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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)

#31

Post by justjake »

Warning: There are a couple people in this thread mentioning products that they're investors in. I won't call them out expressly, but I think people should be direct about their incentive alignments. It's disingenuous and borders on astroturfing IMO.

Background: Founder of Railway.app here.

There's a lot of these companies popping up that offer a "Heroku replacement", and once you dive in, you realize you have to pay $300/mo for a Kubecluster + $200/mo for the wrapped Kube service

In our experience, people move off Heroku for a couple things:

- Cost: Kinda self explanatory but Heroku pricing ramps hard

- Flexibility: Heroku's not great for anything beyond stateful monoliths

- Scalability: Notoriously Heroku's SLAs aren't that great

In my mind, you don't replace Heroku with a minimum $500/mo Kubernetes cluster. Not only is this cost prohibitively expensive, but Kubernetes itself is a jet engine, and if you're not trained to use it correctly, you can risk catastrophic failure (on costs ballooning, on dataloss, etc)

We're working hard at Railway to provide not just a Heroku replacement, but a next generation, composable infrastructure canvas. $5/mo, 30 seconds, and you're up and running.

Demo:https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/5499880/165187948-...

Would love any feedback and thoughts people have about Heroku, my thoughts above, and what we're building :)

EDIT: Wow, just went from 11 -> 8 upvotes. I suppose they didn't like the astroturfing callout

EDIT2: Render isn't who I'm talking about. They're great.

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

#33

Post by tommoor »

krallja wrote: post #26
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…

> we haven't been able to deploy for over two weeks What is stopping you? Are you unable to type `git push heroku master`?

That's fine as a solo developer – but what about a team with CI pipelines etc?

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

#34

Post by gkoberger »

krallja wrote: post #26
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…

> 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 their review apps for code reviews, which we've lost access to.

Lastly, not everyone has access to deploy directly to Heroku, so not everyone would be able to 'git push heroku main'.

Could we fix all of this and get it working? Yeah. But we want to be focusing on building our product, which is why we pay Heroku a ton of money so we don't have to worry about this.

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

#35

Post by geoffharcourt »

krallja wrote: post #26
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…

> we haven't been able to deploy for over two weeks What is stopping you? Are you unable to type `git push heroku master`?

This doesn't work if your Git repo is above a certain size. Some of our apps (fortunately not production) haven't been able to deploy since the incident.

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

#36

Post by heartbreak »

justjake wrote: post #31

Warning: There are a couple people in this thread mentioning products that they're investors in. I won't call them out expressly, but I think people should be direct about their incentive alignments. It's disingenuous and borders on astroturfing IMO. Background: Founder of Railway.app here. There's a lot of these companies popping up that offer a "Heroku replacement", and once you dive in, you realize you have to pay…

They’ve been shilling their R•nder and P•rter services on every single thread about this Heroku incident, and it’s frankly a problem that HN moderators should address.

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

#37

Post by ryanSrich »

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…

I'm in the same boat. We were in the process of moving off of Heroku a few months back. We had to pause that migration for a number of reasons, but the initial jump was to save some money.

Now I'm kicking myself for not pushing the migration to completion. I've basically had to spend the last week recreating much of our deployment pipeline using a very complicated local deployment structure that only I can execute. It's a complete nightmare. My only guess is that the Heroku team is just a handful of overworked developers. For the Github integration to be down this long they must just not care. Like at all.

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

#38

Post by MikeTheRocker »

baggiponte wrote: post #3

Alternatives to Heroku besides Porter?

https://railway.app/ is really good. Easiest way to get a project up and running IMO. You can deploy from existing GitHub repos or a project starter in one click.

Disclosure: I am an investor in Railway

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

#39

Post by jacobsenscott »

krallja wrote: post #26
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…

> 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 resources salesforce is willing to allocate to heroku.

Has anyone switched to AWS App Runner? Curious how it went.

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

#40

Post by ryanSrich »

heartbreak wrote: post #36
justjake wrote: post #31

Warning: There are a couple people in this thread mentioning products that they're investors in. I won't call them out expressly, but I think people should be direct about their incentive alignments. It's disingenuous and borders on astroturfing IMO. Background: Founder of Railway.app here. There's a lot of these companies popping up that offer a "Heroku replacement", and once you dive in, you realize you have to pay…

They’ve been shilling their R•nder and P•rter services on every single thread about this Heroku incident, and it’s frankly a problem that HN moderators should address.

What should HN do? People are free to downvote it until it's dead. That seems a more democratic way to handle it.
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