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For long running tasks (cron jobs, message queues, fire and forget) I’m the cofounder of https://www.tasker.sh https://www.tasker.sh, YC S21. Feel free to ping

by memset 4y ago

For long running tasks (cron jobs, message queues, fire and forget) I’m the cofounder of https://www.tasker.sh https://www.tasker.sh, YC S21. Feel free to ping me: jay@tasker.sh, happy to personally help onboard and toss in some credits if you’d be willing to chat with us about what you’re building!

TekMol 4y ago
I'm trying to understand your service. You write: It's really easy to spin up a web app in production. ... However, it is incredibly difficult to run anything longer than a web request. I can rent a $5/VM with and just run my tasks there. What is difficult about it?
- memset 4y ago
  You can totally run cron jobs on a $5 virtual machine! This is how we started. We find that as the workloads grow, it becomes a bit more burdensome to maintain. Did my job run correctly? Where are my logs? Do I need to make my box bigger? Do I need to pay for a VM when my workload only runs once a day? How do I get my code from GitHub onto the box? etc. All of these are solvable, certainly. Just as Heroku removed the need to set these things up, so too does tasker but purpose built for batch processing.
  - TekMol 4y ago
    But does it make a difference if I have to look up how to do these things on Tasker vs how to do these things on Debian? "Did my job run correctly?" can mean so many things. I have to define what that means for my specific use case anyhow. What does Tasker offer here?
- kasey_junk 4y ago
  You don’t mention how you are going to handle the deployment process, logging (rotation, access, etc), metrics or the like. Those are obviously solvable but each takes some amount of configuration and management that some people don’t want to do. If you are going to say “just use a vm” for every PaaS offering get ready for me to ask “why a vm?” You could do everything you do on a vm with a bare metal server as well and it’s pretty easy and you maintain more control. Of course you probably have good reasons, perhaps lend others the same benefit of doubt?
- aidanhs 4y ago
  (disclosure: I don't use tasker and am not associated with them, I do work on something in the similar space of "compute without servers") First, you're coming at this from the wrong perspective. The OP is about alternatives to Heroku - the starting position is "I don't want to use servers". There are a number of rational reasons for this, including OS maintainence and the mental overhead of setting up continuous deployment from your repo (ansible to configure cron? a self-hosted PaaS?). "Don't worry about servers" doesn't just make sense in principle, it's also quite popular in practice - just consider the uptake of things like serverless. So, starting from "no servers", how do you run something on a regular basis? Let's say "send me a message on telegram daily with some info". Serverless and similar offerings are useless for this, they're a different model (request/response). I did research on "hosted cron" at the time and the options were pretty terrible - there's definitely space here for tasker. FWIW, this is coming from someone with a default position of "self-hosted only". For my own use, I tried out cron and airflow - they're both annoying and I settled on bgproc [0] as least-worst on my already-existing personal server. I really wanted to move to something hosted by the time I was done (tasker didn't exist). [0] https://github.com/seanbreckenridge/bgproc https://github.com/seanbreckenridge/bgproc
- jdsleppy 4y ago
  You are (intentionally, I think) unaware of the context of this entire discussion where these are people who aren't comfortable managing their own servers. They don't know what they don't know. They don't want to learn about systemd, sshd, users and groups, apt, ufw, and however many other things needed to run on a VPS. You got your point across in your various comments.
dewey 4y ago
At least according to the landing page it doesn't really sound like a Heroku replacement (Especially because OP mentioned databases and app hosting or Docker) and more like an ad for an unrelated service.

by memset 4y ago

TekMol 4y ago

I'm trying to understand your service. You write: It's really easy to spin up a web app in production. ... However, it is incredibly difficult to run anything longer than a web request. I can rent a $5/VM with and just run my tasks there. What is difficult about it?

memset 4y ago
You can totally run cron jobs on a $5 virtual machine! This is how we started. We find that as the workloads grow, it becomes a bit more burdensome to maintain. Did my job run correctly? Where are my logs? Do I need to make my box bigger? Do I need to pay for a VM when my workload only runs once a day? How do I get my code from GitHub onto the box? etc. All of these are solvable, certainly. Just as Heroku removed the need to set these things up, so too does tasker but purpose built for batch processing.
- TekMol 4y ago
  But does it make a difference if I have to look up how to do these things on Tasker vs how to do these things on Debian? "Did my job run correctly?" can mean so many things. I have to define what that means for my specific use case anyhow. What does Tasker offer here?
kasey_junk 4y ago
You don’t mention how you are going to handle the deployment process, logging (rotation, access, etc), metrics or the like. Those are obviously solvable but each takes some amount of configuration and management that some people don’t want to do. If you are going to say “just use a vm” for every PaaS offering get ready for me to ask “why a vm?” You could do everything you do on a vm with a bare metal server as well and it’s pretty easy and you maintain more control. Of course you probably have good reasons, perhaps lend others the same benefit of doubt?
aidanhs 4y ago
(disclosure: I don't use tasker and am not associated with them, I do work on something in the similar space of "compute without servers") First, you're coming at this from the wrong perspective. The OP is about alternatives to Heroku - the starting position is "I don't want to use servers". There are a number of rational reasons for this, including OS maintainence and the mental overhead of setting up continuous deployment from your repo (ansible to configure cron? a self-hosted PaaS?). "Don't worry about servers" doesn't just make sense in principle, it's also quite popular in practice - just consider the uptake of things like serverless. So, starting from "no servers", how do you run something on a regular basis? Let's say "send me a message on telegram daily with some info". Serverless and similar offerings are useless for this, they're a different model (request/response). I did research on "hosted cron" at the time and the options were pretty terrible - there's definitely space here for tasker. FWIW, this is coming from someone with a default position of "self-hosted only". For my own use, I tried out cron and airflow - they're both annoying and I settled on bgproc [0] as least-worst on my already-existing personal server. I really wanted to move to something hosted by the time I was done (tasker didn't exist). [0] https://github.com/seanbreckenridge/bgproc https://github.com/seanbreckenridge/bgproc
jdsleppy 4y ago
You are (intentionally, I think) unaware of the context of this entire discussion where these are people who aren't comfortable managing their own servers. They don't know what they don't know. They don't want to learn about systemd, sshd, users and groups, apt, ufw, and however many other things needed to run on a VPS. You got your point across in your various comments.

dewey 4y ago

At least according to the landing page it doesn't really sound like a Heroku replacement (Especially because OP mentioned databases and app hosting or Docker) and more like an ad for an unrelated service.