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A simple DIY Heroku replacement to keep your hosting costs down

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Re: A simple DIY Heroku replacement to keep your hosting costs down

#41

Post by samwillis »

As a relatively late Heroku convert (we moved to it maybe 18 months ago from managing everything ourselves) all of these DIY Heroku replacements may cover deployment and scalability well but they miss two very important aspects of using Heroku.

1. Heroku will manage the underlying os and software, ensuring its all update and patched. We don't need to worry about the security of the bottom of the stack, that is their responsibility.

2. Backups, Heroku have a fantastic backup system for Postgres, it has already paid for itself. I will find it hard to move to any other system after they saved me after accidentally deleting half our db...

My only "complaint" about Heroku is cost, it is quite expensive for memory heavy processes (we have a few of these), jumps from $50 for 1gb to $250 for 2.5gb?! But the ease of use far outweighs that. Just hoping that there is a pricing update with more ram coming soon, I think its very overdue...

Re: A simple DIY Heroku replacement to keep your hosting costs down

#43

Post by dosuken123 »

StavrosK wrote: post #8
gitgud wrote: post #5

Well, Dokku [1] is already a good solution to the heroku cost problem. All the power and convenience of heroku commands with the freedom and low cost of docker deployment. It has lets-encrypt ssl support too! [1] https://github.com/dokku/dokku

I'm using Dokku to serve a bunch of sites and love it, it has made deployments a breeze. I did run into some Docker problems (used too much CPU and couldn't connect to its socket, etc), but I don't think it was Dokku's fault, but Docker's. I want to see if I can use Kubernetes as a Dokku replacement (hopefully a more stable one), but I don't think Kubernetes has all the niceties Dokku has (automatic reverse proxying,…

For the Kubernetes + Dokku replacement, GitLab's Auto DevOps https://docs.gitlab.com/ce/topics/autodevops/ can do a lot of stuff. It's included in CE, thus it's free.

Re: A simple DIY Heroku replacement to keep your hosting costs down

#44

Post by StavrosK »

dosuken123 wrote: post #43
StavrosK wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm using Dokku to serve a bunch of sites and love it, it has made deployments a breeze. I did run into some Docker problems (used too much CPU and couldn't connect to its socket, etc), but I don't think it was Dokku's fault, but Docker's. I want to see if I can use Kubernetes as a Dokku replacement (hopefully a more stable one), but I don't think Kubernetes has all the niceties Dokku has (automatic reverse proxying,…

For the Kubernetes + Dokku replacement, GitLab's Auto DevOps https://docs.gitlab.com/ce/topics/autodevops/ can do a lot of stuff. It's included in CE, thus it's free.

That's a layer over Kubernetes and Prometheus, no? It looks good, but it assumes I've already installed the former.

Re: A simple DIY Heroku replacement to keep your hosting costs down

#45

Post by StavrosK »

Chickenosaurus wrote: post #33
StavrosK wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm using Dokku to serve a bunch of sites and love it, it has made deployments a breeze. I did run into some Docker problems (used too much CPU and couldn't connect to its socket, etc), but I don't think it was Dokku's fault, but Docker's. I want to see if I can use Kubernetes as a Dokku replacement (hopefully a more stable one), but I don't think Kubernetes has all the niceties Dokku has (automatic reverse proxying,…

I haven't used kubernetes yet, but https://traefik.io/ was a great reverse proxy in combination with docker swarm. I imagine it works great with kubernetes, too. Putting a few labels on the containers you want to expose with your reverse proxy is all you need to do. Traefik continuously monitors docker to react to changes. Traefik handles load balancing and automatic certificate generation with ACME, too

That looks great, thank you. I'll try it with my K8s install.

Re: A simple DIY Heroku replacement to keep your hosting costs down

#46

Post by dmacvicar »

jacques_chester wrote: post #11
StavrosK wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm using Dokku to serve a bunch of sites and love it, it has made deployments a breeze. I did run into some Docker problems (used too much CPU and couldn't connect to its socket, etc), but I don't think it was Dokku's fault, but Docker's. I want to see if I can use Kubernetes as a Dokku replacement (hopefully a more stable one), but I don't think Kubernetes has all the niceties Dokku has (automatic reverse proxying,…

You might look at Red Hat's OpenShift, which builds on top of Kubernetes. Or Deis, which has adopted buildpacks. Cloud Foundry has buildpacks too, but it's usually seen as a heavyweight solution -- the light footprint variant is 6 VMs, the standard variant is 20-something. Disclosure: I work for Pivotal, we contribute a lot to Cloud Foundry. Red Hat is a competitor.

SUSE's Cloud Application Platform is already available to selected customers. It is based Cloud Foundry running on top of Kubernetes, all with a very slick UI. No VMs.

https://www.suse.com/products/cloud-application-platform/ https://www.suse.com/communities/blog/take-look-suse-cloud-a...

I tried it recently with an internal app, and the experience was very similar to Heroku. cf push and my app was running.

Disclosure: I work for SUSE, we contribute to Cloud Foundry and the containers ecosystem. Pivotal is a competitor.

Re: A simple DIY Heroku replacement to keep your hosting costs down

#47

Post by seanwilson »

Some of the big sells about Heroku for me are:

- Heroku takes care of patching the OS for you.

- You can scale easily to more than one server.

- If a server goes down or becomes unresponsive, Heroku will essentially destroy and recreate it.

- There's lots of simple options for backups, rollbacks, logging and alerts.

How does this and other solutions like Dokku compare? If your project isn't making much money I can understand wanting to keep costs low. If you're building something for a client or are making a profit though, trying to save something like $1K (a few days of a developers time) a year doesn't make a lot of sense. To get all of the above, you're going to have to spend significantly more in developer time and end up with something less robust which will likely have lots of growing pains. Heroku lets you just get on with the coding.

Re: A simple DIY Heroku replacement to keep your hosting costs down

#48

Post by dmacvicar »

dmacvicar wrote: post #46
jacques_chester wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You might look at Red Hat's OpenShift, which builds on top of Kubernetes. Or Deis, which has adopted buildpacks. Cloud Foundry has buildpacks too, but it's usually seen as a heavyweight solution -- the light footprint variant is 6 VMs, the standard variant is 20-something. Disclosure: I work for Pivotal, we contribute a lot to Cloud Foundry. Red Hat is a competitor.

SUSE's Cloud Application Platform is already available to selected customers. It is based Cloud Foundry running on top of Kubernetes, all with a very slick UI. No VMs. https://www.suse.com/products/cloud-application-platform/ https://www.suse.com/communities/blog/take-look-suse-cloud-a... I tried it recently with an internal app, and the experience was very similar to Heroku. cf push and my app was running. Disclosur…

btw, here is an article about the management UI:

https://www.suse.com/communities/blog/introducing-stratos-ui...

Re: A simple DIY Heroku replacement to keep your hosting costs down

#49

Post by jacques_chester »

dmacvicar wrote: post #46
jacques_chester wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You might look at Red Hat's OpenShift, which builds on top of Kubernetes. Or Deis, which has adopted buildpacks. Cloud Foundry has buildpacks too, but it's usually seen as a heavyweight solution -- the light footprint variant is 6 VMs, the standard variant is 20-something. Disclosure: I work for Pivotal, we contribute a lot to Cloud Foundry. Red Hat is a competitor.

SUSE's Cloud Application Platform is already available to selected customers. It is based Cloud Foundry running on top of Kubernetes, all with a very slick UI. No VMs. https://www.suse.com/products/cloud-application-platform/ https://www.suse.com/communities/blog/take-look-suse-cloud-a... I tried it recently with an internal app, and the experience was very similar to Heroku. cf push and my app was running. Disclosur…

I am actually super pleased that SUSE have picked up where HPE left off. I am hopeful it will avoid too many distro-level monoculturisms.

The link to the UI blog post has turned up in our private chat channels :)

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