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I wish _I_ had a business that was successful enough to justify multiple engineers working 7 months on porting our infrastructure from heroku to kubernetes
by subarctic 2y ago
I wish _I_ had a business that was successful enough to justify multiple engineers working 7 months on porting our infrastructure from heroku to kubernetes
- bastawhiz 2y agoKnowing the prices and performance of Heroku (as a former customer) the effort probably paid for itself. Heroku is great for getting started but becomes untenably expensive very fast, and it's neither easy nor straightforward to break the vendor lock in when you decide to leave.
- cpursley 2y agoMoving from Heroku to Render or Fly.io is very straight forward; it’s just containers.
- dartos 2y agoUnless you relied on heroku build packs.
- debarshri 2y agoBuildpacks is opensource too [1] [1] https://buildpacks.io/ https://buildpacks.io/
- bastawhiz 2y agoIf you use containers. If you're big enough for the cost savings to matter, you're probably also not looking for a service like Render or Fly. If your workload is really "just containers" you can save more with even managed container services from AWS or GCP.
- goosejuice 2y agoSo is kubernetes. GKE isn't that bad.
- ed 2y ago(Except for Postgres, since Fly's solution isn't managed) Heroku's price is a persistent annoyance for every startup that uses it. Rebuilding Heroku's stack is an attractive problem (evidenced by the graveyard of Heroku clones on Github). There's a clear KPI ($), Salesforce's pricing feels wrong out of principle, and engineering is all about efficiency! Unfortunately, it's also an iceberg problem. And while infrastructure is not "hard" in the comp-sci sense, custom infra always creates work when your time would be better spent elsewhere.
- davedx 2y ago> Salesforce's pricing feels wrong out of principle What do you mean exactly? If it takes multiple engineers multiple months to build an alternative on kubernetes, then it sounds like Heroku is worth it to a lot of companies. These costs are very "known" when you start using Heroku too, it's not like Salesforce hides everything from you then jump scares you 18 months down the line. SF's CRM is also known to be expensive, and yet it's extremely widely used. Something being expensive definitely doesn't always mean it's bad and you should cheap out to avoid it.
- mrweasel 2y agoCouldn't you move to AWS? They offer managed Postgresql. Heroku already runs on AWS, so there could be a potential saving in running AWS managed service. It's still a lot of work obviously.
- Maxion 2y agoSo does GCP and Azure. At least in GCP land the stuff is really quite reasonably priced, too.
- cpursley 2y agoI moved our entire stack from Heroku to Render in a day and pay 1/3 less. Render is what Heroku would be if they never stopped innovating. Now I’m thinking of moving to fly as they are even cheaper.
- danenania 2y agoI find AWS ECS with fargate to be a nice middle ground. You still have to deal with IAM, networking, etc. but once you get that sorted it’s quite easy to auto-scale a container and make it highly available. I’ve used kubernetes as well in the past and it certainly can do the job, but ECS is my go-to currently for a new project. Kubernetes may be better for more complex scenarios, but for a new project or startup I think having a need for kubernetes vs. something simpler like ECS would tend to indicate questionable architecture choices.
- bastawhiz 2y agoI pretty strongly agree. Fargate is a great product, though it isn't quite perfect.
- wg0 2y agoECS is far, far far smoother, simpler and stable than anything else out there in cluster orchestration. It just works. Even with EC2 instances it just works. And if you opt for Fargate, then that's far more stable option. I am saying this after bootstrapping k8s and ECS both.
- Aeolun 2y agoThe only pain point there I think is auto scaling logic. But otherwise it’s painless.
- danenania 2y agoI find auto-scaling with fargate to be pretty straightforward. What's the pain point there for you?
- Aeolun 2y agoIt works, but the way it’s not part of fargate, and instead some combination of cloudwatch events and rules modifying the ‘desiredCount’ property on the service. Just feel like it could all be done in a slightly more integrated way.
- internetter 2y agoFrom their presentation, they went from $7500/m to $500/m
- ttul 2y agoI mean, $7,000 a month isn’t nothing. But it’s not a lot. Certainly not enough to justify a seven month engineering effort plus infinite ongoing maintenance.
- crdrost 2y agoThe main engineering effort to reduce by that much was completed in 6 weeks according to their YouTube video. 7 months is presumably more like “the time it has been stable for” or so, although I am not sure the dates line up for that 100%. Also cost reduction was apparently not the main impetus, GDPR compliance was.
- ttul 2y agoThat “main engineering effort” will go on forever. People neglect to note that everything is constantly changing. Just like the roof on your house, if you don’t upgrade your components regularly, eventually you will face a huge rewrite when that thing your ancient home-made infrastructure relies on is no longer supported or is no longer updated to support the latest thing you need for your SaaS. You can’t avoid this cost. Some people refer to it as technical debt, but I think more accurately it could be called “infrastructure debt”. Platform providers maintain the infrastructure debt for you - this is what you pay them for. And they do it with tremendous economies of scale. Unless your scale is truly enormous - like Meta, for instance - it isn’t worth build your own infrastructure.
- nine_k 2y agoThis is $7k/mo today. If they are actively growing, and their demand for compute is slated to grow 5x or even 10x in a year, they wanted to get off Heroku fast.
- ramshorst 2y ago
- antimemetics 2y agoI mean this is what they recommend: - Your current cloud / PaaS costs are north of $5,000/month - You have at least two developers who are into the idea of running Kubernetes and their own infrastructure and are willing to spend some time learning how to do so So you will spend 150k+/year (2 senior full stake eng salaries in EU - can be much higher, esp for people up to the task) to save 60k+/y in infra costs? Does not compute for me - is the lock-in that bad? I understand it for very small/simple use cases - but then do you need k8s at all? It feels like the ones who will benefit the most is orgs who spend much more on cloud costs - but they need SLAs, compliance and a dozen other enterprisy things. So I struggle to understand who would benefit from this stack reclaim.
- dbackeus 2y agoCreator of Reclaim the Stack here. The idea that we're implying you need 2 full time engineers is a misunderstanding. We just mean to say that you'll want at least 2 developers to spend enough time digging in to Kubernetes etc to have a good enough idea of what you're doing. I don't think more than 2 month of messing about should be required to reach proficiency. We currently don't spend more than ~4 days per month total working on platform related stuff (often we spend 0 days, eg. I was on parental leave during 3 months and no one touched the platform during that time). WRT employee cost, Swedish DevOps engineers cost less than half of what you mentioned on average, but I guess YMMV depending on region.
- efilife 2y agoFyi, we use asterisks (*) for emphasis on HN
- Kiro 2y agoDifferent thing. Using visible _ is a conscious choice.
- efilife 2y agoWhy?
- Kiro 2y agoIt looks nice and has been a staple in hacker culture for decades, long before we had rich text and were just chatting on IRC.
- sph 2y agoAlso it looks like _underlined_ text
- efilife 2y agoIt doesn't look nice at all to me. Real emphasis looks way nicer, that's its purpose. Now that we have rich text, why not utilize it?
- Kiro 2y agoI use both and will continue to do so. You're trying to lecture people who have been on HN for more than 10 years how "we" do stuff around here.
- efilife 2y agoThere's so much wrong with this reply I won't even bother trying to respond, I feel the negativity of this comment pour through my screen