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Ask HN: So you moved off Heroku, where did you go?

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Re: Ask HN: So you moved off Heroku, where did you go?

#21

Post by peteforde »

kodah wrote: post #12
peteforde wrote: post #6

fly.io is a big deal. It's not as easy as Heroku as there's no managed Postgres, but it's well-documented with a few paths. However, the main reason Fly stands out is their focus on multi-region deployments. Ever wondered why facebook.com is fast no matter where you are? Fly provides app-level tooling to make this superpower available to everyone. It's especially important if you're making heavy use of Web Sockets. E…

> Ever wondered why facebook.com is fast no matter where you are? They provide app-level tooling to make this superpower available to everyone. They're doing that in the app? GeoDNS has been around for quite some time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GeoDNS or more thoroughly explained: https://jameshfisher.com/2017/02/08/how-does-geodns-work/

Fly's multi-region capability is BGP Anycast-based, which is vastly superior (and much more complex to deploy, outside of Fly) to DNS-based solutions like GeoDNS.

One example of app-level tooling is the fly-replay header, which permits your app to automatically replay requests in different regions. This works really well alongside the FLY-REGION environment variable that is available to each node. https://fly.io/docs/reference/fly-replay/

Another example of app-level tooling is the availability of NATS Jetstream, a key/value store that is less feature-rich than Redis, but supports multi-region active/active replication. This is a big deal, as Redis doesn't offer it at the free tier, and many others (KeyDB) who advertise it seem to have trouble delivering it when there's more than two regions in play.

Re: Ask HN: So you moved off Heroku, where did you go?

#22

Post by Test0129 »

mkl95 wrote: post #15

We have been using "Amazon Web Services". They should market their services more, they definitely have a bright future...

For personal stuff or business? I'm extremely familiar with AWS at the corporate level but I refuse to use it for personal stuff. Not only are the pricing schemes suspect, the results can be surprising. A single front page feature on HN, for example, could suddenly cost you $150,000 because you didn't wade through enough labyrinthine configuration pages to set the right budgets.

Re: Ask HN: So you moved off Heroku, where did you go?

#24

Post by mgreenleaf »

sgloutnikov wrote: post #9

I moved my small free Python/Django app to Fly.io and am extremely happy. The move was seamless because they allow you to run your app from a Dockerfile which was straight forward after going through the documentation. Looking forward to building more things on Fly.io.

Highly recommend fly.io as well; I started an elixir app for a client and decided to use fly.io and very impressed with how easy it is with the feature set so far.

Re: Ask HN: So you moved off Heroku, where did you go?

#26

Post by tomwojcik »

sgloutnikov wrote: post #9

I moved my small free Python/Django app to Fly.io and am extremely happy. The move was seamless because they allow you to run your app from a Dockerfile which was straight forward after going through the documentation. Looking forward to building more things on Fly.io.

I'm planning the migration with my Django side projects from heroku to fly as well. Fly has a special org on GH with example projects, but the one with Django is empty. I created a small test repo to see how Fly works. hands on. Thought I'd share.

https://github.com/tomwojcik/django-fly.io-example-project

Re: Ask HN: So you moved off Heroku, where did you go?

#27

Post by cantrememberit »

One of the best alternatives I found is using dokku with a cheap VPS. Dokku even has herokuish buildpacks and supports (automated) deployment of docker images etc. On top of that dokku is open source with a very helpful community, total cost: 0$. Not looking back at all.

https://dokku.com/

Re: Ask HN: So you moved off Heroku, where did you go?

#28

Post by yowmamasita »

hnzix wrote: post #20
mkl95 wrote: post #15

We have been using "Amazon Web Services". They should market their services more, they definitely have a bright future...

AWS is IaaS not PaaS. With IaaS you need to hire competent infra admins. PaaS abstracts away much of that requirement.

https://aws.amazon.com/apprunner/

https://aws.amazon.com/lambda/

https://aws.amazon.com/fargate/

https://aws.amazon.com/appsync/

https://aws.amazon.com/elasticbeanstalk/

Re: Ask HN: So you moved off Heroku, where did you go?

#29

Post by satvikpendem »

I am using Coolify (https://coolify.io), an open source self-hosted PaaS which is a relatively newer kid on the block compared to Dokku and CapRover. I tried both of these and I just didn't like how they were, always had some problem or another.

In contrast, Coolify has a great GUI that abstracts away the most common things about PaaS hosting, like connecting to GitHub automatically for git push deploys, SSL certificates, reverse proxying and custom domain support, and best of all, having support for Heroku style buildpacks as well as Dockerfiles. I've been quite happy with it, the creator has a Discord and responds to issues very quickly.

With regards to non-self-hosted options, I did try out Render, Fly.io and Railway but I found that their free servers were too anemic. I was compiling a Rust backend and it simply could not compile on their free servers. On Hetzner, for 5 bucks I could get a 2 AMD vCPU and 2 GB RAM machine that was sufficient to compile my Rust apps in a way that the non-self-hosted ones were not. I have a JS frontend app that works fine though but I wanted to keep everything under the same VPS, plus I can run other types of self-hosted services on it too, like Plausible analytics and a Ghost blog. I'm not sure if those are allowed on non-self-hosted options.

All in all, it costs me 5 bucks a month, and I never have to worry about sudden upcharges for traffic à la AWS as in the very worst, my VPS goes down for a while. I'm now running about 20 different services on this 5 dollar box including databases and applications as well as other services, works just fine.

Re: Ask HN: So you moved off Heroku, where did you go?

#30

Post by satvikpendem »

cantrememberit wrote: post #27

One of the best alternatives I found is using dokku with a cheap VPS. Dokku even has herokuish buildpacks and supports (automated) deployment of docker images etc. On top of that dokku is open source with a very helpful community, total cost: 0$. Not looking back at all. https://dokku.com/

I tried Dokku out but I didn't like the lack of GUI, I wrote in another comment but I've been using Coolify (https://coolify.io) as a great alternative with a built in GUI, also free and open source.
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