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Heroku is no longer the hobbyist's friend

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Re: Heroku is no longer the hobbyist's friend

#41

Post by jamiepenney »

PascalW wrote: post #19

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 off…

How big is the VPS you're running it on? I've got a 1GB Digital Ocean box for my side projects already, wondering if I should just spin up another one of those with Dokku instead.

Re: Heroku is no longer the hobbyist's friend

#44

Post by nostrademons »

rubyn00bie wrote: post #30

Not to be rude, but these complaints, minus the "increase" are standard Heroku practice. I see no changes-- in fact, what has changed there, anything? They're finally too expensive for you, or you outgrew them? They aren't cheap, and never have been, especially for hobbyists. If you have a hobby, you most likely have more time than money to complete your hobby, so why, why use something like Heroku? The very nature o…

Different hobbyists have different reasons for doing their hobby. Some just want to learn new tech, any tech, and for them, learning how to deploy on a VPS is a good use of time. But others would rather focus on frontend dev - it's a hobby, after all, the point is to do what's fun - or solving problems for their friends, or learning about a market. It makes no sense for these people to worry about sysadmin stuff or deployment.

Re: Heroku is no longer the hobbyist's friend

#45

Post by [deleted] »

ufmace wrote: post #40

I can certainly see the point where Heroku comes out wildly overpriced for certain types of hobby-scale apps. I've seen several people recommend dedicated servers via Linode or DigitalOcean instead, which has it's own pluses and minuses - gotta maintain the server, but for a pretty low price, you get something powerful enough to run a 24/7 server + database + whatever other odds and ends your app needs, as long as th…

[deleted]

Re: Heroku is no longer the hobbyist's friend

#46

Post by tfe »

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.

Unless you've got a whole lot of them, paying $7 to Heroku is probably still your best bet. Especially if you're already familiar with the ecosystem.

Re: Heroku is no longer the hobbyist's friend

#47

Post by m_fayer »

jonwayne wrote: post #28
m_fayer wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a longstanding gae user I have to disagree. The performance characteristics are esoteric, they're always a few generations behind wrt language updates and framework compatibility, and the whole platform is stagnating. At least in Java-land, and I think Python too.

If you are a Java user and want to take advantage of Java 8, I really encourage you to check out managed VMs. We have a runtime available for Java 8 & Jetty 9 on github here: https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/appengine-java-vm-run... (disclaimer: I work for Google on Cloud Platform, but not on anything Java related)

I tried to move beyond archaic Java with managed VMs when they were first announced. Back then it was half-baked and glitchy, it felt like Google was using its actual users to do their testing, I hope it's gotten better since.

Generally, I think what Google is missing (or doesn't care about) is that anyone who is using a PAAS provider is willingly exchanging some flexibility, control, and price-efficiency for the luxury of having devopsy management tasks taken off their hands in a competent and reliable manner. Managed VMs seem to be providing so little of that that you might as well move to IAAS. Or, do as I have, and move to Azure - who do manage to stay pretty current, and blend PAAS and IAAS in a much more elegant manner.

Re: Heroku is no longer the hobbyist's friend

#48

Post by lexcorvus »

savant wrote: post #18

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 mone…

Correcting grammar and spelling errors—especially in public—is always a tough call: upon judging that an error is systematic and not a simple typo, do you help the writer avoid the error in perpetuity—even if it embarrasses them a little, and even if you'll probably get downvoted for being pedantic or offtopic? In this case, I've determined the downsides are worth the possibility of sparing the author a lifetime of error. So, without further ado:

    s/it's hosting/its hosting/g

Re: Heroku is no longer the hobbyist's friend

#49

Post by savant »

jamiepenney wrote: post #41
PascalW wrote: post #19

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 off…

How big is the VPS you're running it on? I've got a 1GB Digital Ocean box for my side projects already, wondering if I should just spin up another one of those with Dokku instead.

We normally recommend at least 1GB (and tell users to run swap on smaller instances). It's really just dependent upon your app's memory usage, and you can use docker options to limit app resources quite easily :)

Re: Heroku is no longer the hobbyist's friend

#50

Post by jonwayne »

m_fayer wrote: post #47
jonwayne wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are a Java user and want to take advantage of Java 8, I really encourage you to check out managed VMs. We have a runtime available for Java 8 & Jetty 9 on github here: https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/appengine-java-vm-run... (disclaimer: I work for Google on Cloud Platform, but not on anything Java related)

I tried to move beyond archaic Java with managed VMs when they were first announced. Back then it was half-baked and glitchy, it felt like Google was using its actual users to do their testing, I hope it's gotten better since. Generally, I think what Google is missing (or doesn't care about) is that anyone who is using a PAAS provider is willingly exchanging some flexibility, control, and price-efficiency for the lux…

> I tried to move beyond archaic Java with managed VMs when they were first announced.

Please keep in mind that Managed VMs is still in beta, however, there are other parts of Google Cloud Platform that are in GA, including Compute Engine (IaaS), and Container Engine (somewhere between PaaS and IaaS). In fact, depending on how much control you want, Container Engine can be a better fit than App Engine.

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