> In 2018 Heroku was pretty much the only option for a newbie like me to get started with web-development Free PHP webhosts have been around for 15+ years
But nobody was writing trendy Medium posts about PHP.
Heroku has been running a second copy of my scheduler instance
101–110 of 132 posts
Re: Heroku has been running a second copy of my scheduler instance
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
Some one just starting out is not Google. They do not have Google's problems. They do not need Google's complexity, or a dozen layers of docker/terraform/k8s bullshit.
I really don’t understand this. Docker is not difficult to learn. K8s marginally more so. Even if you don’t need HA it’s still worth it for a small team for ease of deploy.
Docker is difficult to understand in-depth, and, at least in my career, I haven't met too many people who do more than just skim a blog post and then think they know everything about Docker. This is how you get Docker punching holes in your firewall[1] and everyone acting surprised, because they a) didn't read the docs and b) have no idea how firewalls work.
Docker's interface might seem simple, but it adds an entirely new layer of complexity, with semantics only superficially understood by the vast majority of its users, and nobody ever seems to talk about Docker's negatives. A good rule of thumb might be: if you can't accurately explain how Docker works under the hood, or if you don't understand the OS components Docker itself uses, you shouldn't use it.
Re: Heroku has been running a second copy of my scheduler instance
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
Rent a $5/month VPS, install a few packages? Or just run a linux vm locally.
you clearly have no idea how things work outside of hobby projects, what about reliability? scalability, guaranteed uptime, resolving incidences,... You can account for all for that for yourself by creating a mini cloud provider.. good luck with that
What about those things? They're just glittering generalities, and an appeal to them is frequently used to justify adding ever more complexity to software.
The vast majority of startup web apps don't need anything more than a decent MVC framework (seriously, just use the web as designed) and a fast database. Keep a warm spare of your application running if a box goes down and you need to cut over or something. No, it's not sexy. No, they probably won't invite you to speak at Re:Invent. But your shit will work and it'll be cheap and FAST.
I've seen way too many basic CRUD apps, written by developers who mean well, needlessly overcomplicated in the name of things like "scalability" and "reliability". And guess what? They were some of the least scalable, least reliable applications. I'm talking applications where low double-digit requests per second for basic web pages caused the entire thing to shit itself.
So no, you don't actually need your own mini cloud provider to run a solid service. You just need to know what the hell you're doing.
Re: Heroku has been running a second copy of my scheduler instance
#104Clearly the author still hasn't learned his lesson: his "no more vendor lock" solution is another vendor(s) - which is always able to vendor-lock him, again. It is truly mind blowing on how many people keep falling for one of the oldest trick in IT : vendor lock-in. === No more vendor lock In 2018 Heroku was pretty much the only option for a newbie like me to get started with web-development. The landscape is very di…
> Heroku was pretty much the only option for a newbie like me to get started with web-development How, exactly? What happened in 2018 that somehow made it impossible to just host a website?
When all you have is a Heroku, everything starts to look like a nail.
Re: Heroku has been running a second copy of my scheduler instance
#105The article doesn't mention billing, I hope you weren't billed twice? :o
Please pay attention to this comment OP. The zombie dynos were likely not “closed”. Look at your bill closely.
Re: Heroku has been running a second copy of my scheduler instance
#106Kinda refreshing - within the ever growing genre of stories about Heroku's downfall into junk status - to find such an article with a higher level of detail and analysis of the origins of the problem. There's one thing that somewhat surprised me though: this line: > "In 2018 Heroku was pretty much the only option for a newbie like me to get started with web-development" Was it? Really? I mean, I'm not saying the auth…
Let's say you have never deployed anything to production before, and you've worked through a tutorial in Rails or Django or whatever and just built your first web app, and it's 2018, what are your options? There's the zoo of AWS. Maybe there's something there you can use - Lightsail came out I think in 2016 - but good luck trying to find it out of all the plethora of weirdly named services. Again, total beginner here…
> You can go with Linode or Digital Ocean. You would need to set up a VM with all the dependencies and make it secure. Oh and you'll need a database - should that sit on another VM? What about backup and restore? What about deployment? Sure, you can use Ansible, but that's yet another learning curve.
An interesting perspective. I started using Linux as a kid, long before I started programming. When I wrote my first webapps, setting up a VM and database was the easy, familiar part. (I didn't really care about securing it.) It makes sense that if someone's first delve into any technical field is writing webapps, setting up a VM and database would be daunting.
Re: Heroku has been running a second copy of my scheduler instance
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
Let's say you have never deployed anything to production before, and you've worked through a tutorial in Rails or Django or whatever and just built your first web app, and it's 2018, what are your options? There's the zoo of AWS. Maybe there's something there you can use - Lightsail came out I think in 2016 - but good luck trying to find it out of all the plethora of weirdly named services. Again, total beginner here…
Why is "learn more about how to properly host something" never an option for people? And in 2018! Suck it up and learn how to secure a VM, folks, especially if you're turning tutorials into production services. Most of those issues don't just go away when someone builds yet another expensive abstraction on top of a server, I promise.
Again, standing in the shoes of a beginner, you don't know what you don't know.
Heroku offered a path to easy, relatively secure deployment of a database-driven web application. If your aim is to just get something up and running - an MVP - it was probably fine, until it got too expensive. Maybe then you could buckle down and learn the "right" way, or maybe your business took off and you could just keep paying Heroku. If you're running a one-person SAAS, you might not have the time to spend on learning devops, when you have to fix bugs and add features and deal with customer support and sales. Sure, you'll hit that pain point when Heroku no longer works for you, but as detailed in the original post, that pain point may be years off.
Re: Heroku has been running a second copy of my scheduler instance
#108Heroku has been an absolute dumpster fire. Every time their name comes up I can't help but mention that they deleted my account for inactivity, but have still been charging my credit card. No easy way to cancel because... they deleted my account.
Netlify did this to me too! I have my startup with them and pay them a hefty bill. I had my personal websites on a second account (that should have been a free plan - one deploy every three years, next to zero traffic), and they deleted them and continue to bill me. I've had multiple customer service interactions asking them to stop billing me and they're nothing short of rude and unhelpful. "We've told you the dozen…
I’ve always thought positively about Netlify. About to launch my startup there as well.
I was thinking about using their identity and access plug-in to build out member access only pages. Would Render have this capability? Or any other non-code recommendations?
Re: Heroku has been running a second copy of my scheduler instance
#109I vote for moving to Render! My god I wish I could short Heroku stock.
I’m curious as to your experience using Render? When I tested it out, it seemed very clunky I was seeing build times in excess of 30 minutes even for small projects.
Really? I've only used it for small projects but I would see build times of around 5 minutes for Node back ends and NextJS front ends.
Re: Heroku has been running a second copy of my scheduler instance
#110I vote for moving to Render! My god I wish I could short Heroku stock.
Looks really expensive. And weird pricing. I click "pricing" and it gives me per user costs. Wat? I thought I was hosting stuff, not managing teams. Click on +Computing costs and it's like $0! $0! $0! Check the fineprint and its like 4GB RAM and 2 CPUs is $85/mo, or you can get the same at DigitalOcean for $24. Then add Postgres for another $95. Or if you're cheap like me, you self-host that in your $24 droplet and p…
It's a managed service. You pay a premium for it. Features like their blueprint file make it worth the price IMO - https://render.com/docs/blueprint-spec
If you are working on a team and you want everyone to be able to spin up a copy of the production infrastruction for each pull request then PaaS is the way to go. If you just have some random one-off production environment and you are happy to either manage the state of a HDD or a k8s cluster yourself (which comes down to will more so than skill) then DO is the way to go.