This was a confusing read. I guess GitLab has a hosting service, or does it? Or was this a demo of terraform?
More a demo of how GitLab pipelines and terraform work together. In this case the app was deployed to AWS.
We are far from a better Heroku for production apps in a hyper cloud
11–20 of 275 posts
Re: We are far from a better Heroku for production apps in a hyper cloud
#12> A typical web app requires a database, storage or caching backend, which can get complicated to run with Heroku. Plainly wrong. Easiest thing ever to spin a pg instance for free and have it immediately available for your app to use. Better Heroku? Does it let you use a pipeline of dev, staging and prod? Does it auto create new copies of your app (db and other services included!) every time you issue a pull request?…
This was a great comment until the mean-spirited last word.
Re: We are far from a better Heroku for production apps in a hyper cloud
#13I feel like Gitlab is going in a direction of AWS, except that instead of having separate products it just bundles everything in one. One massive bloatware that's scary to touch, no idea where features begin or end, or what is it even for in the end. Everything? I thought it was supposed to be Git hosting, but I'm not even sure anymore.
That sounds like a good idea to me. For my personal projects I'd rather have everything in one place, especially if that one place is so well integrated like Gitlab.
AWS, on the other hand, is 500 different massive bloatwares that are scary to touch, to the point where there are literal courses available so you can learn how to use them. I've never had a good experience doing even basic stuff there.
Re: We are far from a better Heroku for production apps in a hyper cloud
#14I find Heroku rather easy. About a year ago I wrote a vanilla blog engine in NodeJS. It only required a small amount of debugging to get up and running on Heroku.
(Although I don't know if I ended up modifying my code to adhere to Heroku quirks, or if the changes I needed for Heroku are normal.)
One weird thing happened a few days ago. I noticed that my blog was offline, and I ended up needing to modify my Postgres connection code to explicitly enable encrypted connections. This struck me as very strange. I mostly work with Microsoft SQL, and those kinds of things are set via the connection string. Shouldn't Heroku have just updated my database connection string without breaking my site? Admittedly, I have a lot less experience with Postgres than Microsoft SQL.
Re: We are far from a better Heroku for production apps in a hyper cloud
#15This was very cringey. A super contrived demo and bashing Heroku through a Twitter reference. Reads like someone is drunk/high and wanted to shitpost about a competitor. I would be appalled by this if I were GitLab's PR department!
Re: We are far from a better Heroku for production apps in a hyper cloud
#16> A typical web app requires a database, storage or caching backend, which can get complicated to run with Heroku. Plainly wrong. Easiest thing ever to spin a pg instance for free and have it immediately available for your app to use. Better Heroku? Does it let you use a pipeline of dev, staging and prod? Does it auto create new copies of your app (db and other services included!) every time you issue a pull request?…
This was a great comment until the mean-spirited last word.
Some folks don’t take kindly to lofty claims and name-dropping just to rile up interest.
I’ve run production apps on Heroku in the past, best possible service for small teams. Gitlab? Given how expensive it is - I’m not so sure.
Re: We are far from a better Heroku for production apps in a hyper cloud
#17I wish they would focus on other things. Things like GitLab CI's cache are unusable with most workloads, we even had builds which were faster without the cache than with it.
Re: We are far from a better Heroku for production apps in a hyper cloud
#18People do not use Heroku because it takes 5 minutes to spin up a box. They use it because it's super easy. Click a button, bam deployed. Want to add a database, click what database you want, bam you got a database, environment variables set and a GUI (depending on what you pick). Want to scale up? Click a button, you're now scaled up. Want a entire review system with staging links and everything? Setup the review pro…
On top of that: It's very easy to create an open-source project and put a "Deploy on Heroku" button right on the Github page.
Re: We are far from a better Heroku for production apps in a hyper cloud
#19> A typical web app requires a database, storage or caching backend, which can get complicated to run with Heroku. Plainly wrong. Easiest thing ever to spin a pg instance for free and have it immediately available for your app to use. Better Heroku? Does it let you use a pipeline of dev, staging and prod? Does it auto create new copies of your app (db and other services included!) every time you issue a pull request?…
This was a great comment until the mean-spirited last word.
I’ll ignore the last word.
The article doesn’t do a great job of showing it, but the 5 minute production app makes it easier to setup stateful services on the hyper clouds.
And it does spin up a new environment for every merge request.
Re: We are far from a better Heroku for production apps in a hyper cloud
#20Alternatively, I tried using DigitalOcean app platform (side note: super hard to Google for help due to the generic name) and it was way harder than setting up Heroku, I invested multiple hours in a few days and when I finally got the app running I was not confident enough to proceed with the migration yet.
Things I've noticed: * Segmentation Fault when deploying a Rails app, Heroku just works. * Ability to add Postgres but no ability to add Redis in the same ecosystem, you have to step out of the app platform, Heroku just one click and you have Redis associated with your app and many other add-ons.
There is a lot of potential on Digital Ocean, it in its infancy, the thing I like the most about it is $ for spec, with a $50 Heroku dyno I get 1GB RAM at DO the specs are way superior.
The blogpost mentions CLI usage and the global naming issues, those are annoying sure, but not the breaking point for Heroku.
The biggest competitor to Heroku IMO it's themselves. The fact their price remain the same even though specs and computational power has became way cheaper.
I would happily keep stuff in Heroku if they revisited their pricing policy.