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Ask HN: Are you leaving Heroku?

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Re: Ask HN: Are you leaving Heroku?

#61

Post by systemvoltage »

JanSt wrote: post #46
skrtskrt wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seconded, I'm on DigitalOcean App Platform, with further plans to self-manage it more either on individual droplets or a RKE2 cluster built on droplets, but I keep on kicking the can down the road because I don't need any more complexity

Why do you want so self manage? Saving a few bucks is probably not worth the hassle. I pretty much spend zero time on infra * push to deploy * auto-restart * managed db * easy scaling * s3 object storage * don‘t spend time on updates * web ui (monitoring, basic logging, configuration, ..)

I go the other way. No docker, just bare metal server with 4 cores and it can handle a shitton of traffic.

- Debian OS, fully locked down (all ports closed except SSH, with limiter).

- SSH + rsync to deploy app. I don't have a risk factor of managing dependencies between dev and prod, so I eliminated docker.

- SQLite db that gets thrown on S3 every hour using a python script. I don't want streaming anything. Just hourly backups is good enough.

- Cloudflare tunnel to connect to outside world and serve requests.

It is fast, cheap and requires not much "infra" knowledge. Of course this is for solo devs and small companies.

Re: Ask HN: Are you leaving Heroku?

#62

Post by mrbugsbunny »

buf wrote: post #7

Short answer: no. Every year I try out new things (fly, render), but stick with heroku because I'd rather focus on building products and not devops. I'm a solo dev making $700k a year on my projects. I'm happy to pay the extra cost for things to just work. If there is a catastrophic issue though, I do have backups elsewhere that I will use.

sent you a mail.

Re: Ask HN: Are you leaving Heroku?

#63

Post by buf »

nicoburns wrote: post #40
buf wrote: post #7

Short answer: no. Every year I try out new things (fly, render), but stick with heroku because I'd rather focus on building products and not devops. I'm a solo dev making $700k a year on my projects. I'm happy to pay the extra cost for things to just work. If there is a catastrophic issue though, I do have backups elsewhere that I will use.

Are the things you feel are missing from fly/render, or is it just a case of it not being worth switching an already set up project?

I wish I could give you a concrete answer but it's been about 7 or 8 months since I last looked at alternatives. IIRC, it was something to do with Postgres restore support not being as good.

Re: Ask HN: Are you leaving Heroku?

#64

Post by appliku »

samwillis wrote: post #14

We plan to, but not quite yet. The only thing keeping us on Heroku is the "point in time restore" for Postgres, once another platform (such as Render) has that we will probably make the switch. Having had to use the point in time restore feature before, it's indispensable. Just taken a look at Appliku as others have mentioned it (we are a Django app), that on DigitalOcean with their managed Postgres could be a strong…

Hey!

There is a heroku config vars sync, so you can keep using Heroku Postgres, but moving the app itself out of there.

Your vars will be in sync, so when heroku rotates credentials they will be quickly applied to your app deployed with Appliku

Re: Ask HN: Are you leaving Heroku?

#65

Post by melony »

nicoburns wrote: post #40
buf wrote: post #7

Short answer: no. Every year I try out new things (fly, render), but stick with heroku because I'd rather focus on building products and not devops. I'm a solo dev making $700k a year on my projects. I'm happy to pay the extra cost for things to just work. If there is a catastrophic issue though, I do have backups elsewhere that I will use.

Are the things you feel are missing from fly/render, or is it just a case of it not being worth switching an already set up project?

Fly.io doesn't track Heroku buildpacks nor does it recommend buildpacks as a first class workflow. Buildpacks are very underdocumented. The official tutorial and guides pushes Docker as the "preferred" workflow. Docker is nice for environments like Rust/Go/when you have additional dependencies. For Ruby/Python/Node buildpacks are a lot easier. Your typical Heroku tutorial says "use cedar-XYZ pack for Python Z and everything will just work". The version of Heroku buildpacks tracked by fly is many years out of date (Heroku 18, https://fly.io/docs/reference/builders/). People use Heroku because they don't want to deal with DevOps or the differences between Ubuntu vs Debian vs Fedora for server side deployments. Docker is great for complex use cases but 80% of the time you just need to install dependencies and expose a port. Fly.io claims to have automated detection of environments but this isn't well documented at all. The docs doesn't explain when to use the automated detection and when it will fail.

In the entire fly.io documentation, there are only two mentions of buildpacks: https://fly.io/docs/reference/builders/ https://fly.io/blog/topic/buildpacks/

Fly.io hides behind clever engineering blog posts while pushing tremendous complexity on to the developer. While I appreciate the transparency and clever engineering hacks used in building Fly, the lack of a true managed database with a proper GUI and point in time backup and recovery makes it hard to consider Fly as a true Heroku alternative (the official Fly.io recommendation is to go to Crunchy Data for managed databases).

Re: Ask HN: Are you leaving Heroku?

#66

Post by jokethrowaway »

eddof13 wrote: post #4

All of the companies I've worked for in the last few years who were Rails stack on Heroku have or were migrating to k8s deployments on the big three (AWS/GCP/Azure). For personal apps I'm looking at consolidating my stuff to Digital Ocean.

I've done that and now I kinda regret it, as there are cheaper alternatives and DO doesn't really offer much more than a VPS. I'm trying to switch to hetzner (but the 40$ per month on DO won't ruin me economically, so I keep postponing it)

Re: Ask HN: Are you leaving Heroku?

#67

Post by johnklos »

To be honest, no service is either too big or too small to run their own DNS. Any company with DNS issues that can't be temporarily fixed by reverting to a pre-issues config until they can address things is doing things quite poorly.

I don't use Heroku, but this trend of people and businesses taking no direct responsibility for critical services is a bad one, and I'd skip any business I could that does this.

Re: Ask HN: Are you leaving Heroku?

#68

Post by jrochkind1 »

cguess wrote: post #60

Today I went to restore a backup from three weeks ago on a new test instance and I saw it broke. I was getting some utterly weird messages about the pgcrypto extension not being available anymore (problem since I use UUIDs as my ids). After HOURS of messing around I found this https://devcenter.heroku.com/changelog-items/2446 . None of which was communicated to anyone, and it completely breaks all old backups. There'…

Yep. I am getting pretty good support communications on this issue in heroku support tickets (you are not?), but the fact that they haven't actually made a public announcement about it is pretty unforgiveable.

Last I heard from support, they thought the issue you are running into with backup restores would be solved maybe in the next week or two... but there is no public place to look for status or resolution, I just need to keep asking support, apparently. There are workarounds, that is there are ways to restore from those backups if you really need to... but it's confusing. Some more info here:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Heroku/comments/wgkjdf/heroku_ext_c...

Anyway, still being in the middle of dealing with this when the DNS issue happened... my opinion of heroku is definitely dropping fast... but it started out so high it's gonna take it a while to hit the ground and smash into pieces.

Re: Ask HN: Are you leaving Heroku?

#69

Post by jrochkind1 »

mrkurt wrote: post #48
samwillis wrote: post #14

We plan to, but not quite yet. The only thing keeping us on Heroku is the "point in time restore" for Postgres, once another platform (such as Render) has that we will probably make the switch. Having had to use the point in time restore feature before, it's indispensable. Just taken a look at Appliku as others have mentioned it (we are a Django app), that on DigitalOcean with their managed Postgres could be a strong…

Heroku's Postgres is still very good. If I were looking for "very good Postgres", I would go straight to Crunchy Bridge. I don't think a PaaS is going to get anywhere near that level soon (and I work on Fly.io, so I know we're not). Building a good PaaS and building an amazing managed database service are two problems that overlap less than you think. The moment we can get Crunchy Bridge or someone at a similar level…

Kind of becoming a sidebar, but I'm curious if Amazon RDS Postgres counts as "managed postgres"; or, more to the point, what something like Crunchy Bridge gets you over Amazon RDS.

(I have used neither Crunchy Bridge nor Amazon RDS, so this is an actual question, not a challenge! I have used Heroku postgres as well as self-hosted postgres)

Re: Ask HN: Are you leaving Heroku?

#70

Post by jrochkind1 »

I am not very familiar with any of these, but here is the short list of things I've compiled from past HN threads, that might be alternatives to heroku that provide similar affordances to heroku.

Most of them I have done no more than look at the website and determine that, yeah, it was similar to heroku for my personal criteria of what makes something similar to heroku. (Some things suggested in past threads did not meet them and I didn't keep on my list).

render.com

fly.io

platform.sh

railway.app

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