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Heroku is no longer the hobbyist's friend

blog.jalada.co.uk

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Re: Heroku is no longer the hobbyist's friend

#11

Post by ghaff »

eatitraw wrote: post #5
shostack wrote: post #3

While my instinctive reaction to Heroku's shift was "ugh, that sucks, how dare they," I have to say I get it. It is hard to build a successful business with that model given their offering. However to the comment about "git push heroku master," someone that is an "early" programmer like myself finds that level of simplification helpful when I'm focusing on things like learning all the other things that could go wrong…

> I'm wondering if there are any recommendations for "Heroku-like" providers with a free tier that stays up 24/7 for super simple Rails and Sinatra apps, perhaps with a DB. OpenShift( https://www.openshift.com/ ) may be the service you're looking for. I haven't tried it, but it looks nice.

Out of the box OpenShift has a variety of languages and frameworks as well as ProstgreSQL, MySQL, and MongoDB database options (plus custom cartridges). You get three free gears (i.e. containers) so up to 3 small apps.

I've only used it to create a small Python/Flask app http://wwos-bitmason.rhcloud.com/ but there are lots of examples and information on the OpenShift blog.

[Disclaimer: I work for Red Hat.]

Re: Heroku is no longer the hobbyist's friend

#12

Post by phunge »

seiji wrote: post #8
shostack wrote: post #3

While my instinctive reaction to Heroku's shift was "ugh, that sucks, how dare they," I have to say I get it. It is hard to build a successful business with that model given their offering. However to the comment about "git push heroku master," someone that is an "early" programmer like myself finds that level of simplification helpful when I'm focusing on things like learning all the other things that could go wrong…

This was making the rounds a while ago as half DIY half managed: http://convox.com

+1 Convox is worth looking at. Fully open source, feature-rich and leverages AWS&Docker instead of reinventing the wheel.

Re: Heroku is no longer the hobbyist's friend

#13

Post by carise »

eatitraw wrote: post #5
shostack wrote: post #3

While my instinctive reaction to Heroku's shift was "ugh, that sucks, how dare they," I have to say I get it. It is hard to build a successful business with that model given their offering. However to the comment about "git push heroku master," someone that is an "early" programmer like myself finds that level of simplification helpful when I'm focusing on things like learning all the other things that could go wrong…

> I'm wondering if there are any recommendations for "Heroku-like" providers with a free tier that stays up 24/7 for super simple Rails and Sinatra apps, perhaps with a DB. OpenShift( https://www.openshift.com/ ) may be the service you're looking for. I haven't tried it, but it looks nice.

I've used OpenShift and it's pretty straightforward to use. I don't feel like it's as easy to use as Heroku, but it got the job done. If I left my app idle (I think for 24 hrs or more), I noticed that it took awhile for it to awake when I tried to access it again.

Re: Heroku is no longer the hobbyist's friend

#14

Post by smt88 »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #2

Hobbyists rarely pay the bills. Go upmarket or suffer in perpetual purgatory.

I imagine MailChimp, WP Engine, and some other services would disagree.

It's possible to have a plan that suits hobbyists while still being profitable. In this case, as a PaaS, Heroku may not have been able to offer something like that, but it's not universally true that hobbyists are unprofitable.

Re: Heroku is no longer the hobbyist's friend

#15

Post by jonwayne »

pickle27 wrote: post #10
TheMagicHorsey wrote: post #6

Google AppEngine is a good alternative for Python, Go, Java, or PHP web apps.

I disagree - do they still lock you to their db? if they do then you are going to have to do a lot of work if you want to move to a different platform

Absolutely not. You can use Cloud Datastore, or you can connect to any database that can communicate over sockets or http, including Cloud SQL. Of note is that Datastore has a free tier, Cloud SQL does not, and Socket usage can incur (some) cost when communicating with other databases.

I've seen many Python apps that connect to a free MongoDB instance hosted on Mongolab.

(also worth noting that Node.js support for App Engine is currently in beta.)

(disclaimer: I work for Google on Cloud Platform)

Re: Heroku is no longer the hobbyist's friend

#16

Post by brandur »

Regarding the fifth point on SSL, I agree, but I'd recommend investigating a combined Heroku and Cloudflare stack as I've described here:

https://brandur.org/fragments/cloudflare-ssl

You can stay on the free tier of Cloudflare and the hobby tier of Heroku and get full encryption on your custom domain (and without worrying about getting certs issued). This is how I run my more important hobby apps.

And regarding the lack of novelty of `git push heroku master` — I'd argue that it's still surprisingly valuable even in modern times. Sure you can do it yourself using a dozen different techniques these days, but as a hobbyist I want to be building apps and not maintaining personal infrastructure.

(Disclaimer: I used to work at Heroku.)

Re: Heroku is no longer the hobbyist's friend

#17

Post by smt88 »

phunge wrote: post #12
seiji wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This was making the rounds a while ago as half DIY half managed: http://convox.com

+1 Convox is worth looking at. Fully open source, feature-rich and leverages AWS&Docker instead of reinventing the wheel.

Docker originally came from DotCloud, which was basically the same concept/underlying services as this. It was amazing. I never understood why someone would want to use Heroku instead. I haven't used it since they sold that business, but I'm excited to use Convox.

Re: Heroku is no longer the hobbyist's friend

#18

Post by savant »

A reasonable option for hobbyists is Dokku[1], a single-server heroku clone. I'm also pretty excited about Convox[2], and would definitely recommend that early adopters check it out.

I get that people are frustrated with heroku's pricing, but at the end of the day I think that if your side project isn't worth the money you spend on it's hosting, maybe you should look into other side projects? If it's truly not a money-making project, not needing to scale it or have it up 24/7 seems like a reasonable trade-off to not paying for it's hosting.

The number of tools and resources Heroku provides is quite significant, and developing/deploying/maintaining similar solutions is certainly not cheap or easy. Especially at scale.

Disclaimer: I'm one of the Dokku maintainers.

  - [1] http://progrium.viewdocs.io/dokku/
  - [2] http://convox.com/

Re: Heroku is no longer the hobbyist's friend

#19

Post by PascalW »

Heroku indeed used to be very generous. I totally get why they are making these changes, it's hard to sustain this in the long run.

That said; for hobby stuff I've switched to a cheap VPS plus Dokku [0] and haven't looked back. Works with Heroku buildpacks and even runs custom Dockerfiles if you need anything fancy. Hardly requires any maintenance.

There's a couple of alternatives like Deis [1] and Flynn [2] that offer more advanced features, but they're much more complex and way overkill for my pet projects.

[0] http://progrium.viewdocs.io/dokku/ [1] http://deis.io/ [2] https://flynn.io/

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