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No one's watching. Your initial comment just really didn't add any value. Calling Heroku monolith compared to Amazon is an understatement and I don't see Heroku

No one's watching. Your initial comment just really didn't add any value. Calling Heroku monolith compared to Amazon is an understatement and I don't see Heroku being "wiped off the map" from this.

ceejayoz 13y ago
https://twitter.com/scottvdp/status/401111184092315648 https://twitter.com/scottvdp/status/401111184092315648 > RDS 4XL vs Heroku Mecha: 40% cheaper on demand, 74% cheaper 1 year reserved, 82% cheaper 3 year reserved... with more features and capacity. If that's true, Heroku's Postgres offering isn't going to do well. "Wiped off the map" may be an overstatement, but not by that much.
- fat0wl 13y ago
  If you listen closely you can hear the sound of an army of devteams uploading DB exports to Amazon.... & it would be louder if the rest could figure out where to put the custom DB URL parameter ;D
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
fat0wl 13y ago
I wasn't calling Heroku a monolith because they're a huge company -- it's because they suck you in & then youre forever stuck in their web of services. I bet they start bleeding a lot of money now that there is an easy-to-use alternative for Postgres hosting on a well-known platform. Heroku epitomizes the idea of overcharge + vendor lock-in & people only put up with their high prices because they don't have the time to figure out a better configuration. Database is the easiest thing to jump ship with, you just have to change 1 URL. It's a shame that Amazon has some proprietary idea of a machine image, but my ideal hosting scenario is just App Server Machine Image + DB + any Machine Images required for extra services. Shouldn't have to choose between several paid services that are just different APIs into an app server component you should have direct access to. I don't understand how the open source community can be so into Heroku given that it's basically just wrapping open source software & charging for it, getting away with it by saying they're charging for the admin UI or whatever.
- avenger123 13y ago
  Fair enough. Looks like not a lot of love for Heroku for you. This could be a nice fire under Heroku's ass to get more competitive.
  - eli 13y ago
    Hard to compete with your main supplier, no?
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- rpedela 13y ago
  Just like AWS, you pay Heroku to simplify your system administration. You don't have to like Heroku's product but there is a place for it. I do not use Heroku but it makes total sense if you have an app you need to deploy and you don't know system admin, don't want to do system admin yourself, or can't afford a system admin. GitHub just "wraps up" git and charges for it and I am happy to pay them. Setting up a git server is a royal pain in the ass. Setting up a wiki, issue tracker, etc to go along with a git server is even more of a pain in the ass. Well done cloud services make life simpler, and many people will pay for that simplicity regardless of how the internals are built.
  - krob 13y ago
    you could always use gitlabs or phabricator and you get much of what you just said is a PITA.
- kennystone 13y ago
  This is not true at all. Apps on Heroku are built on open source software (Rails, Postgres, etc). You can always decide to host it all yourself without too many issues.
  - fat0wl 13y ago
    How is this not true? It absolutely IS vendor lock-in, just in a slightly less sinister form. If you add 5 services & then to switch hosts it's not another git push. You have to re-configure each of the services. If you'd done this yourself all along & made machine images it would have been less convenient at the time, but probably cheaper & a good learning experience. There are many other hosting platforms that offer Linux boxes so you could move your whole App/Software layer to another of these companies without much trouble. I'm not saying Heroku is evil or anything. Yes, they provide a good platform. But I think any web company with a significant customer base would benefit more from the cost savings & freedom of a purer platform than the conveniences of Heroku. Plus, there are so many configuration issues with their services. I have auto-scaling setup with Adept and still I see these long request-queue buildups now & then. I get the feeling I would not have the same issues with an AWS stack where I have CPU usage monitors that are very transparent & all the networking is trivial. I still use Heroku as an app server & don't hate it enough to up & move (though a large factor in this is I'm not the one footing the bill, the client is...) but anything I can easily get on to AWS is a no-brainer. Database is one of those things -- a couple clicks to scale up/down every year is all thats really required. CONCLUSION (cuz I rambled too much): I think Heroku offers scaling/convenience but AWS is just so rock solid & cheap that you can probably just buy larger instances than you need (to compensate for scaling) and have much better performance at the same price. Then you just need to learn how to install your tools & take a machine image as backup. Plus there's a lot of value in learning how to work with machine images that goes way beyond hosting a web app.
eonil 13y ago
Also Heroku is not available in Japan region. Simply funny.

No one's watching. Your initial comment just really didn't add any value. Calling Heroku monolith compared to Amazon is an understatement and I don't see Heroku being "wiped off the map" from this.

ceejayoz 13y ago

https://twitter.com/scottvdp/status/401111184092315648 https://twitter.com/scottvdp/status/401111184092315648 > RDS 4XL vs Heroku Mecha: 40% cheaper on demand, 74% cheaper 1 year reserved, 82% cheaper 3 year reserved... with more features and capacity. If that's true, Heroku's Postgres offering isn't going to do well. "Wiped off the map" may be an overstatement, but not by that much.

fat0wl 13y ago
If you listen closely you can hear the sound of an army of devteams uploading DB exports to Amazon.... & it would be louder if the rest could figure out where to put the custom DB URL parameter ;D
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]

fat0wl 13y ago

I wasn't calling Heroku a monolith because they're a huge company -- it's because they suck you in & then youre forever stuck in their web of services. I bet they start bleeding a lot of money now that there is an easy-to-use alternative for Postgres hosting on a well-known platform. Heroku epitomizes the idea of overcharge + vendor lock-in & people only put up with their high prices because they don't have the time to figure out a better configuration. Database is the easiest thing to jump ship with, you just have to change 1 URL. It's a shame that Amazon has some proprietary idea of a machine image, but my ideal hosting scenario is just App Server Machine Image + DB + any Machine Images required for extra services. Shouldn't have to choose between several paid services that are just different APIs into an app server component you should have direct access to. I don't understand how the open source community can be so into Heroku given that it's basically just wrapping open source software & charging for it, getting away with it by saying they're charging for the admin UI or whatever.

avenger123 13y ago
Fair enough. Looks like not a lot of love for Heroku for you. This could be a nice fire under Heroku's ass to get more competitive.
- eli 13y ago
  Hard to compete with your main supplier, no?
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
rpedela 13y ago
Just like AWS, you pay Heroku to simplify your system administration. You don't have to like Heroku's product but there is a place for it. I do not use Heroku but it makes total sense if you have an app you need to deploy and you don't know system admin, don't want to do system admin yourself, or can't afford a system admin. GitHub just "wraps up" git and charges for it and I am happy to pay them. Setting up a git server is a royal pain in the ass. Setting up a wiki, issue tracker, etc to go along with a git server is even more of a pain in the ass. Well done cloud services make life simpler, and many people will pay for that simplicity regardless of how the internals are built.
- krob 13y ago
  you could always use gitlabs or phabricator and you get much of what you just said is a PITA.
kennystone 13y ago
This is not true at all. Apps on Heroku are built on open source software (Rails, Postgres, etc). You can always decide to host it all yourself without too many issues.
- fat0wl 13y ago
  How is this not true? It absolutely IS vendor lock-in, just in a slightly less sinister form. If you add 5 services & then to switch hosts it's not another git push. You have to re-configure each of the services. If you'd done this yourself all along & made machine images it would have been less convenient at the time, but probably cheaper & a good learning experience. There are many other hosting platforms that offer Linux boxes so you could move your whole App/Software layer to another of these companies without much trouble. I'm not saying Heroku is evil or anything. Yes, they provide a good platform. But I think any web company with a significant customer base would benefit more from the cost savings & freedom of a purer platform than the conveniences of Heroku. Plus, there are so many configuration issues with their services. I have auto-scaling setup with Adept and still I see these long request-queue buildups now & then. I get the feeling I would not have the same issues with an AWS stack where I have CPU usage monitors that are very transparent & all the networking is trivial. I still use Heroku as an app server & don't hate it enough to up & move (though a large factor in this is I'm not the one footing the bill, the client is...) but anything I can easily get on to AWS is a no-brainer. Database is one of those things -- a couple clicks to scale up/down every year is all thats really required. CONCLUSION (cuz I rambled too much): I think Heroku offers scaling/convenience but AWS is just so rock solid & cheap that you can probably just buy larger instances than you need (to compensate for scaling) and have much better performance at the same price. Then you just need to learn how to install your tools & take a machine image as backup. Plus there's a lot of value in learning how to work with machine images that goes way beyond hosting a web app.

eonil 13y ago

Also Heroku is not available in Japan region. Simply funny.