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How about another Heroku for Ruby? Could use some competition I think, and the market is already proven. Seems like it should be straightforward replicate the
by jpcx01 16y ago
How about another Heroku for Ruby? Could use some competition I think, and the market is already proven.
Seems like it should be straightforward replicate the functionality for a lower price and get a good percentage of the Heroku user base. Nothing really ties people to the platform. And the addon's should work with pretty much any EC2 based platform as a service.
- kaerast 16y agoSure but the integration of the addons is tightly done, and there'll be a commercial contract with these companies. You'd probably need a similar contract with those addon providers which they may not be willing to provide if they've an exclusive contract with Heroku. And don't forget the number of free applications running on Heroku, these aren't making them any profit at all and are using up a lot of resources.
- jpcx01 16y agoEvery one of those addons is available directly from the vendor. The addons just set some ENV variables, or auto installs a plugin on deploy. Plus the provisioning apis are well documented so you could easily replicate it on a competing service so existing addon's would work with no additional dev effort needed by the addon provider (I've deployed a heroku addon). Yep, good point on the free apps. I don't think a competitor would have to offer free apps though if they were able to lower the cost for paid installs and use the exact same deployment tools.
- kaerast 16y agoTo use the addons in a standalone setup you need to create an account at the provider's website. I assumed that Heroku had some agreement with the providers which lets them bypass this and instead passes on the user's Heroku details transparently
- jpcx01 16y agoYep, these are handled via the provisioning apis. When the addon is installed, the service gets a simple provision api request with the customer details. When the addon is uninstalled, there's a deprovision api request. Heroku Addons are super well documented and easy to develop and deploy. One of the best parts of the platform.
- bretpiatt 16y agoBy "straightforward replicate the functionality" you mean hire a team of 20 and spend 3 years building your own platform fabric? I wouldn't trivialize work product or the capabilities of the Heroku team. Building multi-tenant infrastructure is quite a bit more difficult than it sounds.
- jpcx01 16y agoI totally agree. straightforward != easy. That's why I'm not chomping at the bits to do it myself :-). But the opportunity and potential is there, there should be some investors and star developers who should take it.
- steveklabnik 16y agohttp://duostack.com/ http://duostack.com/ Ruby and Node.js. Also, Rubyists have the fog gem to work with, no need to only support EC2.
- jpcx01 16y agoI like it! I'll keep that on my radar.
- ig1 16y agoEngineYard
- jpcx01 16y agoCloud is a good product. But it basically just resell AMZN ec2 instances and doesn't provide the simplicity of Heroku. I switched from EY to Opscode's Platform and it's both much cheaper and much more powerful. edit: ok, I love engineyard and the people there. I'm really sorry to say that EY cloud is not actually a good product. I despise it. Probably the worst tool I've ever used to deploy rails.
- steveklabnik 16y agoWhile EngineYard is cloud Ruby hosting, they actually offer a very different product. Heroku is like "Accept a few limitations, never worry about anything," while EngineYard is like "Don't worry about ever writing Chef scripts again." I deployed to both today.
- atomical 16y agoWhy do you say that the market is proven?