One thing this article is missing is the arbitrary "400MB slug size" that heroku limits your application to if you want to deploy.
FWIW that's a "soft limit". I've deployed slugs over that limit without trouble. Idk if they have a hard limit.
Why companies move off Heroku (besides the cost)
111–120 of 230 posts
Re: Why companies move off Heroku (besides the cost)
#112As someone that was there at Heroku after the acquisition, I don't think you can state that since the acquisition it's been consistently downhill. There isn't much debate that things have stagnated in the last 5-7 years which is a longer story on why probably. Some examples of innovation that happened and were launched after the acquisition: buildpacks (at the time of acquisition Heroku was still Ruby only), Heroku P…
> at the time of acquisition Heroku was still Ruby only
Uhhh... I don't think that's true. There were 3rd party buildpacks available.
Re: Why companies move off Heroku (besides the cost)
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
> we haven't been able to deploy for over two weeks What is stopping you? Are you unable to type `git push heroku master`?
I think you're underestimating the complexity of our codebase. Aside from the usual blockers, we have hundreds of repos (our Staging feature for Enterprise allows customers to deploy our code on their own cadence) all tied together using pipelines. We have our own custom release management software, which now doesn't work. Different repos have to go out at the same time so things don't break. Plus, we extensively use…
We were in the same position (although luckily far fewer repos than you!). It took a bit of fiddling, but in the end I found that it was actually quite easy to fix this by tacking on a force push to the main branch of the heroku git repo at the end of our existing CI process (essentially treating heroku got as a deploy api that happens to use the git protocol)
Don’t blame you for wanting to move, but you might find that approach helpful as a quick fix.
Re: Why companies move off Heroku (besides the cost)
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
> we haven't been able to deploy for over two weeks What is stopping you? Are you unable to type `git push heroku master`?
* It was automated. Now it requires someone to pay attention and do it. You need to check if CI passed, and pull, and be sure you pulled the version that passed CI (maybe someone pushed since then). * Review apps, the only remaining heroku "killer feature", do not work at all. The fact that this has been broken for 2 weeks tells you everything thing you need to know about the state of their code base, and the resourc…
Tip for your first point: make the CI server push to heroku.
Re: Why companies move off Heroku (besides the cost)
#115We're big Heroku customers; despite that, I largely agree with the points in this article and there's a voice in the back of my head asking every few months "is this worth it?" Whenever I research the new crop of Heroku clones (the one being hawked here, and others) the pitch is always "it's just like Heroku but you can run it in your own cloud". It's mind-boggling to me that none of the clones understands that I DON…
You might like render.com
I recently deployed a web app on render.com and it looks it fits the description. I just told it to set up a PostgreSQL database, pointed it at my git repo and told it how to build/run the static site, web server, and cron job. It was pretty simple, it's got great features like logs, a console, and monitoring. The price is reasonable too.
Re: Why companies move off Heroku (besides the cost)
#116A good article, except for one big thing: this is not an end user, rather a direct competitor. Public articles that criticize competitors always run me the wrong way. I haven't used Heroku in a few years, but it has served (using the Hobby plan) as a really low cost way to host web apps. I have been reading through the comments on alternative providers, and even though I haven't used it, GCP's Cloud Deploy looks inte…
Dosen’t criticising competitors increase competition? “We taste better than x”, “we have higher quality than x”, “we’re like x but cheaper?”
Re: Why companies move off Heroku (besides the cost)
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
What do you imagine their home-grown offering would have over using S3 directly?
I thought the entire point of Heroku was that it wrapped up existing essential basic AWS offerings into a more manageable package? I’d rather not have to manage a side account for AWS, and set up the connections to it and things. I’d rather it was just there, like their database.
A lot of AWS’s offerings are hard to use. But s3 really isn’t. There’s also firebase storage and backblaze b2 in this space. And they’re all easy to use standalone.
Re: Why companies move off Heroku (besides the cost)
#118For all heroku's frustrations (and I agree with all of them in the article), it is still the only thing that "just works" for a standard monolith web app. Heroku is not cheap, but it is still cheaper than a couple full time employees + aws. It is really too bad they aren't innovating - they are just burning up their 10 year lead in the space. I wouldn't start a new project on Heroku - not because of the cost, but bec…
Heroku is not _the only thing that just works for standard monolith web apps_. Plenty of others in this space, like netlify, vercel, firebase, etc. I don't know how they all compare to each other, I don't use any of them.
Most of those others don’t offer traditional compute. And “functions” have a lot of limitations, and a pain to work with locally.
Re: Why companies move off Heroku (besides the cost)
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
AWS’s ECS Fargate with Aurora Serverless and AWS CA certificates is close.
But even that stuff is gonna be more configuration than Heroku, right? I wanna spend literally zero hours a month on server / dev ops, if I can manage it. I will pay for it and accept the constraints of simplicity.
It is more configuration, yes, but it's far less than say ec2 and nomad. We run a very light production load on it and in 6 months I've had to intervene once (to bump our limits because we spiked slightly more than I expected us to)
Re: Why companies move off Heroku (besides the cost)
#120I don't know if I'm seeing things, but Heroku seems to be more expensive than GCP. I get a 8 GB RAM Postgres instance for 200$ on Heroku. On GCP I get a 4CPU 26GB RAM Postgres instance for 280$ (Cloud SQL). What's the USP Heroku provides?
Point it at your got repo, click to choose which tech stack you’re running, write a 1 line yaml file to tell it what command to run to start up, and you already have a server running and a build pipeline that deploys when you push your code.