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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?

#241
We moved off of Heroku in late-May/early-June of this year. It took a few weeks of half-time work for one person to make everything happen. We were already using Docker in CI, so we didn't need to spend much time making our app work in Docker for production. We paid the $500 for Porter's "white glove" migration service because we figured it would be useful to be able to get quick feedback about choices and changes.

We had some AWS experience from running our backing services (RDS, Elasticsearch, Memcached, Redis) on AWS despite doing compute on Heroku for a long time, but we'd never done EC2 or EKS for deployments on AWS. Despite having been on Porter now for months, I'd say we still don't know or really need to know a ton about k8s, but we are familiar with some basics around pod sizing, healthchecks, deployments, etc.

I think Porter does a lot to put themselves out as as destination for people leaving Heroku. I'm not sure if this would have been more work to do something like Render, but I was very pleased with the timeframe, hours spent, and the ease of cutting over.

We have a monolith that handles ~50k/min traffic at peak use as well as a couple very tiny services that do some accessory stuff. All the apps are Rails apps.

One of the reasons that we chose Porter over other options is that we really liked their setup for Preview Environments, which are an important part of our workflow here. The experience of running preview apps on Porter is notably better than on Heroku, where we started to see a lot of unreliable behavior on app launch that resulted in the app being unusable and the only fix was to close and open a new PR .

On the whole this was a really positive experience for us. We're seeing better performance, we're paying less (in Porter + AWS compute combined) than we did for Heroku Enterprise, and our ability to deploy mid-day when we're under load is better than it was before. I've spent most of my 12 years or so of Rails development working on Heroku (and we had been on Heroku for almost six years), so we had some fear around moving to unfamiliar tooling, but this has been a big win for us.

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

#243
I'm using two services, fly.io and encore.dev. Both are wonderful, but different worlds.

fly.io (as others have mentioned below) lets you build a Docker image and run that. I've found having them serve static files lets me not include caddy in my app (simple go-based website).

encore.dev is, in effect, a URL service. You write go code with comments that say which path goes to that function, and it takes care of routing for you. They have a lot of ancillary services (cron jobs, database, queue, etc.) that integrate very nicely. Different way to write code, but it seems to work very well (it watches a git repository and rebuilds when you push).

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

#244

Hey, Andras here, founder of Coolify ( https://coolify.io ). Coolify is an open-source & self-hostable Heroku / Netlify alternative. Lots of features are added day-by-day and I'm open for new ones. Visit our Github ( https://github.com/coollabsio/coolify ) or our feedback page ( https://feedback.coolify.io/ ) to get more info. A few months ago, I quit my job and started to work on it full-time (best decision I've mad…

My whole purpose in using Heroku is to avoid self-hosting something, to get the "platform as a service." Is that not the main attraction of heroku? Maybe not for everyone, if the idea of a self-hosted product as an "alternative" to heroku has traction?

I think simple and not doing it yourself is the entire selling point for heroku.

Coolify sounds cool, And i love the idea of being able to have self-hosting as a backup which it would allow, but i don't want to HAVE to self host. Would rather pay Coolify to host for me until they go out of business / change direction, at which point i can continue on with the self-hosted bit.

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

#245

Hey, Andras here, founder of Coolify ( https://coolify.io ). Coolify is an open-source & self-hostable Heroku / Netlify alternative. Lots of features are added day-by-day and I'm open for new ones. Visit our Github ( https://github.com/coollabsio/coolify ) or our feedback page ( https://feedback.coolify.io/ ) to get more info. A few months ago, I quit my job and started to work on it full-time (best decision I've mad…

My whole purpose in using Heroku is to avoid self-hosting something, to get the "platform as a service." Is that not the main attraction of heroku? Maybe not for everyone, if the idea of a self-hosted product as an "alternative" to heroku has traction?

Right. It's not even about the initial setup and provisioning. I can handle that. But what I don't want to handle is constant maintenance. I get weekly notifications of maintenance that Heroku is doing for me. I have no interest in doing these things, or hiring anyone to do them.

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

#246

Hey, Andras here, founder of Coolify ( https://coolify.io ). Coolify is an open-source & self-hostable Heroku / Netlify alternative. Lots of features are added day-by-day and I'm open for new ones. Visit our Github ( https://github.com/coollabsio/coolify ) or our feedback page ( https://feedback.coolify.io/ ) to get more info. A few months ago, I quit my job and started to work on it full-time (best decision I've mad…

This looks really cool, I can't wait to try it out!

From what I saw, it looks like it does a lot of stuff behind the scenes relating to domains and SSL.. does it work with the server behind Cloudflare (the dashboard and hosted sites), or is this something I would probably want to be accessing directly?

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

#247
post #150

Hey, Andras here, founder of Coolify ( https://coolify.io ). Coolify is an open-source & self-hostable Heroku / Netlify alternative. Lots of features are added day-by-day and I'm open for new ones. Visit our Github ( https://github.com/coollabsio/coolify ) or our feedback page ( https://feedback.coolify.io/ ) to get more info. A few months ago, I quit my job and started to work on it full-time (best decision I've mad…

When did it become acceptable for the official installation method to be running a random script on your server? No one should be running that without personally verifying each line. What if I want to uninstall it? (I haven’t looked at this script) but many don’t effectively clean up properly after uninstalling, as that’s an afterthought. What is specifically wrong with the dozens of existing packaging solutions we a…

> What is specifically wrong with the dozens of existing packaging solutions we already have?

specifically? Specifically: they are even WORSE from a security standpoint because you don't have the option of "personally verifying each line". Just because someone's stuck it in a nice easy-to-install package doesn't mean it's not a virus / malware / whatever.

are you suggesting that you read the source code of every app / tool you download before you execute it? If not, hello... pot. kettle?

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

#248
post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is running an "random" script any different than running a "random" binary? With a script at least you CAN look at each line. With a binary you have no clue what the fuck it is doing.

Running random binaries is also a terrible idea. They should be packages that integrate with your local package manager, and which are signed by some entity that you've decided to trust.

and who would that be? Are you suggesting that you ONLY install software signed by developers you have personally verified the keys of? or that you know personally? Because if not, your argument is void because you're trusting completely unknown people who may actively be working to compromise your computer.

The fact that the software was signed doesn't mean anything if you don't actually verify each signature, and even then it only means that what they put up is what you downloaded. It doesn't mean it's not malware. It doesn't mean it doesn't have a back door. It doesn't mean it's not filled with security holes.

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

#249
post #78

I went with render.com (no affiliation). Found them fairly easy to use, really excellent support.

Every time I've tried to give render.com a proper go, I've run into some weird small issue. Ended up settling on fly.io and use that for everything now.

(Render hat on)

Interesting feedback--feel like sharing in detail? You can reach me directly at ed@render.com.

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

#250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Fly is innovative in the same way Heroku was when it launched I've not had a chance to play with it yet, what are they doing that's innovative. (Genuine question, not being cynical).

The big one as a layman is they've invested in tooling for "edge" compute - similar to CloudFlare distributing your static assets worldwide for faster responses, Fly gives you the tools to do the same for your app servers. If you've got a worldwide audience you can set up your app in Dallas, Paris, Chennai, and Tokyo, have it auto-scale (and re-balance) instances based on which regions are the most in demand (eg, min…

That all sounds pretty cool. Nice to see people trying something new.
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