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For all heroku's frustrations (and I agree with all of them in the article), it is still the only thing that "just works" for a standard monolith web app. Herok

For all heroku's frustrations (and I agree with all of them in the article), it is still the only thing that "just works" for a standard monolith web app. Heroku is not cheap, but it is still cheaper than a couple full time employees + aws. It is really too bad they aren't innovating - they are just burning up their 10 year lead in the space. I wouldn't start a new project on Heroku - not because of the cost, but because I don't expect them to last another 10 years.

spicybright 5y ago
It's honestly strange how no one has eaten their lunch yet. Besides the extra services they now offer (which you aren't required for hosting a simple app), you could probably have a team bang out the basics in a few months. You could even just be a layer on top of AWS and probably make profit from not many users, as long as you're cheaper.
- mixedCase 5y ago
  > You could even just be a layer on top of AWS and probably make profit from not many users, as long as you're cheaper. Isn't Heroku exactly that?
- jacobsenscott 5y ago
  There are a lot of startups that have banged out the basics in a few months. The are getting mentioned all over in the threads under this article. But the basics aren't good enough. Heroku looks simple, but does a lot, and pretty much does it all right. Their documentation alone is amazing and it would take more than a few months to create docs of the same quality.
  - rsanheim 5y ago
    Yuuup. That is the genius of Heroku. They make almost everything very simple and the tougher stuff relatively easy to understand and configure. All of that took many many years of iteration and refinement, which is why the competitors are going to take awhile to get there.
PenguinCoder 5y ago
Heroku is not _the only thing that just works for standard monolith web apps_. Plenty of others in this space, like netlify, vercel, firebase, etc. I don't know how they all compare to each other, I don't use any of them.
- DylanSp 5y ago
  Netlify and Vercel are great, but they're limited for deploying backends. You're limited to a FaaS paradigm with the languages they support, and if you need a database you'll need to host it somewhere else. It's a long ways from the flexibility of running arbitrary containers + a managed database that's easy to connect to.
- nicoburns 5y ago
  Most of those others don’t offer traditional compute. And “functions” have a lot of limitations, and a pain to work with locally.
chrisseaton 5y ago
It blows my mind that they don't provide an object store. Almost all web apps in my experience need an object store of some kind.
- ceejayoz 5y ago
  What do you imagine their home-grown offering would have over using S3 directly?
  - chrisseaton 5y ago
    I thought the entire point of Heroku was that it wrapped up existing essential basic AWS offerings into a more manageable package? I’d rather not have to manage a side account for AWS, and set up the connections to it and things. I’d rather it was just there, like their database.
    - jacobsenscott 5y ago
      I suppose that's what this is https://elements.heroku.com/addons/bucketeer https://elements.heroku.com/addons/bucketeer, but using S3 is really easy. And honestly I wouldn't trust most heroku addons are maintained outside of the most popular - postgres, redis, memcache.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - nicoburns 5y ago
      A lot of AWS’s offerings are hard to use. But s3 really isn’t. There’s also firebase storage and backblaze b2 in this space. And they’re all easy to use standalone.
- G4BB3R 5y ago
  I use Bucketeer plugin on Heroku but I am planning to move to S3, that is around 20x cheaper.
- ryanSrich 5y ago
danjac 4y ago
I'm currently evaluating PAAS services. The use case is early-stage SAAS with very small dev team who want to focus on the product and not have to deal with Kubernetes or the AWS services soup. Maybe further down the line that might be necessary but right now there isn't sufficient time or people for devops time-sinks. So PAAS it is. I've used Heroku before and it was fine, and price as you say is not an object compared to developer time, but when I see people not being able to deploy for 2 weeks that rings very loud alarm bells. It means they don't have enough people to fix the problem (whether customer service or developers) and they can't afford or don't want to hire more people. Salesforce clearly are happy to let Heroku die on the vine, and are OK with current customers slowly leaving the platform while they squeeze the last drops of profit from them. That's a shame, but it is what it is. So instead currently looking at other options - Render, Google Cloud Run, fly.io etc.

spicybright 5y ago

It's honestly strange how no one has eaten their lunch yet. Besides the extra services they now offer (which you aren't required for hosting a simple app), you could probably have a team bang out the basics in a few months. You could even just be a layer on top of AWS and probably make profit from not many users, as long as you're cheaper.

mixedCase 5y ago
> You could even just be a layer on top of AWS and probably make profit from not many users, as long as you're cheaper. Isn't Heroku exactly that?
jacobsenscott 5y ago
There are a lot of startups that have banged out the basics in a few months. The are getting mentioned all over in the threads under this article. But the basics aren't good enough. Heroku looks simple, but does a lot, and pretty much does it all right. Their documentation alone is amazing and it would take more than a few months to create docs of the same quality.
- rsanheim 5y ago
  Yuuup. That is the genius of Heroku. They make almost everything very simple and the tougher stuff relatively easy to understand and configure. All of that took many many years of iteration and refinement, which is why the competitors are going to take awhile to get there.

PenguinCoder 5y ago

Heroku is not _the only thing that just works for standard monolith web apps_. Plenty of others in this space, like netlify, vercel, firebase, etc. I don't know how they all compare to each other, I don't use any of them.

DylanSp 5y ago
Netlify and Vercel are great, but they're limited for deploying backends. You're limited to a FaaS paradigm with the languages they support, and if you need a database you'll need to host it somewhere else. It's a long ways from the flexibility of running arbitrary containers + a managed database that's easy to connect to.
nicoburns 5y ago
Most of those others don’t offer traditional compute. And “functions” have a lot of limitations, and a pain to work with locally.

chrisseaton 5y ago

It blows my mind that they don't provide an object store. Almost all web apps in my experience need an object store of some kind.

ceejayoz 5y ago
What do you imagine their home-grown offering would have over using S3 directly?
- chrisseaton 5y ago
  I thought the entire point of Heroku was that it wrapped up existing essential basic AWS offerings into a more manageable package? I’d rather not have to manage a side account for AWS, and set up the connections to it and things. I’d rather it was just there, like their database.
  - jacobsenscott 5y ago
    I suppose that's what this is https://elements.heroku.com/addons/bucketeer https://elements.heroku.com/addons/bucketeer, but using S3 is really easy. And honestly I wouldn't trust most heroku addons are maintained outside of the most popular - postgres, redis, memcache.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - nicoburns 5y ago
    A lot of AWS’s offerings are hard to use. But s3 really isn’t. There’s also firebase storage and backblaze b2 in this space. And they’re all easy to use standalone.
G4BB3R 5y ago
I use Bucketeer plugin on Heroku but I am planning to move to S3, that is around 20x cheaper.
ryanSrich 5y ago

danjac 4y ago

I'm currently evaluating PAAS services. The use case is early-stage SAAS with very small dev team who want to focus on the product and not have to deal with Kubernetes or the AWS services soup. Maybe further down the line that might be necessary but right now there isn't sufficient time or people for devops time-sinks. So PAAS it is. I've used Heroku before and it was fine, and price as you say is not an object compared to developer time, but when I see people not being able to deploy for 2 weeks that rings very loud alarm bells. It means they don't have enough people to fix the problem (whether customer service or developers) and they can't afford or don't want to hire more people. Salesforce clearly are happy to let Heroku die on the vine, and are OK with current customers slowly leaving the platform while they squeeze the last drops of profit from them. That's a shame, but it is what it is. So instead currently looking at other options - Render, Google Cloud Run, fly.io etc.