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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?

#261

Post by ceecko »

Founder of EvenNode here - https://www.evennode.com

We don't have big marketing budgets and are a less known alternative, but we see influx of new customers moving off of Heroku every day. It's mostly Node.js and Python apps since we focus on this stack.

The migration is very simple - git push evennode main. This works for most of the apps without any extra steps required. It's really this simple.

Cost is cheaper than Heroku - 4.50 EUR / month. Each app also gets its own MongoDB database at no additional cost.

The biggest advantage I see, compared to VPS, Lightsail, etc., is you get a fully hosted and monitored platform. A server goes down? No problem, your app is migrated to a new one automatically.

I would says a pretty good alternative to self-hosting and Heroku.

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

#262

Post by pbronez »

andrasbacsai wrote: post #98
sandGorgon wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

this is very very cool! one question - u deploy to individual servers right ? can u target deploy to a kubernetes platform. Like EKS? I couldnt find it in your docs. Because one of the cool things about Heroku is scale-up. A cool project here is https://sst.dev/ . Would love to see EKS/GKE native integration there.

Atm, only individual servers, but Coolify will be able to deploy to any Kubernetes platform soon, natively.

There are a couple self-hosting services that rely on k8s or k3s. For example, TrueNAS SCALE and Kubesail. Do you envision that Coolify could deploy on top of one of these, or does it need to own the full machine?

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

#263

Post by pbronez »

Aeolun wrote: post #144
andrasbacsai wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey, the founder of Coolify here. I'm constantly adding new features to Coolify. Which ones are you missing (except Docker Swarm)?

The one thing I’m missing in Caprover, and that would make me switch instantly, is I want to be able to feed it a docker-compose file to run a whole stack. Now if a service has only a docker-compose file I have to pull it apart and start every service individually.

100% this. Docker Compose has all the information you need, please let me just deploy it.

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

#264

Post by 0x457 »

tecleandor wrote: post #130
holografix wrote: post #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 enterpris…

Companies count on the "cheapskates" and the free plans to work as a "gateway drug" to corporate plans. I sometimes feel this services "need" an affordable paid plan, so I don't "freeload" on their free plans, and I don't need the expensive big plan. I.e.: I monitor a bunch of my hobby sites with StatusCake. They're great and I use the free plan but I'd like to pay a little for very simple monitoring. But the first p…

> I monitor a bunch of my hobby sites with StatusCake. They're great and I use the free plan but I'd like to pay a little for very simple monitoring. But the first paid plan is around $200 a year. But I don't need the premium plan, I just need the free plan, but paying, so I feel like I'm contributing to the business.

Odd mentality. You don't want to feel like a freeloader, but don't want to pay the asking price.

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

#265

Post by krajzeg »

forgomonika wrote: post #256
krajzeg wrote: post #187

Moved backend services for my videogame from Heroku to Render. It's been super-easy, and the service is more responsive and significantly more stable now on Render, despite me paying much less. 1. Almost no work. The app was Node.js + Postgres, it stayed that way and only needed a few environment variable changes plus a database migration. 2. Almost none, I use PaaS because I concentrate on making games, and want to…

Thanks for the info - I have some similar use cases. How has the Postgres DB worked out for you with Render? I've been weary of using a relational DB in general since it's a single point of failure and really disruptive if your instance goes down (even with a back-up DB to failover too can be problematic if data doesn't get replicated before a crash). Also are you just using your Node.js app as a back-end server or a…

No issues with the Postgres - it's rock-solid so far (100% uptime over 6ish months). Most DBs are going to be a SPOF, unless you're willing to go into a distributed/replicated DB setup (which for my use case, I'm definitely not - I'd rather be down for an hour once in a blue moon).

It's an API consumed by the game client, no user-facing webpages.

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

#266

Post by jfrisby »

Almost, but not quite the audience for your question.

I was going to use Heroku, but the security requirements for my app made that a non-option. Instead, I went with simple Terraform that spins up CoreOS nodes, using cloud-init to spin up Docker containers. CI process built the Docker images, and deploying was just a matter of making an ECR tag point at the new image then cycling instances. Not quite as simple as Heroku, but pretty close.

I moved onto AWS via this: https://registry.terraform.io/namespaces/GoCarrot

No k8s. No Docker. Beautifully clean system. Blue/green deploys with automatic rollback. Continuous deployment (there's a CircleCI orb as well). Tightly buttoned-down system configuration. Debian built from scratch with an eye towards supply chain security. (There's a root image factory and base image factory to handle the layering of image build processes involved.) Log aggregation and configuration management baked in. Security that can only be described as "insanely paranoid, yet oddly pragmatic." Cascaded image builds, so I can update the entirety of my infrastructure by pushing one button to kick things off then clicking a few buttons to approve deployment of the various services.

1. About a week, although I had the assistance of the author. I'm now rebuilding my personal infra on Omat and it's going much more quickly. Probably 3 days total, with no assistance.

2. More experience with DevOps stuff than most, but not a DevOps person by any stretch.

3. Very, very, very instructive.

4. Given what I was coming from, cost-neutral. Compared to Heroku? Notably cheaper.

5. At present, we're in alpha so traffic is negligible and back-end workload is fairly minimal (tens of thousands of jobs per day). The author of the tools, however, is CTO of a mid-tier SaaS that handles a quite significant (millions of transactions/day, IIRC) amount of traffic, and he is super aggressive about not being hobbled on performance needs -- but also being cost-efficient.

6. Avoiding the k8s iceberg, while having all the modern amenities in a system I actually have a hope of understanding top-to-bottom (modulo my hesitation around reading the systemd source) is nice. This system is an object lesson in "loosely coupled, highly cohesive" design. I haven't felt at any point that I may be stuck in a You Can't Get There From Here situation. Avoiding layering a second layer of software-defined networking (Docker/k8s) on top of the software-defined networking of AWS means I neatly avoid the single biggest source of chronic issues (and, via the workarounds needed, system complexity) that I've experienced with "modern" (Docker/k8s) DevOps approaches.

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

#267

Post by andrasbacsai »

ryanSrich wrote: post #245
jrochkind1 wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That will be Coolify Cloud :) (https://beta.coolify.io).

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

#268

Post by adamckay »

joshmanders wrote: post #230
awill wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> No one should be running that without personally verifying each line. Ok, if you feel so strongly about it, then before you paste the link into your terminal and hit enter to execute it, how about you uh... open the shell script it will execute in your browser and read the contents of it? You use this idea that people are executing stuff they don't know and blaming the tools for it but don't think to read the scrip…

> Ok, if you feel so strongly about it, then before you paste the link into your terminal and hit enter to execute it, how about you uh... open the shell script it will execute in your browser and read the contents of it?

As an FYI - unless the script is on a site like GitHub (which you can assume to be behaving truthfully), it's possible for a server to respond differently according to the user agent, allowing a malicious file to be served if it's downloaded via `curl` or `wget`.

https://www.onsecurity.io/blog/careless-with-curl-dont-be/

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

#269

Post by adamckay »

discordianfish wrote: post #158
awill wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> No one should be running that without personally verifying each line. Do you also verify each line of software you install? If you trust the author of certain software, why do you mistrust their install script?

It's not only the original author, don't forget, but it's any malicious actor that's managed to compromise that hosted script.

It should be viewed in the same way that a package author on NPM or PyPI may publish a malicious package, either themselves or via their account being compromised. It's not particularly common, but nor is it impossible and could present a good targe.

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

#270

Post by 4khilles »

jamie_ca wrote: post #214
noneeeed wrote: post #200

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…

I think their auto-scaling is somewhat broken currently. I set up auto-scaling with min=2 and max=6, and my VMs aren't scaling down from 3 to 2 even though there are 0 active connections on all the VMs.
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