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Help me understand that “graduate” off sentiment towards Heroku? (Full disclosure: I work on Heroku for Salesforce).

cloverich 7y ago
(similar boat, use Heroku and some GCP in production for work) -- Heroku is great. But it is a bit limited and very expensive. It feels w/ modern cloud platforms you get something comparable with a little more flexibility for only a little more technical burden, _iff_ you have the chops. GCP / AWS are starting to encroach a bit w/ offerings like Cloud Run, I feel like they are one quality PM away from making a Heroku for Google type product that is a bit more powerful and a bit cheaper than Heroku. Conversely, I also feel like Heroku could round out their offering just a bit more (ex: built in robust monitoring and alerting, better deploy notifications and healthchecks, a simple custom metrics system) and really lock in that "premium basic" tier that would be perfect for most small to medium businesses.
- LifeIsBio 7y ago
  Yea, I would second this. I've always enjoyed Heroku, but feel like I'm paying a premium because I don't know enough to do "real" cloud work. "If I were a more experienced developer, I could run this on AWS for pennies on the dollar". Honestly, I don't know where that sentiment comes from exactly. It's at least partially coupled with the fact that all of add-ons you would need to pay for to run a small business site add up pretty quickly, from what I can tell.
wgerard 7y ago
Hey! Totally. I meant that Heroku is incredible for bootstrapping projects, but as time moves forward I usually find myself migrating services from Heroku to just run on AWS directly. There's some friction with AWS (e.g. SSL termination) that Heroku makes incredibly easy, so I usually don't migrate until it's clear that a service is going to continue to exist in the medium term - otherwise the investment isn't worth it. Didn't mean to imply that was a widespread sentiment, of course! Just my personal one.
- amerine 7y ago
  Word, I didn’t take it as a negative either. I just want to eliminate those pain points so you never feel the need to migrate. Do you move to cost-optimize early if a project seems to have legs?

(similar boat, use Heroku and some GCP in production for work) -- Heroku is great. But it is a bit limited and very expensive. It feels w/ modern cloud platforms you get something comparable with a little more flexibility for only a little more technical burden, _iff_ you have the chops. GCP / AWS are starting to encroach a bit w/ offerings like Cloud Run, I feel like they are one quality PM away from making a Heroku for Google type product that is a bit more powerful and a bit cheaper than Heroku. Conversely, I also feel like Heroku could round out their offering just a bit more (ex: built in robust monitoring and alerting, better deploy notifications and healthchecks, a simple custom metrics system) and really lock in that "premium basic" tier that would be perfect for most small to medium businesses.

LifeIsBio 7y ago
Yea, I would second this. I've always enjoyed Heroku, but feel like I'm paying a premium because I don't know enough to do "real" cloud work. "If I were a more experienced developer, I could run this on AWS for pennies on the dollar". Honestly, I don't know where that sentiment comes from exactly. It's at least partially coupled with the fact that all of add-ons you would need to pay for to run a small business site add up pretty quickly, from what I can tell.

wgerard 7y ago

Hey! Totally. I meant that Heroku is incredible for bootstrapping projects, but as time moves forward I usually find myself migrating services from Heroku to just run on AWS directly. There's some friction with AWS (e.g. SSL termination) that Heroku makes incredibly easy, so I usually don't migrate until it's clear that a service is going to continue to exist in the medium term - otherwise the investment isn't worth it. Didn't mean to imply that was a widespread sentiment, of course! Just my personal one.

amerine 7y ago
Word, I didn’t take it as a negative either. I just want to eliminate those pain points so you never feel the need to migrate. Do you move to cost-optimize early if a project seems to have legs?