin_Dobell 8y ago

Don't forget Dokku - https://github.com/dokku/dokku https://github.com/dokku/dokku Dokku is extremely flexible Heroku alternative, and a good introduction to dev-ops. You can start-out treating it like a "dumb" Heroku host, but install plugins and customise to your heart's content. You can easily migrate from apps/buildpacks to Dockerfile's one app at a time etc. Whilst it's great for getting your apps up and running, and learning basic dev-ops at your own pace. It's not really designed for scale/reliability. So if your small business/app/service starts to take off, you'll quite likely need to migrate to K8s, Docker Swarm, Amazon ECS, if not for scale, for redundancy/reliability.

StavrosK 8y ago
I rented a 10 EUR VPS from Hetzner and put Dokku on it. It currently runs ~10 side-projects and I couldn't be happier.

wenc 8y ago

This is something I've been hearing. I have a small dev team that deploys many small (but important) apps internally. We feel we need to hire more ops folks to help us with maintenance and troubleshooting, but people keep telling me that instead of increasing headcount, to just outsource my ops to PaaS like Heroku. After reading the comments here, I may look into this more.

brightball 8y ago
As somebody who was used to running my own servers when I was first forced to use Heroku on a project...I'll go ahead and tell you there is an adjustment period. But after using then going back to the alternatives, there's a lot more that I miss about it than the other way around. You take for granted how much stuff you no longer have to deal with, until you have to again. There will be a moment when you'll be irritated about some very low-level knob that you want to turn that you can't get access to but when that happens, don't take for granted all the other ones you're not dealing with. And it simplifies life for developers tremendously.