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This hit a nerve for me. I keep going back and looking at Engine Yard Hoping there will be something there for me but I just can't justify moving from Heroku fo

by andymoe 16y ago

This hit a nerve for me. I keep going back and looking at Engine Yard Hoping there will be something there for me but I just can't justify moving from Heroku for the ruby stuff. They have so many knobs to turn and a nice low entry point for very small apps that can be cranked up easily. It's this low barrier to entry that Engine Yard is missing and free for three weeks is not a substitute for this. AppCloud seems to be (and I hate to use this word) "just" a thin wrapper around EC2. At least I get that impression looking at the price points - the smallest 32bit instance is just shy of 1k/year. Am I going to get more performance out of three Dynos at Heroku for about the same cost? Maybe maybe not. But where am I going to put my staging test/servers? On a 20/month VPS? On an instance @AppCloud that I spin up and down? No, I'll tell you where, I'm going to stick it on a Dyno or two at Heroku and not worry about it. And then when I need to scale or the product is ready for production where is it going to be hosted. That's right - the same place it's been validated and tested on. By the way, Engine Yard is not the only place that has this barrier to entry problem. Most of the cloud providers do. Joyent.com, Media Temple, Rackspace cloud all have Barriers whether it's poor documentation, higher than normal base costs and bandwidth fees or just inconvenience like having to wait on a call from someone in Texas in order to be allowed to create instances. If the other players want to compete with Heroku on the service and ease of use side or Amazon on flexibility and scale then they are going to have to do much, much, much better.

wuputah 16y ago
Agreed; after using their product for many months, I learned how it is little better than running your own instances. There are some cool things it does, but you end up doing plenty of sysadmin work yourself, writing Chef recipes for anything not supported by their (aging) platform, and then you lose the benefit of support as well. Did I mention that support costs start at $275 (12/5) or $475 (24/7) a month?[1] Without it, you can't open a ticket. It's also increasingly annoying to see shots taken at Heroku in their blog posts and on Twitter. It's unprofessional. Compete on features and services, please. [1]: http://www.engineyard.com/products/appcloud/support http://www.engineyard.com/products/appcloud/support
- tmornini_ey 16y ago
  "It's also increasingly annoying to see shots taken at Heroku in their blog posts and on Twitter" Really? We've always been friendly with everyone in the Rails deployment space, and I don't ever remember taking shots at Heroku specifically, though it's certainly possible that we've expressed disagreement on technologies or practices that they and others may use. I'd appreciate it if you'd point out what you've seen, as it's certainly not part of our philosophy or business practice. With respect to your comment about our "aging" platform, we all age a bit every day. There's tremendous work underway at Engine Yard, some visible, some not. This is no-doubt true of every competitive platform. Many of our customers choose to describe this as maturation! :-)
  - wuputah 16y ago
    Yes, all platforms that are static and curated in this way are aging every day, and Heroku has some flaws in this area as well. But as I understand it, the base platform of AppCloud is predominately a Gentoo-based custom portage tree that Ezra built years ago, and it has seen very few updates. This causes problems building gems or bugs in gems that are quite rare since most people do not use software/libraries that are so old. While there may be amazing things in the works, it also seems to take a long time for features to be rolled out, and often these are in betas initially which do not fall under the support contracts. So if we wanted to move to Ruby 1.9, it's at our own risk (or was, last time I looked). As for the jabs at Heroku, I have seen quite a few, honestly, but I don't have a pile of links for you. Many of them are subtle or implied, and not necessarily untrue. For instance, sure, Heroku was acquired by Salesforce, but I haven't seen any indication as to why that should influence my hosting decision. Companies are bought and sold all the time. The "ey-migrate" tool was also a great time to get a few subtle jabs in.
    - tmornini_ey 16y ago
      I hear you loud and clear and appreciate your viewpoint and feedback. Keep an eye on us, wonderful things are in the works.
  - sunchild 16y ago
tmornini_ey 16y ago
There are differences between each and every provider and every developer needs to choose which service they want to use in their own way. Customers choose Engine Yard for many reasons including 24x7x365 human technical support availability, a choice of infrastructure providers, resource transparency, request transparency (EY is not in the request path to your app), customizability and a strong history of supporting the Ruby open source community with projects such as Rails 3, JRuby, Rubinius and Fog. We're very aware that there are other services available, and that they fill a need for certain users. Specialization is important, and it's difficult to be all things to all people.

by andymoe 16y ago

wuputah 16y ago

Agreed; after using their product for many months, I learned how it is little better than running your own instances. There are some cool things it does, but you end up doing plenty of sysadmin work yourself, writing Chef recipes for anything not supported by their (aging) platform, and then you lose the benefit of support as well. Did I mention that support costs start at $275 (12/5) or $475 (24/7) a month?[1] Without it, you can't open a ticket. It's also increasingly annoying to see shots taken at Heroku in their blog posts and on Twitter. It's unprofessional. Compete on features and services, please. [1]: http://www.engineyard.com/products/appcloud/support http://www.engineyard.com/products/appcloud/support

tmornini_ey 16y ago
"It's also increasingly annoying to see shots taken at Heroku in their blog posts and on Twitter" Really? We've always been friendly with everyone in the Rails deployment space, and I don't ever remember taking shots at Heroku specifically, though it's certainly possible that we've expressed disagreement on technologies or practices that they and others may use. I'd appreciate it if you'd point out what you've seen, as it's certainly not part of our philosophy or business practice. With respect to your comment about our "aging" platform, we all age a bit every day. There's tremendous work underway at Engine Yard, some visible, some not. This is no-doubt true of every competitive platform. Many of our customers choose to describe this as maturation! :-)
- wuputah 16y ago
  Yes, all platforms that are static and curated in this way are aging every day, and Heroku has some flaws in this area as well. But as I understand it, the base platform of AppCloud is predominately a Gentoo-based custom portage tree that Ezra built years ago, and it has seen very few updates. This causes problems building gems or bugs in gems that are quite rare since most people do not use software/libraries that are so old. While there may be amazing things in the works, it also seems to take a long time for features to be rolled out, and often these are in betas initially which do not fall under the support contracts. So if we wanted to move to Ruby 1.9, it's at our own risk (or was, last time I looked). As for the jabs at Heroku, I have seen quite a few, honestly, but I don't have a pile of links for you. Many of them are subtle or implied, and not necessarily untrue. For instance, sure, Heroku was acquired by Salesforce, but I haven't seen any indication as to why that should influence my hosting decision. Companies are bought and sold all the time. The "ey-migrate" tool was also a great time to get a few subtle jabs in.
  - tmornini_ey 16y ago
    I hear you loud and clear and appreciate your viewpoint and feedback. Keep an eye on us, wonderful things are in the works.
- sunchild 16y ago

tmornini_ey 16y ago

There are differences between each and every provider and every developer needs to choose which service they want to use in their own way. Customers choose Engine Yard for many reasons including 24x7x365 human technical support availability, a choice of infrastructure providers, resource transparency, request transparency (EY is not in the request path to your app), customizability and a strong history of supporting the Ruby open source community with projects such as Rails 3, JRuby, Rubinius and Fog. We're very aware that there are other services available, and that they fill a need for certain users. Specialization is important, and it's difficult to be all things to all people.