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We are far from a better Heroku for production apps in a hyper cloud

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Re: We are far from a better Heroku for production apps in a hyper cloud

#21

Post by sytse »

dubcanada wrote: post #10

People 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…

I agree Heroku has the perfect dev environment, not much to improve there.

We’re trying to make the perfect production environment. Most people end up hosting at a hyper cloud (edit: like AWS). We’re trying to make the app on a hyper cloud in production as easy as Heroku is in development.

We’re still building that, it is t done by any means. And the article doesn’t do a good job of showing what we are trying to make easier. Setting up managed services on AWS is time consuming and that is what we want to solve. See https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/5-minute-production-app/deploy...

The contents of the blog post doesn’t warrant the title. We regret it.

Re: We are far from a better Heroku for production apps in a hyper cloud

#22

Post by jrochkind1 »

So I think heroku has stagnated a bit, and I am definitely very open to "better herokus".

But the idea that something you did in five minutes is going to be better than heroku (in all ways?) is.... I don't know what the adjective is. Heroku is very mature and polished software, that almost always does what you expect -- it's a very non-leaky abstraction, I guess. You can almost always get away with ignoring the details. (Yes, not 100%, but almost always). And there's pretty high quality documentation explaining how all the parts work, when you do need to figure out something.

This is unlikely to be a "better heroku", that solves all the problems heroku solves with as little time/energy from the customer -- if it really is, this post definitely didn't convince me of it, I still don't totally understand what it's even demo'ing. And it just makes gitlab look rude and/or desperate to have a heading that's simply "Do not use Heroku" -- because it's not open source, is the argument, i guess? Plus a vague and sarcastic tweet? How would we feel if heroku (or github) had an article titled "Do not use gitlab" with no more of an argument than that? It's just... childish.

Re: We are far from a better Heroku for production apps in a hyper cloud

#23

Post by fractionalhare »

askonomm wrote: post #2

I 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.

> Everything? I thought it was supposed to be Git hosting, but I'm not even sure anymore.

They're losing to GitHub. While they advertise that they have 2/3 of the self-hosted git server market share, they just barely have a double digit share of the total VCS market, which is where the real enterprise money and value is. I don't have figures on hand, but I'd guess they have a single digit percentage of actual enterprise market share. GitHub has the same domination over its space that Google has over search, and Microsoft is excellent at competing on enterprise partnerships.

Tech companies usually scale out their products eventually anyway, but in GitLab's case it's probably existential if they want to maintain status as a high growth, VC-backed company. They need to find another of their competitors' moats which is easier to chip away at, or they need to change the game and introduce something original.

Re: We are far from a better Heroku for production apps in a hyper cloud

#24

Post by koolba »

> Lots of CLI commands involved, and it did not run in a CI/CD pipeline with additional tests before deploying it. Now the web application is deployed into a black box.

That's just the other side of coin. If you want a simple "push and it's up!" interface then Heroku is a shiny coin. If you want to sell multiple levels of CI pipelines then it looks rusty.

> Want to use Let’s Encrypt and your own domain name?

I've never seen a platform that is easier to add Let's Encrypt domain validated TLS than Heroku's. Yes it's manual steps, but it's manual because you have to set up your DNS to point to their load balancer. I fail to see how much simpler it could be than that.

> How about adding the deployment natively to GitLab to have a single application in your DevOps workflow?

> # A better Heroku: The 5 minute production app

> ... The documentation says to create a new AWS IAM role with credentials for automation.

Nothing that involves creating AWS accounts or IAM role creation would take five minutes for someone unfamiliar with AWS. And if does happen in less than five minutes than I guarantee you that new user either has no clue what they just created or (boolean, not exclusive) they've left some gaping wide hole in their IAM permissions.

I'm not saying that it can't be done. I'm saying there is no way that creating all of that from scratch can be done simply, securely, and quickly for a new user.

Re: We are far from a better Heroku for production apps in a hyper cloud

#25

Post by capableweb »

sytse wrote: post #21
dubcanada wrote: post #10

People 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…

I agree Heroku has the perfect dev environment, not much to improve there. We’re trying to make the perfect production environment. Most people end up hosting at a hyper cloud (edit: like AWS). We’re trying to make the app on a hyper cloud in production as easy as Heroku is in development. We’re still building that, it is t done by any means. And the article doesn’t do a good job of showing what we are trying to make…

What does "hyper cloud" mean in this context? Searching only shows a headset with the name "HyperX Cloud" but I'm sure that's not what you are referring to.

Re: We are far from a better Heroku for production apps in a hyper cloud

#26

Post by danpalmer »

This post appears to be a comparison between deploying something on Heroku from scratch in 5 minutes, all-in, and someone knowledgeable about GitLab, GitLab CI and AWS, with accounts and credentials already created and configured, deploying something trivial in 6 minutes.

That's quite a straw-man.

If I were GitLab, I wouldn't be criticising the UX of companies known for excellent UX like Heroku while GitLab's UX is in the state its in.

Re: We are far from a better Heroku for production apps in a hyper cloud

#27

Post by ignoramous »

askonomm wrote: post #2

I 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.

> I feel like Gitlab is going in a direction of AWS...

It turns out, if you host the source, you hold the keys to the world of DevOps, too. It is completely natural then for GitLab to venture in to an ever expanding field of GitOps and eventually the Cloud computing market. I mean, Microsoft plonked billions on GitHub for Azure more than anything else.

Re: We are far from a better Heroku for production apps in a hyper cloud

#28

Post by carlosf »

oweiler wrote: post #17

I 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.

GitLab customer here. Sometimes I also feel like they are adding a lot of stuff instead of improving their core services. BTW I already gave up on using GitLab's native caching in favor of doing all my CI/CD with Kaniko + Multi Stage Dockerfiles

I would not care about new features if they had granular billing like AWS, GCP, etc... But here I am paying for Devsecops and a lot other stuff I don't use.

Re: We are far from a better Heroku for production apps in a hyper cloud

#29

Post by boleary-gl »

capableweb wrote: post #25
sytse wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree Heroku has the perfect dev environment, not much to improve there. We’re trying to make the perfect production environment. Most people end up hosting at a hyper cloud (edit: like AWS). We’re trying to make the app on a hyper cloud in production as easy as Heroku is in development. We’re still building that, it is t done by any means. And the article doesn’t do a good job of showing what we are trying to make…

What does "hyper cloud" mean in this context? Searching only shows a headset with the name "HyperX Cloud" but I'm sure that's not what you are referring to.

In this context "Hyper Cloud" means one of the major cloud vendors - AWS, GCP, Azure.

Re: We are far from a better Heroku for production apps in a hyper cloud

#30

Post by arthurcolle »

candiddevmike wrote: post #15

This 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!

> I have been a backend focussed developer in the past 20 years, web development is often fighting with Javascript and CSS. Especially Heroku as a deployment platform is a new area for me.

No editing either...

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