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Thank You Heroku, or "How To Eliminate Sysadminning"

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Re: Thank You Heroku, or "How To Eliminate Sysadminning"

#41

Post by jackowayed »

I like Heroku, but it seems overpriced for most situations.

In particular, I think it's an issue that there's no decrease in cost for dynos (though I be for extremely large sites there's special pricing). Because of this and because you get a freebie, dyno pricing is actually a little progressive (ie. your average cost/dyno increases as you get more dynos).

If you have 2 dynos, you're paying for one at ~$36/month, so your average cost per dyno is $18. If you have 11 dynos, you're paying for 10 for a total of $360/month, which is an average of $32.73/dyno-month.

Re: Thank You Heroku, or "How To Eliminate Sysadminning"

#42

Post by hopeless »

dasil003 wrote: post #22

I'm intrigued by Heroku (and EY Cloud), but the thing that really freaks me out is how they charge for every little extra thing. I love the idea of a turnkey solution for Rails deployment and cloud scalability, but for me personally I don't think I would do a startup on it because the value proposition is squeezed from both sides. On the low-end I can get a VPS for $10-$20 month and get a Rails app up and running for…

Even though I had a VPS configured and running for almost a year (i.e., all the upfront sysadmin setup done) I was stressing about what I hadn't done, or more precisely what I didn't know I needed to do. Forgetting to update the OS, check if the machine had been compromised, check the load/mem/disk space etc. Just a hundred little worries floating around inside my head.

So I moved to Heroku to focus purely on the app. It's wrong to say they change for "every little thing"... most addons are free. But yes, hourly cron, background workers, unlimited bundles etc are charged for.

I'll always recommend to anyone that they check out Heroku because I think it's a real time saver if your app fits within their constraints. During development you'll usually save money and then the costs will scale (hopefully) with your income after launch

Re: Thank You Heroku, or "How To Eliminate Sysadminning"

#43

Post by donw »

moe wrote: post #17
thedob wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're definitely correct about the first statement. It should be revised to "Heroku has a strong history of very little downtime." Regarding the second though, I truly believe that the cost + time savings are tremendous from using their platform vs administering your own early on in a startup product lifecycle.

In a perfect world heroku would be the ideal "pay later" option. I.e. you start out with them and once you outgrow their platform you simply hire the sysadmin then , and make him transplant the beautifully clean rails app onto your own infrastructure. Except... reality is harsh and ugly. You want the guy with the sysadmin foo on your team from as early as possible. Because if your thinking goes along the lines you ju…

I'm a sysadmin-turned-startup-founder, so there's my bias right there, plain for all to see.

With that, this is really, really good advice.

In sysadmin-land, all my pain comes from software that was never written with management in mind. Assumptions like 'all TCP ports are open, all the time, between all servers', 'we can put things wherever we want in the filesystem', and 'the server should be configured just like my local workstation' make upgrades and deployment a nightmare, and are nominally difficult to change in a codebase with more than a few iterations underneath it.

Oh, and my other favorite pet peeves: Applications that provide no easy way to verify whether or not they are, in fact, up or down, and having debugging information dumped into the logs marked as errors, rather than as debug messages.

Keep in mind that these won't bite you in the ass initially, when you're only on a single server, or on a small, tightly controlled cluster of boxes. They'll torpedo you when you need to scale up, and you'll get a second shot in the boilers if you ever need meet any number of regulatory standards for various industries (PCI, HIPAA, etc.).

Fixing these early-on is easy, and you can enforce scaling-and-deployment friendly coding practices through automated unit testing and CI. Won't even really cost your coding team any extra time. Fixing them down the road, after you've got a few thousand live customers and a big pile of codebase to dig around in, is... difficult, at best.

Re: Thank You Heroku, or "How To Eliminate Sysadminning"

#44

Post by grahamr »

xal wrote: post #36
freetard wrote: post #10

I tried installing spree the other day, a rails shopping app, and I gave up after entering gem dependency hell and the no local file policy. Went faster on my own server with nginx+passenger.

You cannot be PCI DSS compliant on Heroku unless you only use paypal express or google checkout for your payment backend. Be mindful of that before you commit to something like spree. I recommend Shopify instead :D

Is this accurate that paypal express and google checkout are the only legitimate ways to accept payments while deployed on Heroku?

Re: Thank You Heroku, or "How To Eliminate Sysadminning"

#45

Post by rgrieselhuber »

njl wrote: post #25
jokull wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. There are a number of some pretty serious restrictions. I would _love_ something like Heroku for WSGI applications. Ian Bicking is working on something similar, not as high level with his Silver Lining project. http://bitbucket.org/ianb/silverlining/

A couple of months ago I explored building a Django-friendly Heroku clone. I white-boarded out the architecture, estimated how much work would be needed for all the pieces, and built a spreadsheet revenue model. It's an interesting and attractive business, but I'm only one man and my C skills are rusty (really, really rusty). I couldn't get myself to a point where I could deliver a product for at least a year, and I…

I see a lot of looking and no doing. ;-)

Re: Thank You Heroku, or "How To Eliminate Sysadminning"

#46

Post by patio11 »

moe wrote: post #17
thedob wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're definitely correct about the first statement. It should be revised to "Heroku has a strong history of very little downtime." Regarding the second though, I truly believe that the cost + time savings are tremendous from using their platform vs administering your own early on in a startup product lifecycle.

In a perfect world heroku would be the ideal "pay later" option. I.e. you start out with them and once you outgrow their platform you simply hire the sysadmin then , and make him transplant the beautifully clean rails app onto your own infrastructure. Except... reality is harsh and ugly. You want the guy with the sysadmin foo on your team from as early as possible. Because if your thinking goes along the lines you ju…

Heroku will run your stuff for a while just until things get interesting and worthwhile load starts to build.

I seem to mention this frequently, but I'll mention it again: there are many business models for which you can reach any level of "worthwhile" business results without ever taxing your setup. The whole notion of "Make a service on a shoestring, get popular, race against time to keep up with the volumes of traffic possibly crushing you before you can raise money to rearchitect the service" is the exception, not the law of nature.

Re: Thank You Heroku, or "How To Eliminate Sysadminning"

#47

Post by squidsoup »

I've been considering using Heroku for my one-man side project , simply because I do not have the time to attend to both development and system administration. I'm aware that it's more expensive, but when your time is precious, I suspect it will be well worth the extra investment.

Re: Thank You Heroku, or "How To Eliminate Sysadminning"

#48

Post by gridspy »

dasil003 wrote: post #22

I'm intrigued by Heroku (and EY Cloud), but the thing that really freaks me out is how they charge for every little extra thing. I love the idea of a turnkey solution for Rails deployment and cloud scalability, but for me personally I don't think I would do a startup on it because the value proposition is squeezed from both sides. On the low-end I can get a VPS for $10-$20 month and get a Rails app up and running for…

Your clean analysis mirrors my own choice to use virtual and dedicated servers.

I think that it would be sensible for a VC founded startup to eliminate risk and go for scale on day one with an internal infrastructure team + self managed, colocated physical servers.

Re: Thank You Heroku, or "How To Eliminate Sysadminning"

#49

Post by njl »

rgrieselhuber wrote: post #45
njl wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A couple of months ago I explored building a Django-friendly Heroku clone. I white-boarded out the architecture, estimated how much work would be needed for all the pieces, and built a spreadsheet revenue model. It's an interesting and attractive business, but I'm only one man and my C skills are rusty (really, really rusty). I couldn't get myself to a point where I could deliver a product for at least a year, and I…

I see a lot of looking and no doing. ;-)

Hah! Well, I extracted myself from my previous commitments about two weeks ago, then spent a week building a co-founder-finder (http://amb.itio.us/). I've been spending this week doing mock-ups and filling out the rough architecture of the app I'm building. Give me a month or two.

Re: Thank You Heroku, or "How To Eliminate Sysadminning"

#50

Post by rebelvc »

_pius wrote: post #8
rebelvc wrote: post #5

Add php support pretty please

Why would one need this for PHP? Isn't PHP already pretty much upload and go?

Something that scales, inexpensive, and with out the hassles of system admin that is required with ec2, slicehost, rackspace cloud, and other cloud sites.
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