We are far from a better Heroku for production apps in a hyper cloud • Hacker News Board

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

#201

Post by throwaway823882 » Tue, Mar 23, 2021, 6:47 PM UTC

If nothing else, this whole thread shows that actually running a product in production is much more difficult than a lot of people would like to believe, and paying for good managed hosting is worth it. Just because we want it to be cheap or easy doesn't mean it will be.

Aside: has anyone here ever tried to build an actual wheel? Like a wheel for a car, or a wheelbarrow, or a wagon? One that has to take hundreds / thousands of pounds, works in multiple environments, lasts years, requires little maintenance? I think the phrase "reinventing the wheel" understates the difficulty it takes to actually re-create a wheel even if you already know how it works. Not only is it wasted effort if a good wheel already exists, it's also much harder than you think.

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

#202

Post by octernion » Tue, Mar 23, 2021, 6:49 PM UTC

i use heroku because someone else maintains infrastructure for me. i haven't had to touch apps for years (4+ years) except for security patches or other minor updates and everything just keeps trucking. we have a long way to go to build those systems.

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

#203

Post by airstrike » Tue, Mar 23, 2021, 6:50 PM UTC

tnolet wrote: post #86

> "A typical web app requires a database, storage or caching backend, which can get complicated to run with Heroku." Ah no. That is exactly where Heroku is dead easy. The creating, maintaining, updating and general day-to-day management of these "addons" require almost no input from the user. DB failover and mgmt is almost magic. I wished GitLab would stay away from this needless, click bait type articles. It's not e…

I agree but you're replying to the wrong comment

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

#204

Post by throwaway823882 » Tue, Mar 23, 2021, 6:51 PM UTC

Since the post has diverged quite a bit from the original and most of the comments are about the original, here is the original: https://web.archive.org/web/20210322133353/https://about.git...

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

#205

Post by samblr » Tue, Mar 23, 2021, 6:57 PM UTC

Hey Gitlab,

This is as worse as it can get. This is tabloid stuff. Have lost respect for you.

Name calling Heroku which is known for its UX and ease of use. And then offering nothing but some made up nonsense and buzzwords. What happened to your good standards ?

Why can't you be serious and build a better Heroku instead ? for real

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

#206

Post by j4yav » Tue, Mar 23, 2021, 6:58 PM UTC

The title edit makes this topic pretty confusing.

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

#207

Post by nightpool » Tue, Mar 23, 2021, 6:59 PM UTC

JimDabell wrote: post #157

alecbz wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a blog post on the company's official blog, no? I doubt it's like a free-for-all where any employee can post whatever they want without any review. Judging GitLab based on the content posted on their blog seems like fair game.

> It's a blog post on the company's official blog, no? No. There’s a notice saying it’s unfiltered, with a link leading to a disclaimer saying, pretty much: > it's like a free-for-all where any employee can post whatever they want without any review. Or, in their own words: > This blog is intended for user-generated content submitted by the GitLab team. The views and opinions represented in this blog are personal to…

Regardless of its unofficial status, it's a post promoting the company's products in a public space, where the employee is representing the company. As a GitLab employee agrees above, it's fair to judge the company and hold them to a high standard based on how their employees present their work in the public sphere.

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

#208

Post by agilob » Tue, Mar 23, 2021, 7:04 PM UTC

samblr wrote: post #205

Hey Gitlab, This is as worse as it can get. This is tabloid stuff. Have lost respect for you. Name calling Heroku which is known for its UX and ease of use. And then offering nothing but some made up nonsense and buzzwords. What happened to your good standards ? Why can't you be serious and build a better Heroku instead ? for real

They do the same on linkedin and that was the reason I unfollowed them, too many buzzwords for short content. GitLab used to have a really good technical blog (like postgres articles), but you wouldn't believe the top 10 things they started doing! Unfortunately recent posts are medium.com quality.

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

#209

Post by throwaway894345 » Tue, Mar 23, 2021, 7:08 PM UTC

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…

> You don't need a bunch of silly yml configs

The "silly yml configs" are the things I care about the most. I don't want to have to remember how to reproduce my environment in order to stamp out a new one or recover an existing one. I'm all for removing the seldom-needed complexity, but "reproducibility" is the concern around which I build my whole tech stack--I largely avoid VM-based stacks precisely because the reproducibility story is so much flakier than the reproducibility story for containers. I imagine you can use something like Terraform for Heroku, but pretending that you can ignore reproducibility altogether is... really something. Maybe the parent means that "yaml is silly" and Heroku has a better reproducibility story in some other format (maybe graphical?)?

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

#210

Post by lumost » Tue, Mar 23, 2021, 7:14 PM UTC

throwaway894345 wrote: post #209

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…

> You don't need a bunch of silly yml configs The "silly yml configs" are the things I care about the most. I don't want to have to remember how to reproduce my environment in order to stamp out a new one or recover an existing one. I'm all for removing the seldom-needed complexity, but "reproducibility" is the concern around which I build my whole tech stack--I largely avoid VM-based stacks precisely because the rep…

There is a gap here in apps that (typical) developers need. There is absolutely a market for footguns that work 95% of the time as long as the developer pays some attention to it.

If you did all of the things required of launching a cloud level service for every signup page... few things would get done. There are some web apps which only need to exist for a few weeks or less before they can be tossed in a fire.

If I'm a startup with limited customer expectations of reliability and I just want to see if my friends would use my product demo... a point and click solution sounds pretty great.