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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?

#111
post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use CapRover and my main criticism is the non-zero downtime deployment. Also when I update docker some apps don't restart properly, but that may just be my (basic Ubuntu dedicated) server though.

Non-zero downtime deployment is supported for apps without mounted volumes: https://github.com/caprover/caprover/issues/661#issuecomment... Tangentially I was looking at Render.com the other day and they also don't support zero downtime deployments if you have a mounted volume, so it's not very uncommon even on cloud platforms. As for restarts, I didn't have that problem yet, I believe CapRover adds `restart: always`…

I guess most of my apps have persistent data.

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

#112
We moved from Heroku to GCP after approximately two years of using Heroku. (This was three years ago so some information may have changed)

The move worked out incredibly smoothly and has saved us money and allowed us to "modernise" our infrastructure to take advantage of some of the newer trends in Infrastructure and Security.

To address your direct questions:

1. Not very long. We were running a NodeJS app with a web layer and several background workers. We were able to get this running on a Google Compute Engine VM in about 1 day using Packer. The whole migration process took about two weeks start to finish.

2. Our team is relatively experienced and had experience with all three major platforms and Kubernetes (although we chose not to use Kube in this case). We are definitely a team of developers, not sysadmins though. This means we had to learn some new things particularly about tuning NodeJS apps on raw linux.

3. I don't think we learnt too much (other than the undocumented rough edges of both platforms) but it was definitely worth it for financial and quality reasons.

4. It's a relatively hard metric to calculate when the company is growing user base and features quickly - but I would estimate it at around 50%.

5. 1 app with around 5000 requests per second. NodeJS / Typescript / Rust

6. If you have only ever used Heroku I think it would be worth getting comfortable with Containers (Docker basically) and making your app run in a container. From there you have tools like Railway (https://railway.app) or Cloud66 (https://www.cloud66.com) that can do most of the rest for you.

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

#113
post #99
post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure about that? So if I have static images going through an ALB to the requesting client, I can't operate in another way to reduce those costs? ... you're sure?

Sure you can front static assets with the free Cloudflare tier... [a] which is fine if you're happy with the inflexibility that free Cloudflare offers. And you live in a country where the free tier doesn't have horrible routing (eg use the Sydney AWS region, put Cloudflare in front of it and then watch your traffic to/from Sydney take a round trip via the US or Singapore) [b] every single AWS service charges egress f…

> Am I missing something?

No, but you're not the OP above my comment, so my question still stands.

> (eg use the Sydney AWS region, put Cloudflare in front of it and then watch your traffic to/from Sydney take a round trip via the US or Singapore)

I don't understand? I don't have this issue (I'm in Brisbane; I use ap-southeast-2)

> [c] this does nothing for non-static assets

Non-static assets are going to be very tiny in most cases, and the problem then becomes about volume. If you've got volume and your business model doesn't suck, then you can afford the rate (my understanding is AWS' network egress charges are gross compared to other vendors.)

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

#115
post #74

I got a VPS off Contabo and started using docker compose for deployments. Learning it all took me a day (I had been using docker but compose was new) and the implementation took me one more day. Mainly setting up GH workflow for automated deploys. There's just so much freedom now! Cost wise, I am down from about $24 to $8 with a much better performance. I can finally have a server near to the users and not be restric…

No post body was provided.

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

#116

I 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 i…

Can anyone say why DB disk space is so expensive compared to just a volume? Tempted to just roll my own with these prices.

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

#119
Controversial opinion: given the vast majority of answers here: cheapskates looking for free tiers wherever they can find them.

Heroku should’ve closed that free tier years ago! Now they added some very very cheap plans as well which is fantastic for them = gets rid of some of the horrendous cost from platform abuse they dealt with every quarter.

Good for you Heroku, you were always under appreciated by the enterprise, with their clingy sysadmins and ops people fighting you like a plague and at the same time you were taken advantage of by an army of penny pinchers!

Heroku

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

#120
post #59

I have 4 apps running on fly.io for most of this year and can recommend them. 2 are elixir apps that have been created on fly, 1 was an elixir app I had running on heroku, and 1 was rails app on heroku I recently migrated. I used their heroku migrator and it worked pretty much automatically. I had a few steps to follow to move the DB, but their docs covered it - https://fly.io/docs/rails/getting-started/migrate-from-…

Price ?

I get an email each month forgiving my bill because it’s under $5. Got three small VMs running.
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