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Why companies move off Heroku (besides the cost)

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Re: Why companies move off Heroku (besides the cost)

#131

Post by mrkurt »

mwcampbell wrote: post #105
mrkurt wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the most interesting part of this is the PaaS disaggregation. Heroku built an exceptionally good Postgres service. They could not have done that with multiple DBs. Even their redis is pretty meh. People like us (Fly.io) will end up either building very mediocre DB offerings or collaborating with DB companies (like yours: https://www.crunchydata.com/products/crunchy-bridge/ ) to ship stuff that's substantially…

I'm curious about what "substantially better than RDS" means. RDS has been good enough for me for quite a while. Does it only matter once you get to a certain scale?

RDS runs pretty well! It's just irritating to use.

The good DBaaS give me a lot more power. This is true for Heroku PG, PlanetScale, Supabase, and Crunchy Data. Some of them let me fork a DB to run a PR against, some give me app level features that save me code, etc.

Most modern hosted DBs also let you run your own replicas.

I'm not really complaining about how well RDS works when your app is connected to it and it doesn't failover/go down for maintenance/etc. It works fine as a DB backend. That's just a baseline I don't think is very valuable anymore.

Re: Why companies move off Heroku (besides the cost)

#132

Post by ajhurliman »

rubyist5eva wrote: post #47

So this is more of a sales pitch for Porter - which is fine, I didn't know it existed and these are pretty compelling reasons to try it instead of Heroku. For me - the real selling point is that yes, Heroku is expensive - but the cost of a competent devops engineer is much, much, much higher. So unless it's literally impossible to do something with Heroku that needs a specialized skillset - the "devops as a service"…

Agreed. We have a small number of high value users so we’re actually running on the smallest non-free tier (mostly to avoid cold starts) with almost zero head aches. It’s like $15 a month.

The only frustration we’ve hit was mentioned in the article: static IP for integration with 3rd party services (VGS), but we used an add-on and I think we’re still in the free tier, or it’s a few dollars a month.

The cost? We were actually spending more on GCP due to ham fisted provisioning, plus a $150k dev ops guy. So ya, I’m pretty happy about the cost.

Re: Why companies move off Heroku (besides the cost)

#133

Post by a_chris »

booi wrote: post #19
craigkerstiens wrote: post #7

As 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…

https://render.com is my favorite in this space

I'm trying to switch from Heroku to Render but it is awfully slow compared to Heroku, my Rails project takes something like 1 minute to start after it has been shut down gratefully. Moreover, it breaks the CSS assets and uses the older assets instead of the latest ones. I do not why, it is a really small project and I have none of these issue on Heroku

Re: Why companies move off Heroku (besides the cost)

#135

Post by jwogrady »

elondaits wrote: post #126
killingtime74 wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dosen’t criticising competitors increase competition? “We taste better than x”, “we have higher quality than x”, “we’re like x but cheaper?”

I don’t like this either. I think maybe people are more used to this in the US, but I personally think that if you can’t be objective you need to be more humble in your communication. … of course Coke can trash-talk Pepsi and vice-versa… but if I’m making a technical assessment of competing products or software platforms I get a bad feeling of anyone using those sales tactics.

Yeah, but who we protecting? Don't readers want a rigorous debate? Are we pirates or diplomats?

Re: Why companies move off Heroku (besides the cost)

#136

Post by senjin »

Throwing this out there since it hasn't been mentioned yet but AWS's copilot tool (https://aws.github.io/copilot-cli/) has been really nice for setting up an ECS cluster with a good build pipeline that we use in almost the same way as we use Heroku. It's definitely more mental overhead than Heroku but it offers more flexibility and tying directly to your AWS account. After setup it has been maintenance free for over a year but debugging parts of the build pipeline were painful at first. It recently started supporting AppRunner now that AppRunner can access VPCs so I'm looking forward to trying that at some point too.

Re: Why companies move off Heroku (besides the cost)

#138

Post by btown »

gkoberger wrote: post #18

I'm historically a huge Heroku defender. Been using it for a decade now, and my company still uses it despite being quite large and getting a lot of traffic. It's always been a great product and the early Salesforce days they DID ship a ton of new stuff and improve rapidly (despite a narrative that they didn't). Like, it got REALLY GOOD the years after acquisition. That being said... it's insane that we haven't been…

If anything, the number of outages in the past two weeks on https://status.heroku.com/ has increased to the point where colleagues have asked if they can mute our #devops-alerts channel subscribed to notifications there. That's the canary in the coal mine if there ever was one. I have to imagine that rushed updates and maintenance windows are in reaction to the massive leak of credentials a couple weeks ago - but in a well-run organization that would trigger a need for additional caution, not less. Something is horribly wrong at Heroku right now.

Re: Why companies move off Heroku (besides the cost)

#139

Post by njudah »

barkerja wrote: post #49
craigkerstiens wrote: post #7

As 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…

We're big users of Heroku Connect, which has been an incredible product for our use.

As the co-creator of Heroku Connect (originally Cloudconnect), thanks! Its been amazing to watch that space mature in the 11 years since we started that effort, especially with the new crop of reverse ETL vendors.

Re: Why companies move off Heroku (besides the cost)

#140

Post by anurag »

a_chris wrote: post #133
booi wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://render.com is my favorite in this space

I'm trying to switch from Heroku to Render but it is awfully slow compared to Heroku, my Rails project takes something like 1 minute to start after it has been shut down gratefully. Moreover, it breaks the CSS assets and uses the older assets instead of the latest ones. I do not why, it is a really small project and I have none of these issue on Heroku

Sorry about that. It sounds like you're on the free plan which is somewhat underpowered vs Heroku right now. Still, definitely not the experience we hope to provide and I'd love to learn more. Email in profile.
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