I've been using Render.com, but I experience very slow boot time with my Node application. I think I will be moving my project to Fly.io
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?
#42I wrote about it shortly here in another Heroku topic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32585299
But to answer your questions: 1. It took around 1-2 months of experienced DevOps works (1-2 devops), this included testing and the actual switchover to new AWS infra.
2. We actually used outside contractors (actual k8s gurus) to do the work. But the decision was made in-house by myself. I'm no k8s guru, hell, I'm not even devops, but I have enough experience with the "big guys" so the choice was calculated from technical perspective, considering our growth needs and technical needs for now and for the future.
3. I haven't had any reasons to regret the decision, but I knew that before. I knew AWS offered the things we need and how to use them and what it's roughly going to cost, so this wasn't really a surprise. I did my due diligence.
4. Heroku bills were around 5$k/mon... AWS ones are in 5 digit, but it was expected because we started to use so much more services and resources than we did (or could) in Heroku. We also expanded into two new countries (one of the main reasons the switchover was done) so the costs are sadly not directly comparable. I can say that the new costs are in expected ranges and I'm happy with what we get for the money.
5. We run a eCommerce site with monthly GMV of 1m€+ and around 700k monthly unique visitors. Our stack is (per country) 3 nodejs services, PostgreSQL, redis and some frontend services. Main cost factors are the database(s) and CloudFront.
6. These decision have to made per use-case, per project and taking into consideration your actual infrastructure needs and budget limits. I don't think there isn't anything AWS can't do, but is the cheapest? Of course not. Hell, there have been plenty of topics on this very page about moving your infrastructure to your own bare metal and saving hundreds of thousands per month.
Think through what are the issues you are currently having (ie, for us it was the Herokus stack limitations, couldn't get http2, couldn't do custom monitoring / alerting, no access to LBs, no scalable DB hosting, the need to easily roll out new countries without having to do too much of manual work, weirdly high cost of some services, like redis for an example). If your problems are in the wallet, you need to consider this as your first priority and find a provider which will meet your technical needs with best price. All the big guys also have cost calculators available which will allow you to get an estimation on what you would be paying. Take time, this isn't an easy decision and it will affect you a lot in the future as well, so you don't want to get it wrong to be stuck with another set of issues.
Re: Ask HN: So you moved off Heroku, where did you go?
#43DigitalOcean. Databases are much cheaper. No big deal in moving as digital ocean app platform supports buildpacks
Re: Ask HN: So you moved off Heroku, where did you go?
#44Google cloud run https://ashishb.net/tech/how-to-deploy-side-projects-as-web-...
Re: Ask HN: So you moved off Heroku, where did you go?
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Would have been a good comment if you dropped the first line.
So you disagree that it's superior? Please explain why.
Re: Ask HN: So you moved off Heroku, where did you go?
#46I have moved a Rails and Go app to https://northflank.com. I have my Rails app running in their free project (limited to two services and 2 jobs) and my Go app in a paid project. I find the pricing to be very reasonable and considerably cheaper than Heroku.
I was looking for somewhere I could run web services and cron jobs both in the same place.
They have a Heroku importer, however I think you need to ask to have it turned on. I found that it was easier for me to build docker images for my apps and use a 'build service' instead however. YMMV
I found their support to be very responsive and enjoy using their UI. The UI, builds and so on all feel very fast.
Northflank can run databases, however for my databases I've been running them on ElephantSQL for some time (https://www.elephantsql.com) - even when I was on Heroku.
Free for Dev's PaaS list is worth a review: https://free-for.dev/#/?id=paas
Re: Ask HN: So you moved off Heroku, where did you go?
#47We are really recommending https://www.clever-cloud.com/ . Their stack is awesome, great uptime and great support.
Are you planning to make a disclosure regarding that statement, such as being co-founders with Quentin Adam, the founder of Clever Cloud, in other projects?
Ouch!
Stuff like this should always be disclosed. Something like "My co-founder / friend built ..." would be totally fine, but this comment looks like it intentionally obscures the connection. Not a good look.
Re: Ask HN: So you moved off Heroku, where did you go?
#48I had a comment system (staticman) on heroku, I moved to fly.io and the import (build by fly.io) was done in some minutes, adjusting my blog and ready to go. All in all 15 min.
Re: Ask HN: So you moved off Heroku, where did you go?
#49(I'm assuming the OP is referring to production workloads.)
I think PaaS is awesome. I actually consider moving to one of the managed offerings from time to time... then I look at the pricing.
As a systems engineer specialising in automation, it's hard for me to justify the $75-100/month fee from a PaaS provider (not including network bandwidth), when I currently pay that now for the same thing in AWS including network bandwidth (and I haven't even optimised it with CloudFront yet and static asset deployments to S3.)
I'm not saying PaaS should be a foregone conclusion based purely on my microscopic example and edge case, but if you can configure a CI/CD pipeline (I recommend GitLab CI or GitHub Actions), manage/configure an OS (I recommend Ansible), write Terraform to build out your infrastructure (loads and loads and loads of TF code libraries with example code you can just run with), and a few extra steps, then I'd recommend going IaaS.
You can keep the entire thing KISS, you'll know it inside out, you can grow it (or not) to any scale whilst keeping costs considerably lower than any managed PaaS available, you can hire someone else down the line to look after it when you've reached that level of scale/success/financial freedom, and more.
That being said, I can certainly see a huge value add in doing both: IaaS with a self-managed PaaS stack on top of it. That is, I think, the sweet spot.
Note: yep, maintaining your own infra' is undesirable to a lot of people. If you're one of those people, then stick to managed PaaS and pay the price (it's worth it in your case.)
Note: yep, your time does (technically) have a cost associated with it, but if you're building solutions based on IaaS everyday of your life, you've likely done a lot of the work already.
Re: Ask HN: So you moved off Heroku, where did you go?
#50I 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 certif…
It's funny how people are different, after using CapRover for years I tried Coolify but it felt like so much functionality was missing that I would not use it over CapRover in its current state. All the things you mentioned (GitHub webhooks, custom domains, SSL certs, reverse proxying) are supported by Cap. It also supports Docker Swarm.