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I used to prefer the flexibility and efficiency of having my VPS setup, and it's certainly cheaper. Over the past 2 years though, I've saved so much time and sa

I used to prefer the flexibility and efficiency of having my VPS setup, and it's certainly cheaper. Over the past 2 years though, I've saved so much time and sanity using Heroku. I certainly can understand saving thousands of dollars and improving performance by moving from Heroku to a VPS or bare metal solution, but $90 is not uncomfortable enough for me to warrant the change. Interesting article!

jonmccartie 12y ago
Thanks, David. We use Heroku a TON at work and I absolutely love them. For my small-ish app, I just couldn't afford the extra cash to pay Heroku to manage my app. Thanks for reading!
- davidlumley 12y ago
  Ah, that makes a lot more sense! I quickly skimmed through SproutMark and it seemed great so assumed it was a full time job.
  - jonmccartie 12y ago
    That's the best compliment I've gotten all day. Thanks! :)
brettskiii 12y ago
Heroku apps aren't performant in many areas of the world e.g Australia like where I am, Amazon EC2 has an Australian region which is amazing
- davidlumley 12y ago
  I'm also Australian, but we have a fairly international customer base so the ~150ms difference for requests that hit the application hasn't been that big for us in the scheme of things.
  - brettskiii 12y ago
    Yeah we have a near-realtime app and all our customers are in Australia. Tried heroku meh. Silly thing is they run on Amazon so should be able to deploy to Australia. We also do thing heroku doesn't support with some vpn setup etc but all good for those who can use it.
donw 12y ago
Question -- do you have any background as a sysadmin? If not, then I can totally understand the attractiveness of something like Heroku. It really does take care of a lot of nastiness. From my side, I've got a fantastic Ansible setup for databases, security, ssl certificate distribution, and so on, and so Heroku doesn't really buy me anything for the extra money.
- davidlumley 12y ago
  None as a fulltime sysadmin, most of my experience has been in operations, and in configuring servers for my own projects. I've used Puppet and Chef before, haven't checked out Ansible. My main dissatisfaction with those tools was that there wasn't a super easy way to get started on a new VPS. I had to configure roles and settings to install Puppet or Chef, and _then_ I could get started automating things. It's certainly not hard, but I've never been in a position where it was something I did full time so have really valued platforms that do a lot of this for me.
  - donw 12y ago
    That's why I picked Ansible. The only dependency is SSH, and you can write modules in whatever language you choose. Plus -- and this is a big win -- Ansible actually has usable documentation and practical examples, which coupled with a really clean design, make it way easier to get developers up to speed on the operations half of things.
    - frik 12y ago
      Can you recommend tutorials, examples for Ansible? Is Ruby knowledge required to efficiently use Ansible? I would like to automate the installation of nginx, php, nodejs, mysql, etc. incl. modify a few config files.
      - donw 12y ago
        Ansible is written in Python, so no you don't need Ruby knowledge, and I've found the documentation -- especially the tutorials -- to be very helpful: http://docs.ansible.com/intro.html http://docs.ansible.com/intro.html

jonmccartie 12y ago

Thanks, David. We use Heroku a TON at work and I absolutely love them. For my small-ish app, I just couldn't afford the extra cash to pay Heroku to manage my app. Thanks for reading!

davidlumley 12y ago
Ah, that makes a lot more sense! I quickly skimmed through SproutMark and it seemed great so assumed it was a full time job.
- jonmccartie 12y ago
  That's the best compliment I've gotten all day. Thanks! :)

brettskiii 12y ago

Heroku apps aren't performant in many areas of the world e.g Australia like where I am, Amazon EC2 has an Australian region which is amazing

davidlumley 12y ago
I'm also Australian, but we have a fairly international customer base so the ~150ms difference for requests that hit the application hasn't been that big for us in the scheme of things.
- brettskiii 12y ago
  Yeah we have a near-realtime app and all our customers are in Australia. Tried heroku meh. Silly thing is they run on Amazon so should be able to deploy to Australia. We also do thing heroku doesn't support with some vpn setup etc but all good for those who can use it.

donw 12y ago

Question -- do you have any background as a sysadmin? If not, then I can totally understand the attractiveness of something like Heroku. It really does take care of a lot of nastiness. From my side, I've got a fantastic Ansible setup for databases, security, ssl certificate distribution, and so on, and so Heroku doesn't really buy me anything for the extra money.

davidlumley 12y ago
None as a fulltime sysadmin, most of my experience has been in operations, and in configuring servers for my own projects. I've used Puppet and Chef before, haven't checked out Ansible. My main dissatisfaction with those tools was that there wasn't a super easy way to get started on a new VPS. I had to configure roles and settings to install Puppet or Chef, and _then_ I could get started automating things. It's certainly not hard, but I've never been in a position where it was something I did full time so have really valued platforms that do a lot of this for me.
- donw 12y ago
  That's why I picked Ansible. The only dependency is SSH, and you can write modules in whatever language you choose. Plus -- and this is a big win -- Ansible actually has usable documentation and practical examples, which coupled with a really clean design, make it way easier to get developers up to speed on the operations half of things.
  - frik 12y ago
    Can you recommend tutorials, examples for Ansible? Is Ruby knowledge required to efficiently use Ansible? I would like to automate the installation of nginx, php, nodejs, mysql, etc. incl. modify a few config files.
    - donw 12y ago
      Ansible is written in Python, so no you don't need Ruby knowledge, and I've found the documentation -- especially the tutorials -- to be very helpful: http://docs.ansible.com/intro.html http://docs.ansible.com/intro.html