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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

#81

Post by arikrak »

jacques_chester wrote: post #73
eatitraw wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Cloud Foundry. You can try it through Pivotal Web Services or BlueMix. It reuses Heroku's code for several buildpacks, particularly Ruby. I know that it works really well because (disclaimer!) I worked on the Cloud Foundry Buildpacks team for Pivotal.

How easy is it to migrate your database, app, addons and configuration from Heroku to Bluemix? I'm going to consider a new host once Heroku ends it's grandfathered prices on Feb 1, 2016.

Re: Heroku is no longer the hobbyist's friend

#82

Post by nostrademons »

rubyn00bie wrote: post #78
nostrademons wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 d…

Well... More concisely, what I'm trying to say here is that often time we don't consider all the costs, just the monetary ones, which leave us in situations like the poster's current one. He considered the monetary costs, but didn't think through what other costs are associated (time/stress/performance/etc) and has come out "on bottom." It does make sense if you do a proper cost benefit analysis, to yourself, in this…

It didn't sound like he has come out "on bottom". Rather, it sounds like he's evaluated all the costs and decided that Linode fits his needs better.

The blog post, presumably, is because there are still things that he misses about Heroku, and so even though Linode has come out on top, he wishes that there were some sort of hybrid solution. That, and there may be other people in his situation that haven't yet made the cost/benefit analysis themselves and aren't aware of alternatives.

Re: Heroku is no longer the hobbyist's friend

#83

Post by felixgallo »

cynix wrote: post #66
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…

If only these things supported FreeBSD…

you don't need those things if you have freebsd, because you already have jails and, e.g., https://github.com/iocage/iocage .

Re: Heroku is no longer the hobbyist's friend

#84

Post by savant »

cynix wrote: post #67
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…

Any plans for FreeBSD support?

We largely just orchestrate docker - there is a bit of glue around nginx of course - but I don't see why we couldn't support FreeBSD.

Arguably the biggest blocker is actually getting a running BSD instance - I'm going to say I've never successfully installed FreeBSD, though the last time I tried was 10+ years ago - and then potentially creating a `docker` binary that uses Jails but responds as if it's docker.

As it's open source, I definitely wouldn't mind helping someone investigate FreeBSD support :)

EDIT: Looks like there is already docker on FreeBSD, https://wiki.freebsd.org/Docker . I assume you guys have bash, so this should more or less work...

Re: Heroku is no longer the hobbyist's friend

#85

Post by savant »

joshmn wrote: post #55
orthoganol wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except it's $14, because I can't remember the last time I built even a trivial app that didn't incorporate background processes somehow (the extra $7). Then it's an extra $20/mo if you want SSL. Which you will most likely want. That $7/mo just became $34/mo. Bye, bye Heroku.

For something small (assuming it is), you can get away using Unicorn as your Rails server (assuming Rails), you can spawn a worker inside your dyno using before_fork and #spawn. For SSL, you can use CloudFlare as your DNS and take advantage of their SSL feature. While not ideal, does it need to be ideal for a trivial, probably-not-super-high-functioning-hacky-app? There's always Cloud66 — which I've used to great suc…

Jesus $50 a month? How did you end up finding such a team?

Re: Heroku is no longer the hobbyist's friend

#86

Post by shostack »

area51org wrote: post #58
iza wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to https://www.openshift.com/products/pricing/plan-comparison the free plan idles after 24 hours of inactivity ( https://developers.openshift.com/en/managing-idling.html ) However you can work around it by hitting your server with an http request every 24 hours, or upgrade to the Bronze Plan which apparently has $0 base price anyway so I'm not sure what the downside is.

Openshift user here: there is no downside. Bronze truly is $0/mo. It's just that you have to given them a CC number (while you do not need to do that for the "free" plan). Why the CC number? Bronze lets you pay for more features if you want them—but there's no obligation.

Are there any ways to be hit by surprise charges on Bronze? I'm assuming setting up a ping via the New Relic trick people used on Heroku is sufficient.

Also, for a relative novice, how easy is it to get a Rails or Sinatra app up and running?

My concern longer-term is that Openshift would go the same route as Heroku. Is there anything about their business model that might indicate that's not a major risk?

Re: Heroku is no longer the hobbyist's friend

#87

Post by jacques_chester »

arikrak wrote: post #81
jacques_chester wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cloud Foundry. You can try it through Pivotal Web Services or BlueMix. It reuses Heroku's code for several buildpacks, particularly Ruby. I know that it works really well because (disclaimer!) I worked on the Cloud Foundry Buildpacks team for Pivotal.

How easy is it to migrate your database, app, addons and configuration from Heroku to Bluemix? I'm going to consider a new host once Heroku ends it's grandfathered prices on Feb 1, 2016.

I'd recommend Pivotal Web Services[0], aka PWS, aka "p-dubs", buuuut that's only because I work for the company running it :)

If you have a 12-factor app that pulls config from the environment, it should ideally not be too traumatic. Services are meant to be injected by the platform.

Apps should be the easiest part. Of the buildpacks: Ruby, Python and Node are based on Heroku's and are very nearly identical. Go is based on a community buildpack, PHP is a complete ground-up rewrite and Java is a ground-up rewrite maintained by the Spring team.

If you signup for PWS and you find things broken or missing, email me: jchester@pivotal.io, and I will find who can help you.

[0] http://run.pivotal.io/

Re: Heroku is no longer the hobbyist's friend

#88

Post by mr_luc »

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…

Convox and Otto are occupying similar spaces (with Empire being vaguely similar). Otto has the immutable infrastructure powers of Terraform to fall back on, (not to mention Consul, Vault and Packer), and at v0.0.1 already supports deploying apps to clouds other than Amazon (and has as lower fixed cost for deploying simple apps, because apps using the simple recipe don't need private registries etc, so the only real non-app fixed cost in the simple case is storage of built AMIs).

However, Convox is built to do something considerably more focused, and doesn't have to worry about eg its infrastructure setup bits being usable as a separate product yet ... and it shows in the sophistication of what they've put together in such a short time, like the Postgresql, Redis and Papertrail services. Likewise, though Otto is slated to integrate with Nomad (for containers as a deployment unit), it doesn't yet, and only supports AMIs.

Who wins? We do! I am very, very happy that there's such active innovation happening in this space.

Re: Heroku is no longer the hobbyist's friend

#89

Post by jestar_jokin »

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.

Note that, for some reason, they limit regions that can use their paid tiers. So, you can't use them if you're in third world countries like Australia or New Zealand.

Re: Heroku is no longer the hobbyist's friend

#90

Post by cynix »

felixgallo wrote: post #83
cynix wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If only these things supported FreeBSD…

you don't need those things if you have freebsd, because you already have jails and, e.g., https://github.com/iocage/iocage .

Thanks. I've been using ezjail, but will take a look at iocage. What I really want, though, is the Heroku-style push-to-deploy workflow that things like Dokku seems to offer.
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