17 ms·

I Miss Heroku's DevEx

310 points by craigkerstiens 4y ago

klardotsh 4y ago
Bottom of the article tells me I shouldn't have been able to see this yet, especially here (edit: right... timezones... nevermind): > If you're reading this before the 12th, welcome to an experiment! I've been wondering about how to make some of my posts Patreon exclusive for a week. This post was published for my patrons on the 5th of May. Please don't share this link around on social media until the 12th, but privately sharing it is okay.
- iamevn 4y ago
  I made the same mistake and almost commented similarly
meter 4y ago
> the way Heroku worked… The author implies that something has changed — and that nowadays, you can’t `git push heroku main`. But according to the docs, it’s still just as simple. I guess I don’t understand how Heroku’s DevEx has changed. Seems just as intuitive as it’s always been. But I could be missing something.
- cjk 4y ago
  What I took away from the post is not that Heroku no longer works like that, but that it's a sinking ship, and thus not advisable to use any longer.
  - oxff 4y ago
    Based on Salesforce's handling of the April / May security breach / incident I would not recommend Heroku, not even to other developers who understand risks and would just use it for hobby / throwaway projects. Gonna have to test all the meme alternatives soon, fly / render / glitch / porter.
  - wutwutwutwut 4y ago
    So like talking about your 97-year-old grandmother in past tense, as if she was already dead, because she will be in a year or two.
    - tinco 4y ago
      I wouldn't bet my income on my 97-year-old grandmother for surviving as long as I promised my clients their website would stay online. That said, I don't think Heroku is that close to being sunset, but that's my guess, and that guess is as good as the people who say it is. I'm currently messing around with fly.io and that product is so young one would be crazy to think it has better chances to last the next decade than Heroku does.
      - jrochkind1 4y ago
        I don't think Salesforce is probably planning on sunseting Heroku anytime soon. But they seem to be totally starving it, allocating it the minimum of resources they think they can to keep it going pretty much as it is without any new features. Based on how they handled the recent security update, I won't be surprised if it... just kind of crumbles into the sea at some point. We all know that software doesn't just "keep working" at all without continual maintenance. For several different reasons, security being one of them. Heroku's ability to keep "just working" with the languages/platforms it does, as new versions of such come out, seems to be dependent on an increasingly smaller workforce that goes above and beyond.
  - ryantgtg 4y ago
    I struggled to follow parts of this article. She discussed taking to the CTO about bad insurance, and then followed that section with “I got hired.” The whole thing meanders and barely has a point or provides evidence, and I’m not truly convinced it’s a singing ship. That said, I do defer to ex-employees on this matter. I’m mostly looking for alternatives because people keep saying I should (and I could possibly get double the ram for the same price). But I just git push heroku mastered 5 minutes ago and it took about 1 minute to build, and it was wonderful.
    - xena 4y ago
      I was a contractor before I was an employee because Salesforce was starving the beast until they made CRM features. Never work with MBO Partners. They do not give two shits about you, just your money that they take a huge percentage of.
      - ryantgtg 4y ago
        Thanks. Not too long ago I was like “we’ve been paying heroku $59/mo for years (open source, non-commercial, funded by patreon) and while I don’t have any issues I can’t tell if it’s kind of in maintenance mode or what.” So I checked the blog and saw posts like “Faster Dynos for All” and their email newsletter which regularly mentions improvements to service. From those I felt reassured that they’re still improving it. But then came a wave of “heroku alternatives” and posts lamenting how heroku is blowing it. I’m grateful to hear reports from the other side (though again, my personal experience with heroku is still totally fine - and we don’t do the github integration)!
- nomilk 4y ago
  The word "worked" could just as well be "works" (present tense) because Heroku still works exactly as the author describes (I think the author is recounting how it worked when they were there, hence why they use past tense).
- bin_bash 4y ago
  There was discussion about this the other day: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31313779 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31313779
- geoffharcourt 4y ago
  `git push heroku main` doesn't work if your repository is large enough (not sure if this is raw file sizes or the Git data size). Some of our apps can't be redeployed using this method, we have to use the build workaround which has its own set of issues.
cjk 4y ago
Something I miss in particular about Heroku's git-push-to-deploy experience is that you'd know whether the build/deploy succeeded by the time the push finished. Modern “GitOps”-based deployments that rely on webhooks or polling are fine, but it feels so disjointed to me to `git push` and then have to go watch some other system to see if the deploy succeeded.
- sieabahlpark 4y ago
  You could just stream the updates to the cli. You'd have to be okay with using a command that handles pushing for you.
  - tinco 4y ago
    It's not just about the updates. If the deploy fails, then your push should also fail. That way your deploy branch is always a reflection of what's actually deployed.
- tasuki 4y ago
  How do these modern gitops based deployments work? I've got a bare repo to push into, with hooks to sync to the live repo and run the Makefile upon push. I just see the output of the make command upon running `git push`. The most basic of workflows shows the deploy status. I think you'd have to specifically go out of your way to hide it?
  - djur 4y ago
    The deploy happens asynchronously from the push. Instead of having a separate repo you push to in order to deploy, the main branch of the shared GitHub (or whatever) repo just gets automatically deployed whenever there's a push (or sometimes it's triggered by a tag). So there's no feedback at all on push.
    - tasuki 4y ago
      Ah of course! In fact I even have one personal project with collaborators, and indeed I've set it to deploy on push using GitHub actions, and indeed there's no feedback. Pushing straight to the prod server is nicer UX, but I guess that only works reasonably well with one person, or a very tiny team.
stickfigure 4y ago
I have more or less this experience right now with both Google App Engine and Digital Ocean App Platform. For GAE it's driven by Github Actions, for DO it's built in. Either way it's just: git checkout production; git merge master; git push It doesn't take much wiring to set it all up. Heroku is great but it isn't the only PaaS.
- andyfleming 4y ago
  DigitalOcean's App Platform is still a bit immature, but I think it has the most potential to be a heroku-like experience.
  - stickfigure 4y ago
    Everything, including Heroku, feels a bit immature compared to GAE. Just the stackdriver logging alone is worth the price. I couldn't live without cloud tasks. And of course the autoscaling... DOAP has some minor issues and a very minimal feature list but it's significantly less expensive than GAE. I use it to run a memory-hungry image processing service that would otherwise hurt too much. We still log remotely to stackdriver.
- DangitBobby 4y ago
  I use GAE for just about every deployment I have. Works very well. And I like that I can deploy code from whatever branch (or no branch at all) to whatever service I want.
- capableweb 4y ago
  When the git push process finishes, do you know that the deploy succeeded without running any other command or looking at other logs? Does the push fail if it the deploy itself was unsuccessful?
  - stickfigure 4y ago
    It posts a slack message to a channel, which triggers an alert on my desktop. My build/test/deploy cycle (for the GAE app, which is the primary service) is currently about 25 minutes. I'm happy with the flow. My only real complaint is that Github Actions offers almost nothing if a build fails. I try to put some useful info in the slack message, but often I have to download and grep the build logs.
emilsedgh 4y ago
I think Heroku's aggressive pricing is the main driver behind making them obsolete. I honestly cannot believe Salesforce is so short-sighted with Heroku. Their approach is "Milk it as much as we can until everyone just abandons it for cheaper solutions/clones". Had they become more competitive in terms of pricing, a large, large chunk of companies would've used them rather than moving to solutions like Kube, etc, or a bunch of Heroku clones which are now taking off as it's being considered a "Sinking Ship". Just see this: https://blog.porter.run/why-companies-move-off-heroku/ https://blog.porter.run/why-companies-move-off-heroku/ The reasons they are suggesting [that companies leave Heroku for] (besides the costs) are a bunch of non-reasons and small nuisances. The main reason is the cost, and the cost issue will become bigger and bigger of an issue as competing solutions get cheaper and cheaper, until Heroku is completely sunk and abandoned. We are still using Heroku and I really hope they would fix the pricing before we bite the bullet and just spend a couple of weeks moving to a cheaper alternative. There's no vendor lock in on 12 Factor Apps you see.
- andi999 4y ago
  How much do they charge?
  - shakna 4y ago
    Heroku's pricing model is absurdly complicated. [0] But for anything nonfree, you're probably going to end up at over $100/mo, even if just by accident. To compare it to one of their current competitors, render [1], for something with all the same features as gave me that $100/mo figure, you're looking at about $15/mo. [0] https://www.heroku.com/pricing https://www.heroku.com/pricing [1] https://render.com/pricing https://render.com/pricing
    - dinvlad 4y ago
      And if we look at some European cloud providers' prices, it becomes painfully obvious that any such services (even incl. Render) built on top of major US cloud providers are excruciatingly overpriced - the markups can be as large as 5x for equivalent compute: https://www.hetzner.com/cloud https://www.hetzner.com/cloud This combined with something like Doku gives one a sense of what could be possible.
encryptluks2 4y ago
I miss when people that wrote docs in markdown actually converted them to HTML as intended.
- tirpen 4y ago
  The page isn't written in markdown though.
  - encryptluks2 4y ago
    Is it AsciiDoc? Regardless, the `=======` indicates a heading. The `` indicates inline code. The `----` indicates horizontal rules (page breaks). The `>` indicates blockquotes.
    - brundolf 4y ago
      The symbols are just decorative; it’s not being parsed by anything so there’s no reason for it to be any kind of valid syntax
      - encryptluks2 4y ago
        So writing markup but not actually converting it to look hip? I don't understand the point.
        brundolf 4y ago
        You don’t have to like the aesthetic, but there's no need to disparage it either. I think it looks nice.
        encryptluks2 4y ago
        I'm sorry. My comment was meant as constructive feedback, but I probably came across as an asshole. I do like the blog and the content which are the most important components. I just wish that the content was actually rendered semi-normally. If you think it looks cool, that is all that matters really.
Rastonbury 4y ago
As someone non-technical, Heroku is what helped me launch my first production site. It was really like magic when I discovered it existed, because I was intimidated by AWS. It's sad reading accounts from employees, seemed like a great place with great product. Hopefully, competitors can match them, what I've read is that they are a bit less mature than them. I actually still have a production site, will need to move off soon.
ignoramous 4y ago
> I wonder if we'll ever really have something like that on top of Nix or NixOS. Xe, go do it! (: In all seriousness, Fly.io has explored this path (and very well may pursue it depending on RoI of going down this route, I'd imagine): https://github.com/superfly/recco https://github.com/superfly/recco Even though I'd like Fly.io to be more like Heroku, it is railway.app that comes the closest (but I believe they use buildpacks like Fly.io does rather than Nix/NixOS). Speaking of Nix, shout out to replit (https://blog.replit.com/nix https://blog.replit.com/nix) for having a holistic view of the product and it is unlike anything I've ever seen before. And unsurprisingly, most junior developers that I interact with, prefer replit over other alternatives. Heroku may be dead, but an entire range of upstarts have risen up in its wake: https://www.swyx.io/cloud-distros https://www.swyx.io/cloud-distros
- xena 4y ago
  I've been considering doing something like that but I am not at a point in my life to be risky like that. When I have permanent residency or citizenship in Canada maybe, but until then I'm happy to just be an IC at Tailscale and write out these articles on my blog as the spirit moves me.
  - ignoramous 4y ago
    Perhaps need to convince apenwarr et al that tailscale was originally meant to solve the long tail of software development, and not just fix the internet ;)
- zoomzoom 4y ago
  Agree that railway is the most promising "next-gen" heroku-like - between multi-service apps, opinionated pipelines, and the add-ons - they have got the basics right! replit is the most holistic and unique product in the broader category. from dev to prod with laser focus on getting the experience right. But for enterprise or startup teams that needs dev/qa/CICD/testing etc it's still a bit too downmarket. And many people still want an escape hatch from the cloud IDE, or at least to use VSCode. Coherence (www.withcoherence.com) is trying to deliver a replit-like experience for those teams. It's a new category that confuses Cloud IDE, PasS, infra-as-code and more. But in general it's obvious to us that the future looks more like replit than like anything else out there! In line with the idea that most new/junior devs want to work this way as well. disclosure - I'm cofounder of Coherence
xrd 4y ago
I still have the same experience with dokku. It's magical. git push # it just builds Then: dokku enter # and I'm inside a container on the remote machine.
- sscarduzio 4y ago
  Damn, I could not test Dokku on my M1 ARM processor, as it's x86 only.
  - josegonzalez 4y ago
    Thats not true. Dokku supports amd64, arm, and arm64. While you can install it via Debian package, here is the Docker image you can run on OSX: https://hub.docker.com/r/dokku/dokku/tags https://hub.docker.com/r/dokku/dokku/tags Note: I am the Dokku maintainer.
- xena 4y ago
  What happens when that dokku server goes down?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
aaronbrethorst 4y ago
Render hits a lot of the sweet spots for me that Heroku used to…and they offer real HTTP/2 support, non-absurd pricing, and more. I’m a fan. https://render.com/ https://render.com/
- fourstar 4y ago
  I recently migrated some apps off Heroku and onto Render. Their global chat while annoying to have on every page was actually very helpful. "Adrian" from render quickly replied to 2 of my separate inquiries within less than 10 minutes. Very close to the Heroku exprience. Plus their free redis tier (I have multiple starter plans) allows way more connections than Heroku's.
- abhimskywalker 4y ago
  Looks nice :) Have been looking for something as simple as Heroku for a while now. This seems closest as of all the ones I have looked at!
- brundolf 4y ago
  Wow, their pricing looks almost too good to be true? I think everything I've ever done with Heroku can be done for free on here, if I'm reading this right
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - unwind 4y ago
    As an utter n00b in modern web (all ends, front and back) development, what does it even mean that "static" sites are free, but so is also running Postgres? If I have a "static" site, then I can't have any backend code that talks to the database, is that it? So the actual web pages can't use client-side Javascript to customize page content by talking to a backend, that talks to a database?
    - 0JzW 4y ago
      that is correct. though it looks like you can have some backend services for free at render as well (although it comes with limitations). so if you don't mind slow first load you could have a proper dynamic app within the free tier.
mt42or 4y ago
Before being hacked.
jaggederest 4y ago
This is a little off topic, but I was actually the first user of Heroku [1]. It emerged from the terrible experience of trying to run Ruby apps at a consulting company I worked at called Bitscribe back in '06-'07. The three founders of Bitscribe (Adam Wiggins, Orion Henry, James Lindenbaum) spun off to build a web IDE with automatic app building and hosting, which eventually became Heroku. The old idea was that you could use Git to download your code from the web IDE, and eventually got developed into the experience we all love(d?). Adam Wiggins, one of the three founders, was one of my favorite software engineering mentors back when we called it programming - as an example, he wrote an early rails plugin called "axeman" for the consultancy that would list controllers and actions by least-often-used, so that we could remove functionality that wasn't worth clients paying for. He also got me introduced to Vim, and another coworker there (Hi Simon Michael) demonstrated for me the orchestral nature of a true Emacs master operating at peak capacity, so I blame them to some degree for being stuck in the DMZ at the middle of the IDE war. [1] The reason I know I was the first user was that in October 2008, Adam sent me an invite to try out Heroku and there was a classic rails error - they forgot to skip the before_filter for authentication on the "accept invite" controller and action. Bug quickly fixed, but definitely a funny anecdote. Even on day one it was obvious they were going places - I would have blind invested money into whatever venture those three were working on regardless of what it was.
- lloydatkinson 4y ago
  I really love that idea of pruning unused and redundant usage of endpoints. You could take that functionality and apply to to whole application features in the UI too for example. It’s inspired me a lot. I assume this axeman had to integrate with either logs or analytics to get the usage counts? I’m not sure such an idea would even work these days at large organisations following the Big Agile TM nonsense, imagine trying to explain that to a dozen or so product owners and scrum masters…
  - jaggederest 4y ago
    This shows you how wild and wooly the "early" days of rails was - I forget whether it ran its own instance of sqlite, or was just a completely in-memory hash of hit counts ala counts[controller][action] += 1 that you had to retrieve. Either way it was extremely primitive, predating really what we think of as monitoring and analytics data being its own process and pipeline. But that was also part of the genius of it - as you say, you'd be hard pressed to hack something together that solved a real problem for customers in an afternoon that way these days. I do think it would be a great thing to incorporate into a monitoring and observability tool - my day job at the moment is related and I hope to work in that area of research a bit. Necessary Disclaimer time: my opinions are my own personal opinions, not professional opinions or those of my employer or anyone else.
brundolf 4y ago
I was introduced to Heroku at a hackathon, a few months before graduating college, when it was still in its prime. I was instantly hooked, and from there I went on to use it for every single solo project I’ve ever put on the internet (including a website for a small business that’s been working reliably for ~6 years now). I loathe everything about working with Docker, Kube, AWS, etc. Heroku was designed for people like me. I still haven’t taken the time to research an alternative for future projects. I’ve had a sense the time has been coming, but I’ve been putting it off because it’s going to be a pain, and because it’s probably going to make me a little sad no matter what I land on. Salesforce can go fly a kite. PS: I just remembered I have a pretty good story about Heroku and that small business site I mentioned. Originally I had the source for that site on Bitbucket. One day, I went in to make some changes and found that Bitbucket would no longer let me sign in without first converting my account to an Atlassian account. Sigh. Fine, whatever. Well- the account migration got botched, and the end result was that I was locked out. I went through support, they couldn’t figure it out, etc. Just totally lost access to all those repositories. And I had a newish computer that didn’t have them locally stored yet. Luckily this was the only important one on there, but… it was quite important. Then I remembered that Heroku has you push to a git remote. I was able to recover the entire source code for the site from my Heroku app by cloning the git repo that it offered up as the deploy target. Heroku saved me (and needless to say, I’ll never be using Bitbucket again).
- riskycodes 4y ago
  Exactly the same thing happened to me (though not with BitBucket) - I'm glad you too were able to find relief!
jokethrowaway 4y ago
Heroku is the gold standard of running apps. With every new company I work for or with, I always try to take small step to get closer to that setup. Whatever contraption you may create on top of AWS, GCloud, Azure will never have the same smooth experience, but if you've experienced Heroku, you can at least try to get better logging accessible with a simple command, buy managed databases, use env vars instead of messy configurations / secrets management systems. Now I'll go back to debug my K8S pods, hopefully I can remember the sequence of kubectl commands I need.
phil917 4y ago
holografix 4y ago
Honestly just use Cloud Run on GCP. Push code to GitHub = gets deployed (via buildpacks so no dockerfile needed unless u want one) behind a load balanced tls domain. Wanna use env vars? It’s right there in the ux. Prefer to use “secrets”? Right there in the ux. Want SQL? CloudSQL is around the corner.
- mhoad 4y ago
  Came here to say this also. You can pretty easily replicate the Heroku workflow with Buildpacks and cloud run and end up with a much better service in the process.
- bpicolo 4y ago
  The big miss for me is a shell into a running cloud run container, which you can’t do even with reserved cpus yet. Getting dramatiq (a python sidekiq equivalent) running on the CPU-reserved containers was pretty excruciating. They recommend that functionality for background jobs, but cloud run still needs an HTTP-bound port to know whether apps are running, and also the sandboxing in the gen1 instances didn't work with dramatiq (not sure what, something about forking I imagine?). The error trail was useless for it. Gen2 instances worked. They're also pretty expensive, start at like $40/month for a tiny 1cpu/256mb instance? It's a non-shared CPU, but that's pricey! Memorystore is pricey for bootstrapping too, the cheapest instance is like $35? Other than that it has been okay. There are some weird surprises, like needing to spin up a VPN connector to hit memorystore on non-public endpoints. (Because surprise! GCP serverless doesn’t run in a VPC you have an iota of control over.) Some friction like that they need to have better defaults for. Suffice to say, all these things mean the experience is still way, way higher friction than heroku was a decade ago. I'm hopeful they'll keep iterating though.
  - holografix 4y ago
    Yeah that’s def a little gotcha. Google just announced “jobs” for Cloud Run which is nice but yeah not ssh into an instance. Then again if you’re using the official google buildpack or your own Dockerfile you can just run it locally
adesanmi 4y ago
Heroku was paramount to "proving" _what_ developer experience was at the earliest stage of my career. Because of Heroku, anytime I build products for other developers, I put so much time and effort into trying to design something intuitive to use to for the domain.
Mikejames 4y ago
use fly.io!
crummy 4y ago
Whenever I talk about Fly.io people ask if it's like Heroku. But I never used Heroku so I can't say. Is it?
e9 4y ago
huijzer 4y ago
Why not use Render.com or Fly.io? There are many competitors nowadays.
stepbeek 4y ago
This article doesn't really lay out what - from a customer perspective - would class heroku as a sinking ship? The DevEx is still great, the alternatives are either borderline ridiculous (K8S is a laughably complex beast in comparison), or not fully cooked yet (fly.io, render etc.) I know that it's expensive, but it's nowhere near the price of having an engineer manage cloud infrastructure full-time. I would love Heroku to have more reasonably priced compute. I'm desperately hoping that genuine competition in this space will pressure Heroku into sorting this. But the frequent refrain recently that Heroku just doesn't match with my experience in recent years. When the alternative PaaS solutions offer a comparable postgres service, then we'll have a genuine competitor. Until then, I'm not sure I really grok the level of disdain for it that's been on HN recently.
- jrochkind1 4y ago
  I agree, but I no longer have confidence that salesforce will keep heroku working. Or ever add another feature again. At some point, as the world changes, a feature-freeze is actually going backwards. But so far there's still nothing as mature and reliable as heroku, i agree. fly and render (and maybe some others) are getting closer; I just hope they get there before heroku becomes untenable, which I now expect it to. I got the impression the OP was calling it a "sinking ship" based on the inside view of what's going on. From the customer perspective, it all still works, although the fact that it hasn't changed in 5 years, as the world has continued to, is not encouraging. But what I hear from the inside (not just from OP) is what nails it down.
tdjsnelling 4y ago
The decline of Heroku is a shame, they were the first to really make cloud accessible to all. Over at Northflank (https://northflank.com https://northflank.com), we're trying to continue that trend and great developer experience is our main priority. We address many of the same points you mention - simply `git push` to build and deploy (using Dockerfiles or Buildpacks), instant free DNS & TLS, one-click addons (Postgres, Mongo, Redis...), environment variables inherited from databases, and much much more - all with sensible pricing. Feel free to check out what we've been building at https://northflank.com/changelog https://northflank.com/changelog
- esher 4y ago
  Nothflank looks cool!
rcarmo 4y ago
If you're interested in rolling your own mini-Heroku, check out https://github.com/piku https://github.com/piku. I created it with the intent of having a similar experience and a very tight loop between writing code and getting it running, and it's been great bang for the proverbial buck (~1500 SLOC altogether). Doesn't use containers, though, which many consider to be an anti-feature :)
rikkipitt 4y ago
I've got over 130 apps on Heroku for my various SaaS products and client websites etc. I feel like I'm going to experience a world of pain very soon to migrate away to another provider... I just took a look at fly.io and they seem too dev-opy for my tastes these days. I opted for Heroku after going down the whole Linode route years back and have never looked back. I enjoy the simplicity of deployment and not having to worry too much about servers etc. I recently got to play with Render and DigitalOcean's App Platform and they were okay... just not sure if they'll be suitable for Rails (Postgres/Redis etc). I want something straightforward like Heroku, but without the issues of late. Oh and the costs...
- nameless912 4y ago
  I bet most of those client websites would run just fine with Dokku. It's not ideal, but it'd probably reduce your costs at least. (Speaking as ex-herokai here, from what I've seen render.io seems to have the closest hosted experience, and unlike many of the other commenters in this thread I'm allergic to google cloud and would strongly recommend against GAE :) )
  - rikkipitt 4y ago
    Thanks you, nameless912. I've been leaning towards Render, so cheers for the info. Will take a look into Dukku, but feel it's probably going back a step for my purposes as it'll involve managing a server (or set of servers).
    - nameless912 4y ago
      It will, but the upkeep is extremely low. It takes roughly 15 minutes to set up a DigitalOcean box with Dokku (I think they can even install it automatically for you if you set up a cloud-init script). What I'd honestly do if I was managing a LOT of sites is write a tiny bit of terraform or something to stand up all those sites, and then delete and recreate all of the servers on like a quarterly basis so they all get patched. Slightly more upkeep, but an 8gig/4CPU DO box costs like 48 bucks a month, which is a hell of a lot better than Heroku at that price point.
Traubenfuchs 4y ago
It's like after heroku everyone just decided to make things as complex as they can get and now we are stuck with overpaid devops departments that should not be necessary and AWS bills that leave us in tears.
esher 4y ago
7 Years ago I blogged about if the Platform as Service business model is dead [0]. The PaaS hosting market share by Gartner was never met. Many startups in the space died. We (fortrabbit) are offering "PHP as a Service" for more than 10 years now. It works for us as a small business. I am happy to see new services serving the same itch getting created today. [0] https://blog.fortrabbit.com/cloudscapes-rerevisited https://blog.fortrabbit.com/cloudscapes-rerevisited
franky47 4y ago
For EU-based PaaS, check out Clever Cloud. They are based in Nantes, France and have servers in France (Paris, Roubaix) and Poland (Warsaw), and other locations outside the EU. I host my Node.js apps & databases (PostgreSQL, Redis) there and their GitOps is smooth. https://www.clever-cloud.com/ https://www.clever-cloud.com/
xena 4y ago
Author of the article here if you have any questions
ubertaco 4y ago
This article resonates pretty deeply with me, an engineer at a different company Salesforce acquired years ago that, like Heroku, "had resisted integration into the larger Salesforce organization and as a result was really really starved for headcount." I joined right when the organization was starting to give in and integrate more, largely out of a combination of need for resources and OG execs having been either replaced or else "org-chart-subjugated" by Salesforce execs, whose influence grew stronger over time. I'm looking towards the door a lot these days. The last few years have been a slow downhill slide, but the last month in particular feels like the edge of the slope where it becomes a straight drop down into the abyss. I've been brushing up on leetcode and polishing up my résumé. As catharsis and to help me process the stress and everything I've been feeling at work lately, I even wrote up a "goodbye" letter in my _personal_ Google Drive account, and I guess this article's author had the same feeling as me, because "my coworkers have left the sinking ship, and it's time for me to get on a lifeboat too" was the exact analogy that came to my mind, which matches the OP's bit about "the ship has been sinking for years but the culture of Heroku really stuck around long enough that it was hard to realize the ship was sinking", and I've felt the same sad realization that the author expresses here as "The Heroku I joined no longer exists. I joined Heroku but I left Salesforce." I joined $acquisition, but my reasons for leaving, once I get it all all lined up, will be Salesforce. It doesn't help that Salesforce has committed to a long-term project with the explicit goal of making $acquisition no longer exist. That just confirms the reality of what I've experienced as being an intentional choice by the company rather than an accident.
- xena 4y ago
  Author of the article here, reach out to me (@theprincessxena on twitter, xena on keybase, Xe on libera.chat) if you want to commiserate
gpjanik 4y ago
Vercel
tbrock 4y ago
I think the modern version of this is render (render.com) I’ve found their devex to be delighful and able to provide power without much of the conplexity.
amerine 4y ago
“ The body of Heroku remains but the soul has long since fled.” some of us are still there keeping her soul alive, and plan to do so for our customers for a long time.
- neon_electro 4y ago
  Thank you for your hard work! I used Heroku for 4.5 years at a previous job and never stopped loving what it did for me and my team.
- hnthrow124 4y ago
  Mark, I worked with you for a number of years at Heroku. I apologize for not being brave enough to reveal my identity but I think the time has come for the old guard to throw in the towel. I was certainly a part of that old guard and was a loud critic of sfdc's progressively worse plans and generally how they treated us but we're well past the point that this ship could be turned around. Even if sfdc decided to significantly reinvest in the platform (which I can not imagine anyways) recent events have caused the customers to no longer trust Heroku to be good stewards of the platform. Heroku has no chance of making it at this point. What's worse is Heroku is actively harming the ecosystem by lumbering along like this. Despite how bad things are, it's still keeping investment from upstarts trying to compete against them because Heroku still has plenty of market share. You're not being honest with your customers what the future really looks like for the platform—those customers would be far better served on something they won't have to migrate off of in the next year or two. Move on: let someone else take the reins and be what Heroku could've been if it had the proper investment.
zbruhnke 4y ago
surprised not much mention of Elastic Beanstalk here - it has nearly an identical dev experience to Heroku. I moved past using it years ago but if I was looking for exactly that experience I'd probably go with it or if I was using Elixir likely I'd use fly.io because they seem to have it down pat for elixir/phoenix projects the way heroku did for ruby
- jrochkind1 4y ago
  Whenever I see someone say this... I wonder if your project(s) are just really different than mine, or if instead what you notice about a dev experience is just really different than what I do. Because for me Elastic Beanstalk (plus presumably other AWS services like RDS? SQS and something else for background processes?) isn't close to the experience of Heroku of not having to think about ops at all for my whole infrastructure, including my rdbms etc.
psadauskas 4y ago
These threads always have plenty of great suggestions of alternatives for just getting started or hobby development. What are people using for mid-range stuff? I want the features and ease of Heroku, without having to build it all ourselves on top of AWS directly. Something on the order of $1-5k/mo spend, more than a "hobby", but not enough to justify a devops team wearing pagers.
pnelson 4y ago
I'm working towards building the best possible experience for hosting multiple sites on a single machine at a fixed price at https://acrobox.io https://acrobox.io. Abstracting Docker didn't make the cut for my MVP but it may be the right fit for some of the commenters here.
danbmil99 4y ago
Why did Salesforce acquire Heroku? I don't see the business logic.
webmaven 4y ago
There was a period where there were a bunch of "Heroku for Python" startups (eg. Gondor.io) that were gaining traction and approximating the Heroku DX. As soon as Heroku added support for Python, they all deflated. In an alternate timeline where Heroku delayed adding Python support, the competitive pressure to keep the DX simple might have won out.

Bottom of the article tells me I shouldn't have been able to see this yet, especially here (edit: right... timezones... nevermind): > If you're reading this before the 12th, welcome to an experiment! I've been wondering about how to make some of my posts Patreon exclusive for a week. This post was published for my patrons on the 5th of May. Please don't share this link around on social media until the 12th, but privately sharing it is okay.

iamevn 4y ago
I made the same mistake and almost commented similarly

meter 4y ago

> the way Heroku worked… The author implies that something has changed — and that nowadays, you can’t `git push heroku main`. But according to the docs, it’s still just as simple. I guess I don’t understand how Heroku’s DevEx has changed. Seems just as intuitive as it’s always been. But I could be missing something.

cjk 4y ago
What I took away from the post is not that Heroku no longer works like that, but that it's a sinking ship, and thus not advisable to use any longer.
- oxff 4y ago
  Based on Salesforce's handling of the April / May security breach / incident I would not recommend Heroku, not even to other developers who understand risks and would just use it for hobby / throwaway projects. Gonna have to test all the meme alternatives soon, fly / render / glitch / porter.
- wutwutwutwut 4y ago
  So like talking about your 97-year-old grandmother in past tense, as if she was already dead, because she will be in a year or two.
  - tinco 4y ago
    I wouldn't bet my income on my 97-year-old grandmother for surviving as long as I promised my clients their website would stay online. That said, I don't think Heroku is that close to being sunset, but that's my guess, and that guess is as good as the people who say it is. I'm currently messing around with fly.io and that product is so young one would be crazy to think it has better chances to last the next decade than Heroku does.
    - jrochkind1 4y ago
      I don't think Salesforce is probably planning on sunseting Heroku anytime soon. But they seem to be totally starving it, allocating it the minimum of resources they think they can to keep it going pretty much as it is without any new features. Based on how they handled the recent security update, I won't be surprised if it... just kind of crumbles into the sea at some point. We all know that software doesn't just "keep working" at all without continual maintenance. For several different reasons, security being one of them. Heroku's ability to keep "just working" with the languages/platforms it does, as new versions of such come out, seems to be dependent on an increasingly smaller workforce that goes above and beyond.
- ryantgtg 4y ago
  I struggled to follow parts of this article. She discussed taking to the CTO about bad insurance, and then followed that section with “I got hired.” The whole thing meanders and barely has a point or provides evidence, and I’m not truly convinced it’s a singing ship. That said, I do defer to ex-employees on this matter. I’m mostly looking for alternatives because people keep saying I should (and I could possibly get double the ram for the same price). But I just git push heroku mastered 5 minutes ago and it took about 1 minute to build, and it was wonderful.
  - xena 4y ago
    I was a contractor before I was an employee because Salesforce was starving the beast until they made CRM features. Never work with MBO Partners. They do not give two shits about you, just your money that they take a huge percentage of.
    - ryantgtg 4y ago
      Thanks. Not too long ago I was like “we’ve been paying heroku $59/mo for years (open source, non-commercial, funded by patreon) and while I don’t have any issues I can’t tell if it’s kind of in maintenance mode or what.” So I checked the blog and saw posts like “Faster Dynos for All” and their email newsletter which regularly mentions improvements to service. From those I felt reassured that they’re still improving it. But then came a wave of “heroku alternatives” and posts lamenting how heroku is blowing it. I’m grateful to hear reports from the other side (though again, my personal experience with heroku is still totally fine - and we don’t do the github integration)!
nomilk 4y ago
The word "worked" could just as well be "works" (present tense) because Heroku still works exactly as the author describes (I think the author is recounting how it worked when they were there, hence why they use past tense).
bin_bash 4y ago
There was discussion about this the other day: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31313779 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31313779
geoffharcourt 4y ago
`git push heroku main` doesn't work if your repository is large enough (not sure if this is raw file sizes or the Git data size). Some of our apps can't be redeployed using this method, we have to use the build workaround which has its own set of issues.

cjk 4y ago

Something I miss in particular about Heroku's git-push-to-deploy experience is that you'd know whether the build/deploy succeeded by the time the push finished. Modern “GitOps”-based deployments that rely on webhooks or polling are fine, but it feels so disjointed to me to `git push` and then have to go watch some other system to see if the deploy succeeded.

sieabahlpark 4y ago
You could just stream the updates to the cli. You'd have to be okay with using a command that handles pushing for you.
- tinco 4y ago
  It's not just about the updates. If the deploy fails, then your push should also fail. That way your deploy branch is always a reflection of what's actually deployed.
tasuki 4y ago
How do these modern gitops based deployments work? I've got a bare repo to push into, with hooks to sync to the live repo and run the Makefile upon push. I just see the output of the make command upon running `git push`. The most basic of workflows shows the deploy status. I think you'd have to specifically go out of your way to hide it?
- djur 4y ago
  The deploy happens asynchronously from the push. Instead of having a separate repo you push to in order to deploy, the main branch of the shared GitHub (or whatever) repo just gets automatically deployed whenever there's a push (or sometimes it's triggered by a tag). So there's no feedback at all on push.
  - tasuki 4y ago
    Ah of course! In fact I even have one personal project with collaborators, and indeed I've set it to deploy on push using GitHub actions, and indeed there's no feedback. Pushing straight to the prod server is nicer UX, but I guess that only works reasonably well with one person, or a very tiny team.

stickfigure 4y ago

I have more or less this experience right now with both Google App Engine and Digital Ocean App Platform. For GAE it's driven by Github Actions, for DO it's built in. Either way it's just: git checkout production; git merge master; git push It doesn't take much wiring to set it all up. Heroku is great but it isn't the only PaaS.

andyfleming 4y ago
DigitalOcean's App Platform is still a bit immature, but I think it has the most potential to be a heroku-like experience.
- stickfigure 4y ago
  Everything, including Heroku, feels a bit immature compared to GAE. Just the stackdriver logging alone is worth the price. I couldn't live without cloud tasks. And of course the autoscaling... DOAP has some minor issues and a very minimal feature list but it's significantly less expensive than GAE. I use it to run a memory-hungry image processing service that would otherwise hurt too much. We still log remotely to stackdriver.
DangitBobby 4y ago
I use GAE for just about every deployment I have. Works very well. And I like that I can deploy code from whatever branch (or no branch at all) to whatever service I want.
capableweb 4y ago
When the git push process finishes, do you know that the deploy succeeded without running any other command or looking at other logs? Does the push fail if it the deploy itself was unsuccessful?
- stickfigure 4y ago
  It posts a slack message to a channel, which triggers an alert on my desktop. My build/test/deploy cycle (for the GAE app, which is the primary service) is currently about 25 minutes. I'm happy with the flow. My only real complaint is that Github Actions offers almost nothing if a build fails. I try to put some useful info in the slack message, but often I have to download and grep the build logs.

emilsedgh 4y ago

I think Heroku's aggressive pricing is the main driver behind making them obsolete. I honestly cannot believe Salesforce is so short-sighted with Heroku. Their approach is "Milk it as much as we can until everyone just abandons it for cheaper solutions/clones". Had they become more competitive in terms of pricing, a large, large chunk of companies would've used them rather than moving to solutions like Kube, etc, or a bunch of Heroku clones which are now taking off as it's being considered a "Sinking Ship". Just see this: https://blog.porter.run/why-companies-move-off-heroku/ https://blog.porter.run/why-companies-move-off-heroku/ The reasons they are suggesting [that companies leave Heroku for] (besides the costs) are a bunch of non-reasons and small nuisances. The main reason is the cost, and the cost issue will become bigger and bigger of an issue as competing solutions get cheaper and cheaper, until Heroku is completely sunk and abandoned. We are still using Heroku and I really hope they would fix the pricing before we bite the bullet and just spend a couple of weeks moving to a cheaper alternative. There's no vendor lock in on 12 Factor Apps you see.

andi999 4y ago
How much do they charge?
- shakna 4y ago
  Heroku's pricing model is absurdly complicated. [0] But for anything nonfree, you're probably going to end up at over $100/mo, even if just by accident. To compare it to one of their current competitors, render [1], for something with all the same features as gave me that $100/mo figure, you're looking at about $15/mo. [0] https://www.heroku.com/pricing https://www.heroku.com/pricing [1] https://render.com/pricing https://render.com/pricing
  - dinvlad 4y ago
    And if we look at some European cloud providers' prices, it becomes painfully obvious that any such services (even incl. Render) built on top of major US cloud providers are excruciatingly overpriced - the markups can be as large as 5x for equivalent compute: https://www.hetzner.com/cloud https://www.hetzner.com/cloud This combined with something like Doku gives one a sense of what could be possible.

encryptluks2 4y ago

I miss when people that wrote docs in markdown actually converted them to HTML as intended.

tirpen 4y ago
The page isn't written in markdown though.
- encryptluks2 4y ago
  Is it AsciiDoc? Regardless, the `=======` indicates a heading. The `` indicates inline code. The `----` indicates horizontal rules (page breaks). The `>` indicates blockquotes.
  - brundolf 4y ago
    The symbols are just decorative; it’s not being parsed by anything so there’s no reason for it to be any kind of valid syntax
    - encryptluks2 4y ago
      So writing markup but not actually converting it to look hip? I don't understand the point.
      - brundolf 4y ago
        You don’t have to like the aesthetic, but there's no need to disparage it either. I think it looks nice.
        encryptluks2 4y ago
        I'm sorry. My comment was meant as constructive feedback, but I probably came across as an asshole. I do like the blog and the content which are the most important components. I just wish that the content was actually rendered semi-normally. If you think it looks cool, that is all that matters really.

Rastonbury 4y ago

As someone non-technical, Heroku is what helped me launch my first production site. It was really like magic when I discovered it existed, because I was intimidated by AWS. It's sad reading accounts from employees, seemed like a great place with great product. Hopefully, competitors can match them, what I've read is that they are a bit less mature than them. I actually still have a production site, will need to move off soon.

ignoramous 4y ago

> I wonder if we'll ever really have something like that on top of Nix or NixOS. Xe, go do it! (: In all seriousness, Fly.io has explored this path (and very well may pursue it depending on RoI of going down this route, I'd imagine): https://github.com/superfly/recco https://github.com/superfly/recco Even though I'd like Fly.io to be more like Heroku, it is railway.app that comes the closest (but I believe they use buildpacks like Fly.io does rather than Nix/NixOS). Speaking of Nix, shout out to replit (https://blog.replit.com/nix https://blog.replit.com/nix) for having a holistic view of the product and it is unlike anything I've ever seen before. And unsurprisingly, most junior developers that I interact with, prefer replit over other alternatives. Heroku may be dead, but an entire range of upstarts have risen up in its wake: https://www.swyx.io/cloud-distros https://www.swyx.io/cloud-distros

xena 4y ago
I've been considering doing something like that but I am not at a point in my life to be risky like that. When I have permanent residency or citizenship in Canada maybe, but until then I'm happy to just be an IC at Tailscale and write out these articles on my blog as the spirit moves me.
- ignoramous 4y ago
  Perhaps need to convince apenwarr et al that tailscale was originally meant to solve the long tail of software development, and not just fix the internet ;)
zoomzoom 4y ago
Agree that railway is the most promising "next-gen" heroku-like - between multi-service apps, opinionated pipelines, and the add-ons - they have got the basics right! replit is the most holistic and unique product in the broader category. from dev to prod with laser focus on getting the experience right. But for enterprise or startup teams that needs dev/qa/CICD/testing etc it's still a bit too downmarket. And many people still want an escape hatch from the cloud IDE, or at least to use VSCode. Coherence (www.withcoherence.com) is trying to deliver a replit-like experience for those teams. It's a new category that confuses Cloud IDE, PasS, infra-as-code and more. But in general it's obvious to us that the future looks more like replit than like anything else out there! In line with the idea that most new/junior devs want to work this way as well. disclosure - I'm cofounder of Coherence

xrd 4y ago

I still have the same experience with dokku. It's magical. git push # it just builds Then: dokku enter # and I'm inside a container on the remote machine.

sscarduzio 4y ago
Damn, I could not test Dokku on my M1 ARM processor, as it's x86 only.
- josegonzalez 4y ago
  Thats not true. Dokku supports amd64, arm, and arm64. While you can install it via Debian package, here is the Docker image you can run on OSX: https://hub.docker.com/r/dokku/dokku/tags https://hub.docker.com/r/dokku/dokku/tags Note: I am the Dokku maintainer.
xena 4y ago
What happens when that dokku server goes down?
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

aaronbrethorst 4y ago

Render hits a lot of the sweet spots for me that Heroku used to…and they offer real HTTP/2 support, non-absurd pricing, and more. I’m a fan. https://render.com/ https://render.com/

fourstar 4y ago
I recently migrated some apps off Heroku and onto Render. Their global chat while annoying to have on every page was actually very helpful. "Adrian" from render quickly replied to 2 of my separate inquiries within less than 10 minutes. Very close to the Heroku exprience. Plus their free redis tier (I have multiple starter plans) allows way more connections than Heroku's.
abhimskywalker 4y ago
Looks nice :) Have been looking for something as simple as Heroku for a while now. This seems closest as of all the ones I have looked at!
brundolf 4y ago
Wow, their pricing looks almost too good to be true? I think everything I've ever done with Heroku can be done for free on here, if I'm reading this right
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- unwind 4y ago
  As an utter n00b in modern web (all ends, front and back) development, what does it even mean that "static" sites are free, but so is also running Postgres? If I have a "static" site, then I can't have any backend code that talks to the database, is that it? So the actual web pages can't use client-side Javascript to customize page content by talking to a backend, that talks to a database?
  - 0JzW 4y ago
    that is correct. though it looks like you can have some backend services for free at render as well (although it comes with limitations). so if you don't mind slow first load you could have a proper dynamic app within the free tier.

mt42or 4y ago

Before being hacked.

jaggederest 4y ago

This is a little off topic, but I was actually the first user of Heroku [1]. It emerged from the terrible experience of trying to run Ruby apps at a consulting company I worked at called Bitscribe back in '06-'07. The three founders of Bitscribe (Adam Wiggins, Orion Henry, James Lindenbaum) spun off to build a web IDE with automatic app building and hosting, which eventually became Heroku. The old idea was that you could use Git to download your code from the web IDE, and eventually got developed into the experience we all love(d?). Adam Wiggins, one of the three founders, was one of my favorite software engineering mentors back when we called it programming - as an example, he wrote an early rails plugin called "axeman" for the consultancy that would list controllers and actions by least-often-used, so that we could remove functionality that wasn't worth clients paying for. He also got me introduced to Vim, and another coworker there (Hi Simon Michael) demonstrated for me the orchestral nature of a true Emacs master operating at peak capacity, so I blame them to some degree for being stuck in the DMZ at the middle of the IDE war. [1] The reason I know I was the first user was that in October 2008, Adam sent me an invite to try out Heroku and there was a classic rails error - they forgot to skip the before_filter for authentication on the "accept invite" controller and action. Bug quickly fixed, but definitely a funny anecdote. Even on day one it was obvious they were going places - I would have blind invested money into whatever venture those three were working on regardless of what it was.

lloydatkinson 4y ago
I really love that idea of pruning unused and redundant usage of endpoints. You could take that functionality and apply to to whole application features in the UI too for example. It’s inspired me a lot. I assume this axeman had to integrate with either logs or analytics to get the usage counts? I’m not sure such an idea would even work these days at large organisations following the Big Agile TM nonsense, imagine trying to explain that to a dozen or so product owners and scrum masters…
- jaggederest 4y ago
  This shows you how wild and wooly the "early" days of rails was - I forget whether it ran its own instance of sqlite, or was just a completely in-memory hash of hit counts ala counts[controller][action] += 1 that you had to retrieve. Either way it was extremely primitive, predating really what we think of as monitoring and analytics data being its own process and pipeline. But that was also part of the genius of it - as you say, you'd be hard pressed to hack something together that solved a real problem for customers in an afternoon that way these days. I do think it would be a great thing to incorporate into a monitoring and observability tool - my day job at the moment is related and I hope to work in that area of research a bit. Necessary Disclaimer time: my opinions are my own personal opinions, not professional opinions or those of my employer or anyone else.

brundolf 4y ago

I was introduced to Heroku at a hackathon, a few months before graduating college, when it was still in its prime. I was instantly hooked, and from there I went on to use it for every single solo project I’ve ever put on the internet (including a website for a small business that’s been working reliably for ~6 years now). I loathe everything about working with Docker, Kube, AWS, etc. Heroku was designed for people like me. I still haven’t taken the time to research an alternative for future projects. I’ve had a sense the time has been coming, but I’ve been putting it off because it’s going to be a pain, and because it’s probably going to make me a little sad no matter what I land on. Salesforce can go fly a kite. PS: I just remembered I have a pretty good story about Heroku and that small business site I mentioned. Originally I had the source for that site on Bitbucket. One day, I went in to make some changes and found that Bitbucket would no longer let me sign in without first converting my account to an Atlassian account. Sigh. Fine, whatever. Well- the account migration got botched, and the end result was that I was locked out. I went through support, they couldn’t figure it out, etc. Just totally lost access to all those repositories. And I had a newish computer that didn’t have them locally stored yet. Luckily this was the only important one on there, but… it was quite important. Then I remembered that Heroku has you push to a git remote. I was able to recover the entire source code for the site from my Heroku app by cloning the git repo that it offered up as the deploy target. Heroku saved me (and needless to say, I’ll never be using Bitbucket again).

riskycodes 4y ago
Exactly the same thing happened to me (though not with BitBucket) - I'm glad you too were able to find relief!

jokethrowaway 4y ago

Heroku is the gold standard of running apps. With every new company I work for or with, I always try to take small step to get closer to that setup. Whatever contraption you may create on top of AWS, GCloud, Azure will never have the same smooth experience, but if you've experienced Heroku, you can at least try to get better logging accessible with a simple command, buy managed databases, use env vars instead of messy configurations / secrets management systems. Now I'll go back to debug my K8S pods, hopefully I can remember the sequence of kubectl commands I need.

phil917 4y ago

holografix 4y ago

Honestly just use Cloud Run on GCP. Push code to GitHub = gets deployed (via buildpacks so no dockerfile needed unless u want one) behind a load balanced tls domain. Wanna use env vars? It’s right there in the ux. Prefer to use “secrets”? Right there in the ux. Want SQL? CloudSQL is around the corner.

mhoad 4y ago
Came here to say this also. You can pretty easily replicate the Heroku workflow with Buildpacks and cloud run and end up with a much better service in the process.
bpicolo 4y ago
The big miss for me is a shell into a running cloud run container, which you can’t do even with reserved cpus yet. Getting dramatiq (a python sidekiq equivalent) running on the CPU-reserved containers was pretty excruciating. They recommend that functionality for background jobs, but cloud run still needs an HTTP-bound port to know whether apps are running, and also the sandboxing in the gen1 instances didn't work with dramatiq (not sure what, something about forking I imagine?). The error trail was useless for it. Gen2 instances worked. They're also pretty expensive, start at like $40/month for a tiny 1cpu/256mb instance? It's a non-shared CPU, but that's pricey! Memorystore is pricey for bootstrapping too, the cheapest instance is like $35? Other than that it has been okay. There are some weird surprises, like needing to spin up a VPN connector to hit memorystore on non-public endpoints. (Because surprise! GCP serverless doesn’t run in a VPC you have an iota of control over.) Some friction like that they need to have better defaults for. Suffice to say, all these things mean the experience is still way, way higher friction than heroku was a decade ago. I'm hopeful they'll keep iterating though.
- holografix 4y ago
  Yeah that’s def a little gotcha. Google just announced “jobs” for Cloud Run which is nice but yeah not ssh into an instance. Then again if you’re using the official google buildpack or your own Dockerfile you can just run it locally

adesanmi 4y ago

Heroku was paramount to "proving" _what_ developer experience was at the earliest stage of my career. Because of Heroku, anytime I build products for other developers, I put so much time and effort into trying to design something intuitive to use to for the domain.

Mikejames 4y ago

use fly.io!

crummy 4y ago

Whenever I talk about Fly.io people ask if it's like Heroku. But I never used Heroku so I can't say. Is it?

e9 4y ago

huijzer 4y ago

Why not use Render.com or Fly.io? There are many competitors nowadays.

stepbeek 4y ago

This article doesn't really lay out what - from a customer perspective - would class heroku as a sinking ship? The DevEx is still great, the alternatives are either borderline ridiculous (K8S is a laughably complex beast in comparison), or not fully cooked yet (fly.io, render etc.) I know that it's expensive, but it's nowhere near the price of having an engineer manage cloud infrastructure full-time. I would love Heroku to have more reasonably priced compute. I'm desperately hoping that genuine competition in this space will pressure Heroku into sorting this. But the frequent refrain recently that Heroku just doesn't match with my experience in recent years. When the alternative PaaS solutions offer a comparable postgres service, then we'll have a genuine competitor. Until then, I'm not sure I really grok the level of disdain for it that's been on HN recently.

jrochkind1 4y ago
I agree, but I no longer have confidence that salesforce will keep heroku working. Or ever add another feature again. At some point, as the world changes, a feature-freeze is actually going backwards. But so far there's still nothing as mature and reliable as heroku, i agree. fly and render (and maybe some others) are getting closer; I just hope they get there before heroku becomes untenable, which I now expect it to. I got the impression the OP was calling it a "sinking ship" based on the inside view of what's going on. From the customer perspective, it all still works, although the fact that it hasn't changed in 5 years, as the world has continued to, is not encouraging. But what I hear from the inside (not just from OP) is what nails it down.

tdjsnelling 4y ago

The decline of Heroku is a shame, they were the first to really make cloud accessible to all. Over at Northflank (https://northflank.com https://northflank.com), we're trying to continue that trend and great developer experience is our main priority. We address many of the same points you mention - simply `git push` to build and deploy (using Dockerfiles or Buildpacks), instant free DNS & TLS, one-click addons (Postgres, Mongo, Redis...), environment variables inherited from databases, and much much more - all with sensible pricing. Feel free to check out what we've been building at https://northflank.com/changelog https://northflank.com/changelog

esher 4y ago
Nothflank looks cool!

rcarmo 4y ago

If you're interested in rolling your own mini-Heroku, check out https://github.com/piku https://github.com/piku. I created it with the intent of having a similar experience and a very tight loop between writing code and getting it running, and it's been great bang for the proverbial buck (~1500 SLOC altogether). Doesn't use containers, though, which many consider to be an anti-feature :)

rikkipitt 4y ago

I've got over 130 apps on Heroku for my various SaaS products and client websites etc. I feel like I'm going to experience a world of pain very soon to migrate away to another provider... I just took a look at fly.io and they seem too dev-opy for my tastes these days. I opted for Heroku after going down the whole Linode route years back and have never looked back. I enjoy the simplicity of deployment and not having to worry too much about servers etc. I recently got to play with Render and DigitalOcean's App Platform and they were okay... just not sure if they'll be suitable for Rails (Postgres/Redis etc). I want something straightforward like Heroku, but without the issues of late. Oh and the costs...

nameless912 4y ago
I bet most of those client websites would run just fine with Dokku. It's not ideal, but it'd probably reduce your costs at least. (Speaking as ex-herokai here, from what I've seen render.io seems to have the closest hosted experience, and unlike many of the other commenters in this thread I'm allergic to google cloud and would strongly recommend against GAE :) )
- rikkipitt 4y ago
  Thanks you, nameless912. I've been leaning towards Render, so cheers for the info. Will take a look into Dukku, but feel it's probably going back a step for my purposes as it'll involve managing a server (or set of servers).
  - nameless912 4y ago
    It will, but the upkeep is extremely low. It takes roughly 15 minutes to set up a DigitalOcean box with Dokku (I think they can even install it automatically for you if you set up a cloud-init script). What I'd honestly do if I was managing a LOT of sites is write a tiny bit of terraform or something to stand up all those sites, and then delete and recreate all of the servers on like a quarterly basis so they all get patched. Slightly more upkeep, but an 8gig/4CPU DO box costs like 48 bucks a month, which is a hell of a lot better than Heroku at that price point.

Traubenfuchs 4y ago

It's like after heroku everyone just decided to make things as complex as they can get and now we are stuck with overpaid devops departments that should not be necessary and AWS bills that leave us in tears.

esher 4y ago

7 Years ago I blogged about if the Platform as Service business model is dead [0]. The PaaS hosting market share by Gartner was never met. Many startups in the space died. We (fortrabbit) are offering "PHP as a Service" for more than 10 years now. It works for us as a small business. I am happy to see new services serving the same itch getting created today. [0] https://blog.fortrabbit.com/cloudscapes-rerevisited https://blog.fortrabbit.com/cloudscapes-rerevisited

franky47 4y ago

For EU-based PaaS, check out Clever Cloud. They are based in Nantes, France and have servers in France (Paris, Roubaix) and Poland (Warsaw), and other locations outside the EU. I host my Node.js apps & databases (PostgreSQL, Redis) there and their GitOps is smooth. https://www.clever-cloud.com/ https://www.clever-cloud.com/

xena 4y ago

Author of the article here if you have any questions

ubertaco 4y ago

This article resonates pretty deeply with me, an engineer at a different company Salesforce acquired years ago that, like Heroku, "had resisted integration into the larger Salesforce organization and as a result was really really starved for headcount." I joined right when the organization was starting to give in and integrate more, largely out of a combination of need for resources and OG execs having been either replaced or else "org-chart-subjugated" by Salesforce execs, whose influence grew stronger over time. I'm looking towards the door a lot these days. The last few years have been a slow downhill slide, but the last month in particular feels like the edge of the slope where it becomes a straight drop down into the abyss. I've been brushing up on leetcode and polishing up my résumé. As catharsis and to help me process the stress and everything I've been feeling at work lately, I even wrote up a "goodbye" letter in my _personal_ Google Drive account, and I guess this article's author had the same feeling as me, because "my coworkers have left the sinking ship, and it's time for me to get on a lifeboat too" was the exact analogy that came to my mind, which matches the OP's bit about "the ship has been sinking for years but the culture of Heroku really stuck around long enough that it was hard to realize the ship was sinking", and I've felt the same sad realization that the author expresses here as "The Heroku I joined no longer exists. I joined Heroku but I left Salesforce." I joined $acquisition, but my reasons for leaving, once I get it all all lined up, will be Salesforce. It doesn't help that Salesforce has committed to a long-term project with the explicit goal of making $acquisition no longer exist. That just confirms the reality of what I've experienced as being an intentional choice by the company rather than an accident.

xena 4y ago
Author of the article here, reach out to me (@theprincessxena on twitter, xena on keybase, Xe on libera.chat) if you want to commiserate

gpjanik 4y ago

Vercel

tbrock 4y ago

I think the modern version of this is render (render.com) I’ve found their devex to be delighful and able to provide power without much of the conplexity.

amerine 4y ago

“ The body of Heroku remains but the soul has long since fled.” some of us are still there keeping her soul alive, and plan to do so for our customers for a long time.

neon_electro 4y ago
Thank you for your hard work! I used Heroku for 4.5 years at a previous job and never stopped loving what it did for me and my team.
hnthrow124 4y ago
Mark, I worked with you for a number of years at Heroku. I apologize for not being brave enough to reveal my identity but I think the time has come for the old guard to throw in the towel. I was certainly a part of that old guard and was a loud critic of sfdc's progressively worse plans and generally how they treated us but we're well past the point that this ship could be turned around. Even if sfdc decided to significantly reinvest in the platform (which I can not imagine anyways) recent events have caused the customers to no longer trust Heroku to be good stewards of the platform. Heroku has no chance of making it at this point. What's worse is Heroku is actively harming the ecosystem by lumbering along like this. Despite how bad things are, it's still keeping investment from upstarts trying to compete against them because Heroku still has plenty of market share. You're not being honest with your customers what the future really looks like for the platform—those customers would be far better served on something they won't have to migrate off of in the next year or two. Move on: let someone else take the reins and be what Heroku could've been if it had the proper investment.

zbruhnke 4y ago

surprised not much mention of Elastic Beanstalk here - it has nearly an identical dev experience to Heroku. I moved past using it years ago but if I was looking for exactly that experience I'd probably go with it or if I was using Elixir likely I'd use fly.io because they seem to have it down pat for elixir/phoenix projects the way heroku did for ruby

jrochkind1 4y ago
Whenever I see someone say this... I wonder if your project(s) are just really different than mine, or if instead what you notice about a dev experience is just really different than what I do. Because for me Elastic Beanstalk (plus presumably other AWS services like RDS? SQS and something else for background processes?) isn't close to the experience of Heroku of not having to think about ops at all for my whole infrastructure, including my rdbms etc.

psadauskas 4y ago

These threads always have plenty of great suggestions of alternatives for just getting started or hobby development. What are people using for mid-range stuff? I want the features and ease of Heroku, without having to build it all ourselves on top of AWS directly. Something on the order of $1-5k/mo spend, more than a "hobby", but not enough to justify a devops team wearing pagers.

pnelson 4y ago

I'm working towards building the best possible experience for hosting multiple sites on a single machine at a fixed price at https://acrobox.io https://acrobox.io. Abstracting Docker didn't make the cut for my MVP but it may be the right fit for some of the commenters here.

danbmil99 4y ago

Why did Salesforce acquire Heroku? I don't see the business logic.

webmaven 4y ago

There was a period where there were a bunch of "Heroku for Python" startups (eg. Gondor.io) that were gaining traction and approximating the Heroku DX. As soon as Heroku added support for Python, they all deflated. In an alternate timeline where Heroku delayed adding Python support, the competitive pressure to keep the DX simple might have won out.