5 ms·

Funny story around heroku and pricing. I know a company that used to spend enormous amounts of money on heroku. Like, seven figures a year. The company was gro

Funny story around heroku and pricing. I know a company that used to spend enormous amounts of money on heroku. Like, seven figures a year. The company was growing quickly, billion dollar valuation, raised hundreds of millions, etc etc. One day the company passed the billing threshold that put them in the highest heroku tier, and someone in the org got an email from Heroku. The email was congratulating about all the incredible new customer service they would get now that they were spending more than $X a month (dedicated support 24/7, priority access to new features, that sort of thing). The email made its way to some higher up who...hadn't realized just how much was being spent on heroku. They switched to AWS a few months later. Most expensive support email I've ever seen!

ericbarrett 6y ago
Along those lines, a few years ago I joined a company where they had just switched from Heroku to direct-AWS hosting for their infrastructure (to save $$). The devs had gotten used to the ease of Heroku deployments and Kubernetes wasn't yet a thing. So one of the DevOps team reimplemented the Heroku CLI as a massive, self-invoking Go monolith. It had everything from Jenkins scripts to a near-complete Mesos/Marathon client to to local Docker support built in. Many places (especially the CI code) it self-invoked to access other subsystems. Furthermore, it was the dev's self-admitted first Go project (previously he worked in Java). Somehow this spaghetti-behemoth actually worked, and I spent the next year fixing bugs and adding features. We even modularized it enough to support deploys to either Mesos/Marathon or early Kubernetes. It still sticks in my head as an example of where somebody did everything "wrong," yet they still did it, and it ended up being extremely valuable to the company. I think nowadays with k8s being what it is, and with all the tooling around it and increasing industry expertise—not to mention managed offerings—Heroku is going to have a hard time.
- rektide 6y ago
  huge fan of k8s. drop what you're doing & use a cross-system object-storage/"apiserver" & control-loops to automate everything; embrace desired state management & thank me latter. but, Heroku &al have a lot of value left. there's just not that many folk trying to tame deploys on k8s via gitops. flux2 is the rage, it's all over the alpha geek's efforts[1], but it's usually used by someone carefully authoring a fairly complex Helm file, then building out a significant Flux2 HelmRelease object (ex: [2]). there's a bunch of other tools[3], & i'm frankly not familiar enough. but this idea of having a bunch of source that can deploy itself, simply, is still extremely rare even among the alpha-geek #gitops types. i'm sure some of these tools better match the simplicity of the Heroku model, corresponding branches to environments, which makes so so much sense, but so far i feel like such attempts are still basically unknown. heroku's really simmered it down to something that made extremely natural sense. huge props to that. too too much of this effort had to go into creating buildpacks & supporting language environments very very carefully very actively, that ability to stealth-containerize an app & not even notice is so much of the special sauce that makes this a hard, hard & eternal problem (because langauges/envs keep changing). there's still a lot of ease of use to Heroku that's potentially will be underrated and/or lost by the oncoming generations. i have high respect for how operateable Heroku is. [1] https://github.com/k8s-at-home/awesome-home-kubernetes https://github.com/k8s-at-home/awesome-home-kubernetes [2] https://github.com/onedr0p/home-cluster/blob/main/cluster/apps/media/bazarr/helm-release.yaml https://github.com/onedr0p/home-cluster/blob/main/cluster/ap... [3] https://github.com/weaveworks/awesome-gitops#tools https://github.com/weaveworks/awesome-gitops#tools
- bdcravens 6y ago
  We've since moved to ECS, but we used Cloud66 for a few years, which provided a Heroku-like deployment experience on our own EC2 instances.
- EdwinLarkin 6y ago
  I dont get this sentiment at all.If you are paying people to glue Ops and Dev you are already not the main target for Heroku. Heroku is for companies that are willing to pay for convenience.
  - ebiester 6y ago
    Companies aren't static. I'd consider Heroku (or similar) to start, but once I had funding/revenue to support having ops, I would transition away. However, once you have developed a workflow, going back in developer experience is hard, and hacks like these become common. (I saw a team do a similar tool to avoid paying for Cloud Foundry.)
jordanthoms 6y ago
I think the real mistake there is that they waited until that high bar was hit before reaching out - if they'd started the conversation earlier they might have figured out what discounts they'd have to offer to keep the business, got them on a long term contract etc. We used Heroku for years and were spending around $2k per month (having increased from $1K a few months before) when we migrated the last stuff to GKE and our spending dropped to nothing instantly. I was pretty surprised to have nobody at all reach out to us to see why our spending had changed... Now we spend 7 figures on GCP instead. Heroku solved a lot of problems incredibly well but they seemed to lose any ambition to be more than a salesforce deployment platform a few years after the acquisition and as k8s and other solutions have gotten better they just don't have a super compelling proposition now. I still use them to spin up side projects though as they still provide the best completely out-of-the-box experience.
chii 6y ago
lesson learned - don't ever remind a paying customer how much they're paying for their service. Just remind them of how well the service is running, and that they are getting exceptional support and other goodies.
bjornjajayaja 6y ago
I’m sure they were already planning the migration...
- imwillofficial 6y ago
  You couldn’t possibly be sure unless you were involved. Were you?
  - andybak 6y ago
    No need to be so literal. "I'm sure" is just a way of saying "I strongly suspect" in this context. Nobody would take that as a statement of fact. (and "nobody" is intended to mean "few" in this context. Language is a funny thing, eh?)
    - imwillofficial 6y ago
      The point was to call into question their misplaced confidence. Not only were they wrong, they stated it boldly. They had no grounds to “strongly suspect” Yes, language is a funny thing.
      - andybak 6y ago
        > Not only were they wrong, You sound remarkably confident as well. Were you there? (This isn't going to look so good for me if the answer is "yes" but what the hell) :-)
        imwillofficial 6y ago
        Touche, you win this round, friend hahahah
nirui 6y ago
One funny thing is, few years ago there was a promo video on Heroku.com homepage "complained" about the high price after an intensive praising for the platform. It's not that people just suddenly started talking about the price issue today. Heroku is a great product, there is no denying that. However, relying on startup/small teams is kind risky. Some startups fail after awhile, those who succeed sometimes "grow out of" Heroku to keep their cost down. I think what Heroku needed is a plan or two that can keep the both end happy, instead of offering a plan that eventually driving successful teams away.
mongol 6y ago
What a strange story. Did the company not have a controller?
- bryanrasmussen 6y ago
  maybe you're a startup with two guys in the office, neither of you were business guys, start making money hire a bunch of obvious need to have guys - more programmers, sales, marketing - hurray we're a real business now. Accounting and all that is outsourced. At some point you realize you will get benefits from having someone track this stuff full time, but you can be making money and being a success for a long time before you reach that point if you started off not knowing anything about business.

ericbarrett 6y ago

Along those lines, a few years ago I joined a company where they had just switched from Heroku to direct-AWS hosting for their infrastructure (to save $$). The devs had gotten used to the ease of Heroku deployments and Kubernetes wasn't yet a thing. So one of the DevOps team reimplemented the Heroku CLI as a massive, self-invoking Go monolith. It had everything from Jenkins scripts to a near-complete Mesos/Marathon client to to local Docker support built in. Many places (especially the CI code) it self-invoked to access other subsystems. Furthermore, it was the dev's self-admitted first Go project (previously he worked in Java). Somehow this spaghetti-behemoth actually worked, and I spent the next year fixing bugs and adding features. We even modularized it enough to support deploys to either Mesos/Marathon or early Kubernetes. It still sticks in my head as an example of where somebody did everything "wrong," yet they still did it, and it ended up being extremely valuable to the company. I think nowadays with k8s being what it is, and with all the tooling around it and increasing industry expertise—not to mention managed offerings—Heroku is going to have a hard time.

rektide 6y ago
huge fan of k8s. drop what you're doing & use a cross-system object-storage/"apiserver" & control-loops to automate everything; embrace desired state management & thank me latter. but, Heroku &al have a lot of value left. there's just not that many folk trying to tame deploys on k8s via gitops. flux2 is the rage, it's all over the alpha geek's efforts[1], but it's usually used by someone carefully authoring a fairly complex Helm file, then building out a significant Flux2 HelmRelease object (ex: [2]). there's a bunch of other tools[3], & i'm frankly not familiar enough. but this idea of having a bunch of source that can deploy itself, simply, is still extremely rare even among the alpha-geek #gitops types. i'm sure some of these tools better match the simplicity of the Heroku model, corresponding branches to environments, which makes so so much sense, but so far i feel like such attempts are still basically unknown. heroku's really simmered it down to something that made extremely natural sense. huge props to that. too too much of this effort had to go into creating buildpacks & supporting language environments very very carefully very actively, that ability to stealth-containerize an app & not even notice is so much of the special sauce that makes this a hard, hard & eternal problem (because langauges/envs keep changing). there's still a lot of ease of use to Heroku that's potentially will be underrated and/or lost by the oncoming generations. i have high respect for how operateable Heroku is. [1] https://github.com/k8s-at-home/awesome-home-kubernetes https://github.com/k8s-at-home/awesome-home-kubernetes [2] https://github.com/onedr0p/home-cluster/blob/main/cluster/apps/media/bazarr/helm-release.yaml https://github.com/onedr0p/home-cluster/blob/main/cluster/ap... [3] https://github.com/weaveworks/awesome-gitops#tools https://github.com/weaveworks/awesome-gitops#tools
bdcravens 6y ago
We've since moved to ECS, but we used Cloud66 for a few years, which provided a Heroku-like deployment experience on our own EC2 instances.
EdwinLarkin 6y ago
I dont get this sentiment at all.If you are paying people to glue Ops and Dev you are already not the main target for Heroku. Heroku is for companies that are willing to pay for convenience.
- ebiester 6y ago
  Companies aren't static. I'd consider Heroku (or similar) to start, but once I had funding/revenue to support having ops, I would transition away. However, once you have developed a workflow, going back in developer experience is hard, and hacks like these become common. (I saw a team do a similar tool to avoid paying for Cloud Foundry.)

jordanthoms 6y ago

I think the real mistake there is that they waited until that high bar was hit before reaching out - if they'd started the conversation earlier they might have figured out what discounts they'd have to offer to keep the business, got them on a long term contract etc. We used Heroku for years and were spending around $2k per month (having increased from $1K a few months before) when we migrated the last stuff to GKE and our spending dropped to nothing instantly. I was pretty surprised to have nobody at all reach out to us to see why our spending had changed... Now we spend 7 figures on GCP instead. Heroku solved a lot of problems incredibly well but they seemed to lose any ambition to be more than a salesforce deployment platform a few years after the acquisition and as k8s and other solutions have gotten better they just don't have a super compelling proposition now. I still use them to spin up side projects though as they still provide the best completely out-of-the-box experience.

chii 6y ago

lesson learned - don't ever remind a paying customer how much they're paying for their service. Just remind them of how well the service is running, and that they are getting exceptional support and other goodies.

bjornjajayaja 6y ago

I’m sure they were already planning the migration...

imwillofficial 6y ago
You couldn’t possibly be sure unless you were involved. Were you?
- andybak 6y ago
  No need to be so literal. "I'm sure" is just a way of saying "I strongly suspect" in this context. Nobody would take that as a statement of fact. (and "nobody" is intended to mean "few" in this context. Language is a funny thing, eh?)
  - imwillofficial 6y ago
    The point was to call into question their misplaced confidence. Not only were they wrong, they stated it boldly. They had no grounds to “strongly suspect” Yes, language is a funny thing.
    - andybak 6y ago
      > Not only were they wrong, You sound remarkably confident as well. Were you there? (This isn't going to look so good for me if the answer is "yes" but what the hell) :-)
      - imwillofficial 6y ago
        Touche, you win this round, friend hahahah

nirui 6y ago

One funny thing is, few years ago there was a promo video on Heroku.com homepage "complained" about the high price after an intensive praising for the platform. It's not that people just suddenly started talking about the price issue today. Heroku is a great product, there is no denying that. However, relying on startup/small teams is kind risky. Some startups fail after awhile, those who succeed sometimes "grow out of" Heroku to keep their cost down. I think what Heroku needed is a plan or two that can keep the both end happy, instead of offering a plan that eventually driving successful teams away.

mongol 6y ago

What a strange story. Did the company not have a controller?

bryanrasmussen 6y ago
maybe you're a startup with two guys in the office, neither of you were business guys, start making money hire a bunch of obvious need to have guys - more programmers, sales, marketing - hurray we're a real business now. Accounting and all that is outsourced. At some point you realize you will get benefits from having someone track this stuff full time, but you can be making money and being a success for a long time before you reach that point if you started off not knowing anything about business.