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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

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.

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.