201–210 of 216 posts
On the upside, when I reached out to Heroku, they did offer to recover the database for me - but by this point in time, I'd already moved on with setting up a new one from scratch (with some changes from the original), so this wasn't particularly helpful.
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Ouch. If it knows it's about to fail over from an update, it really should get the follower totally in sync with the leader first.
HA on rds uses synchronous replication - you won’t lose data on automated failover under any normal circumstances.
What is not directly possessed by you is not fully YOURS, and probably it is (un)clearly stated in the "free tier" terms of use.
Remember kids, when you encounter free cloud thing on top of the free host-able thing, just spend another day and host it yourself, cause you're just facing a sales funnel which will eventually collapse
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> Why not just start charging for the postgres db, and only delete if there's no active billing? Probably because the original terms you agreed to were written not anticipating Salesforce perpetrating this and so while I would not at all be surprised if the vast majority of customers in your position would've been entirely happy with it they probably didn't have a legal path to do so.
> they probably didn't have a legal path to do so. That makes no sense. Most large companies change both agreements and prices via notification emails all the time. Probably even SalesForce does so.
If you want to do a close read of the terms and conditions/contract language as of a reasonable guess as to when OP signed up and link the section you believe does give them the right to make such a change unilaterally, I'd be happy to read it and discuss further.
My current position in the mean time will, however, remain that while there's always a chance (often a pretty good one) that my hypothesis is wrong, claiming it makes no sense at all is a stronger claim than is justified by the information forming the basis of this discussion.
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At a guess, Salesforce bought it hoping it would take over the entire space rather than merely having the capacity to be one profitable provider among many, and lost interest once it became clear it was going to be the latter rather than the former. (guess based only on having watched things unfold from the outside without ever being a user/customer so please do add salt to taste)
As a customer with no knowledge of the inside, this is all I've noticed, which probably misses some things: 1. GitHub integration breach, which wasn't handled well but luckily didn't affect me. 2. No more free-tier DBs :( 3. Salesforce logo, which ofc doesn't matter. Hearing vague negative things here makes me nervous about the future because I really like Heroku and don't want to be stuck using AWS directly.
I would suggest you start poking around at possible alternatives just in case, but not as yet with any great sense of urgency.
If you Ctrl-F for crunchydata in this comment section you'll find an employee of theirs talking about their postgres hosting and listing a bunch of services their customer use for the other parts of the puzzle, and have hired enough heavyweight core contributors and active and clueful community members that I think it's reasonable to say they're -good- at postgres.
I would say that what I expect to be most likely to happen is gradually increasing prices and gradually degrading service (the people still working on it do seem to care but I don't know if there are enough of them left to avoid bitrot setting in and even if there are today, in a year or two there may not be) so having a plan to move in an orderly fashion but not executing it yet seems like the wise approach.
Neither panicking and moving in a fast and risky way now, nor waiting until (if it happens) things go from aggravating to actively intolerable and moving in a fast and risky way then, are likely to be particularly good ideas.
OTOH, being prepared to migrate elsewhere in an olderly fashion if the cost/benefit calculations tell you it's time, re-running those calculations and double checking your plan every so often, and continuing to enjoy the service in the mean time, seems like a reasonable, responsible, and overall relatively pleasant way forwards.
(disclaimer: I am not a Heroku user myself, but I think the general principles almost certainly apply here just fine, and I'd certainly be comfortable giving the same advice to a consultancy client at work, so without being foolish enough to claim I'm definitely right I'd suggest the above analysis is at least worthy of giving serious consideration to)
What frustrated me about Heroku nuking free projects was that the paid version was, IMO, too expensive. (Granted, I understand that the free tier was probably a money sink for them.) $5-10 a month is pocket change in some contexts, but for a hobby or a one-off project, it's a huge chunk of change. I really wish they offered a lower-cost tier.
My personal take is that I'd rather work with heroku than dealing with aws or gcs. Sure there are others out there that provide the same easy of use, I am just too lazy to switch ;) OTOH I've never had them wipe a database on me, so I guess that would be the motivation to move on.
About a year ago they shut down my personal blog based on a vague "violation of our terms." There was no violation, either. (I suspect they had to shut down phishing and other abusive sites, and cast a little too wide of a net.)
When they claimed they turned it back on, I had to keep pestering them because they goofed something or other. Eventually I couldn't push updates via Github. (I wrote the blog engine as an exercise to learn NodeJS.)
Again, if I could have bought an ultra-cheap tier, I would have been happy to pay.
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Very much that. As a former SRE responsible for tape storage, I saw things like regular backups of an error phrase "You have no access to this database". Guess what happened when the team accidentally dropped the database? Unless you're doing regular restores, you don't have a backup. You have hope. So yes, doing backups in a way that gives you some form of guarantee isn't exactly cheap.
Or we do have everything in the backup, but the restore process isn't worked out. Someone is losing a weekend writing hacky scripts, and every SLO is being violated, if we ever have to use it for real.
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That's 2 cups of coffee, or 1 latte. It's objectively not a huge chunk of change unless you live in a very LCOL area. You can also go to any competitors, which have their smallest tier around the same price. Linode has a $5/m tier. You could also buy a Raspberry Pi for $50 and run it in your closet.
> or a hobby or a one-off project I don't want to pay $5 / month indefinitely to host a weekend project. I don't want to deal with the complexities of hosting a weekend project myself. I've done plenty of that. I just don't want to end up spending $100-200 / month to host a lifetime of weekend projects and experiments.
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As a customer with no knowledge of the inside, this is all I've noticed, which probably misses some things: 1. GitHub integration breach, which wasn't handled well but luckily didn't affect me. 2. No more free-tier DBs :( 3. Salesforce logo, which ofc doesn't matter. Hearing vague negative things here makes me nervous about the future because I really like Heroku and don't want to be stuck using AWS directly.
A service can run in a state of if not benevolent, then at least ambivalent, neglect for quite some time without it being a disaster for the users. I would suggest you start poking around at possible alternatives just in case, but not as yet with any great sense of urgency. If you Ctrl-F for crunchydata in this comment section you'll find an employee of theirs talking about their postgres hosting and listing a bunch…
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So you're in favor of companies breaking their terms and conditions at will? I think that would cause quite a lot more outrage and problems.
You did not read my comments, did you? The T&Cs are an agreement between the parties. That agreement can be changed at any time if both parties agree. So they just need to ask.