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

#271

Post by giorgioz » Wed, Mar 24, 2021, 12:28 PM UTC

jopsen wrote: post #231

leerob wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey! Lee from Vercel here. Vercel isn't just for static sites – it also handles server-rendered applications, serverless functions, and hybrid frameworks (like Next.js). The current focus has been on an incredible front-end experience, but we're working to become a first-party integrator with your favorite backend solutions. For example, you can deploy a full-stack Next.js application with a PostgreSQL database in le…

Isn't serverless still just lambda..? Slow to boot, and subject to denial-of-wallet attacks. I do love vercel for static sites, and also think my blog with a minimal backend for comments is a good fit. But less sure how it'll hold up to even a single heroku dyno, which can do a lot of concurrent request at very low cost.

My personal experience with a B2B SaaS startup is that Vercel and AWS Lambda are much cheaper than Heroku. 0 to 4th year of the B2B SaaS startup we went from 1 free dyno to 3x 25$ a month dynos on Heroku for a total of 75USD a month. 4th to 8th year we switched to AWS Lambda and we have paid... 0$ since then. AWS Lambda free minutes are well enough to run a B2B SaaS until like 300 paying customers. AWS Lambda is also part of the serverless movement and it pairs up well with static sites on CDN. You can pre-render and/or generate a stic website for all the www landing pages and put them in S3 buckets cached with AWS CloudFront (Amazon CDN).

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

#272

Post by parasubvert » Wed, Mar 24, 2021, 4:24 PM UTC

fractionalhare wrote: post #124

sdfhbdf wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They're losing to GitHub In my experience their approach to pipelines and CI is a winner. In that regard GitHub seems to be playing catchup and the "checks" feel like second class citizens in GitHub while it feels really cohesive in GitLab.

Sure. I wouldn't be surprised if they have better features along specific dimensions. I'm talking about monetizable market share and revenue.

Gitlab has a post money valuation of $6b on revenue of around $150m+. It’s not “winning” but arguably it’s okay to be #3 (behind Atlassian / Bitbucket though they’re more diversified). It’s clearly doing fine enough to IPO or get bought at a premium. They have some huge customers that refuse to use GitHub.

I do question the “kitchen sink” product strategy and whether it’s sustainable - Atlassian pulled it off by building a product line rather than an all-in-one.

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

#273

Post by edem » Wed, Mar 24, 2021, 6:40 PM UTC

giorgioz wrote: post #104

There is already a better Heroku and it's Vercel (previously Zeit) https://vercel.com/ I believe Vercel is the spiritual successor of Heroku. I guess Heroku got bought by Salesforce and the founders/visionaries left. Heroku should have moved to bill per seconds/milliseconds based on AWS Lambda functions like Vercel did later.

+1 for Vercel. It is so stupid, that even my grandma could do it!

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

#274

Post by ljm » Wed, Mar 24, 2021, 8:58 PM UTC

jrochkind1 wrote: post #263

ljm wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Heroku's pricing is also justified IMO, since if you're using Heroku you're most likely saving money on hiring an on-call infrastructure or ops team, and saving money on having your engineers switch focus from feature development to maintaining the system, or doing dev-ops work. You're paying Heroku to do the operational stuff for you so you can spend more time building your product. That's a price well worth paying…

> even then I don't think the default next step is going full-blown cloud and K8S What would you suggest as a 'next step' after heroku?

Switching to a VPS or two is an option. You get more control over the machines you're running.

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

#275

Post by rad_gruchalski » Sat, Mar 27, 2021, 10:14 PM UTC

brodock wrote: post #254

rad_gruchalski wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As long as it is faster than gitlab itself, sure. Every time I go to the hosted gitlab, I cringe. I like the product but the whole thing is sooo slow. First, 5 seconds wasted to "check if my browser supports gitlab", then the lag on every click. Hopefully your heroku will have a better experience than your gitlab.

Isn't that "5 seconds" a cloudflare thing?

Why should I care? I click sign in button, which takes me to https://gitlab.com/users/sign_in and I see the message. Who cares where it comes from.