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Removal of Heroku free product plans

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Re: Removal of Heroku free product plans

#401
post #384
post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah yes, because a company that decides to stop giving away its time and resources for free is now a "villain". Right.

Mate, this was a joke. I hope that came across. I've been a paying member of heroku for nearly a decade, and pay them $1000s of my personal income monthly. I think their product has been brilliant. I just defended them yesterday in a HN comment. I do, however, use their free tier to test things daily. This news puts me in a bind. It's work that I hadn't planned, and I only have 3 months to find a solution for it when…

[deleted]

Re: Removal of Heroku free product plans

#402

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand this sentiment sometimes. There may be fraud and abuse. There may also be a material cost to a company whose detailed financial situation I'm assuming you are not purvey to. Someone doesn't need to be "a stupid MBA" to have made this decision (in fact my guess would be it involved many cross functional and leadership perspectives given its nature). Also, this is quite possibly something necessary f…

Salesforce made 4.34B in gross profit in 2021, they aren't hurting for money and the "health of the business" seems perfectly fine. I'm sure someone got a raise for cutting this program, it will save the company some money in the short term, and that person will have left to screw up another company before the chickens come home to roost. It's a tale as old as time and something we've seen enough times to notice the…

This is Salesforce we're talking about, the company that pledged not to do any layoffs during the pandemic, then announced that they were laying off 1000 people literally the day after announcing what they called "the best quarter in company history." [0] Worst of all? Many of the people who worked at Salesforce found out they were laid off _by reading the news article_ (source: I worked at Salesforce at the time, and there was a _lot_ of commotion internally to try to track down which managers had the audacity to give the laid-off employees advance notice before the public announcement, and lots of internal all-hands-meeting outrage directed at people who dared to "break trust" by telling reporters that they had been laid off).

[0] https://abcnews.go.com/Business/salesforce-announces-layoffs...

Re: Removal of Heroku free product plans

#403

> Open source programs: If you are a maintainer on an open-source project, and would like to request Heroku support for your project, contact the Salesforce Open Source Program office at ospo-heroku-credits@salesforce.com. Both the text version of this email (ospo-heroku-credits@salesforce.com) and the mailto it actually links (ospo@salesforce.com) appear to be invalid. I tried both and got: > We're writing to let yo…

This should be fixed now...

FTR: The correct address is ospo-heroku-credits@salesforce.com

Re: Removal of Heroku free product plans

#404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We are not shutting it down. As I said in the blog, our priority is making sure that Heroku choice is a good business decision for critical apps of all sizes. This does have tradeoffs, but getting the rug pulled out is not one of them - the opposite.

Ok, let's see how well this comment ages. I predict in 5-10 years max we will get an "Our incredibly journey" post or a "Heroku is now Salesforce Cloud" (if that name isn't already taken, I have no clue, "Safeforce" is an immediate "avoid! red flag!" for me, I don't follow that company). Heroku was amazing when it first came out but it squandered the lead it had and hasn't done anything interesting for a long time. A…

"Heroku is now Salesforce Cloud" is an easy-bet prediction, just like "ExactTarget is now Marketing Cloud", or "Pardot is now Marketing Cloud Account Engagement".

When something gets the "Cloud" rename, you can bet it's on the way downhill.

Re: Removal of Heroku free product plans

#405
I posted this previously, but it seems apt to repost given this significant change:

I've not found the time to write up the entirety of my experience unfortunately, but I did move a bunch of stuff off Heroku over the past couple of years and directly onto AWS. It was a very piecemeal approach which had the double benefit of being low/no impact to end users while also letting me do it at my leisure. My general approach was:

* Import my current Heroku config into Terraform resources so I can co-ordinate changes across multiple platforms as a single atomic change.

* Embrace a strangler pattern (https://www.redhat.com/architect/pros-and-cons-strangler-arc...). I used Cloudfront, but you could put any CDN in front.

* My databases + workers were a large part of my Heroku bill, and I had a very spikey usage profile (potentially days with near zero usage, with brief peaks), so I used it as an opportunity to refactor towards a serverless infrastructure (https://glenngillen.com/safely_migrating_from_heroku_aws_ser...). This was entirely superfluous to the migration though. If I'd not taken that approach the alternate would have been to provision and RDS Postgres instance, add the required IAM profiles to my Heroku app. Work out how/when to schedule a window to cutover to RDS being the primary DB. Update the DATABASE_URL accordingly. Again, doing all of this via Terraform to make it happen. But doing it in small incremental steps where possible (i.e., adding the IAM profiles to the app first). Once cut-over, take a final snapshot of the Heroku Postgres database and then shut it down.

* Updating the code on my workers to be idempotent.

* Make sure config vars are imported to Terraform and are sync'd to the various places they need to be (probably just the Heroku app for now).

* Have the workers run inside containers on AWS (doing them just one worker at a time), exposing the required config vars for them to work. Let the Heroku + AWS workers both process the work for a period of time, hence the need for being idempotent. Once I'm confident the AWS ones work as intended, shut down the Heroku workers. * Picking off individual paths/API endpoints to serve from AWS. In my case I also migrated all of this to API gateway + lambda. An ALB with EC2/ECS would have also been an alternative. Add a new path based route to your CDN (e.g., /v2/the-existing-path) and have it's origin point to your non-Heroku service. Test it. Once it works, update the existing path that users are using to now go to the new origin. It means if you discover some issue you can quickly update the routing to have Heroku resume serving that route. Once you're confident, rinse and repeat the next path. Continue through until all traffic is ultimately served by the new host.

* If there's nothing left then scale down the remaining processes on Heroku.

I've gone an all-in AWS approach, but the same general principle could apply to whatever platform you want to run on. I think the biggest thing people I've spoken to in the past about this overlook is that you don't have to make some big wholesale switch. There's ways to derisk it and take an incremental approach to migrating. Which also drastically reduces the cost of making the wrong decision. If you can run just one route through AWS/Fly/DigitialOcean/whatever then you can get a sense for whether it will _actually_ work for your needs, and quickly roll back if you change your mind.

Re: Removal of Heroku free product plans

#406

Really sad end for Heroku. They never could find a balance between the free tiers they offered and their overly-expensive paid tiers. Now they're entering purgatory before they are ultimately shut down for good. They had the markings of a long-lasting company in this space but corporate mismanagement has led to this drawn out death for the company. Salesforce buying the company made a few rich, but it really did turn…

Counter point seems to be Slack, which has become better (in my opinion) after the Salesforce Acquisition. I think the struggle is that Salesforce has never historically offered a platform as a service business that is agnostic to its end goal. I imagine the idea of acquiring Heroku was to make it easy to spin up new Salesforce apps, but I don't know that ever materialized in the way they were hoping.

> Counter point seems to be Slack, which has become better (in my opinion) after the Salesforce Acquisition.

...which was only finalized about a year ago, and "phase one" of Salesforce's several-steps-plan that culminates in screwing up an acquisition is usually needlessly tinkering with pricing and packaging, which just happened recently [0].

The next step, if past patterns are predictors, will be an attempt to bundle Slack into their existing SKUs, then work on integrating Slack with their nightmare CRM codebase/dev-env, and then from there it's all downhill as velocity abruptly halts, the ratio of time spent doing meaningful work vs. time spent doing compliance busy-work stalls out completely, and the brain-drain begins.

[0] https://slack.com/blog/news/pricing-and-plan-updates

Re: Removal of Heroku free product plans

#407
post #15

Fly.io has a dedicated process for moving off of Heroku. Auth via Heroku and they'll launch your app onto Fly. They also have a free tier. The process: https://fly.io/launch/heroku The docs: https://fly.io/docs/app-guides/speed-up-a-heroku-app I haven't used it [the Heroku -> Fly process] myself, but it's been around for quite some time!

Please let me know in the replies what you'd like to see at Fly that would make it as good, if not better, than Heroku. I recently started working at Fly to focus on making Rails & Ruby app deployments awesome, and of course Heroku set that benchmark almost a decade ago. I can't promise I'll get to everything, but I can promise that it will help me better prioritize what I should be focusing on to make Fly better for…

The main drawback I saw compared to Heroku is no longer a drawback now that Heroku will have no free plans. But Fly's 256M free apps just OOM-ed for a hobby project whereas they ran fine with Heroku's 512M free dynos so I moved there.

Re: Removal of Heroku free product plans

#408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fly, Render, or (blah) straight AWS. If I was starting from scratch, I'd go all in on Next + Vercel.

Why not bare metal servers or VPS from like... DigitalOcean? What is DigitalOcean missing for your use case/preference specifically compared to Next + Vercel? I'm not a DigitalOcean shill or employee, I'm just curious what I'm missing from a "what do other competitors out there offer". I always thought it was like... spinup Debian/Ubuntu VPS, ssh to it, install Docker, run docker-compose or Docker Swarm or... Terrafo…

As someone who does what you suggest, it's great but it is a lot of overhead and not zero click. Updates, reboots, lambda functionality (autoscale, blue/green, etc) and database hosting is always complex.

Re: Removal of Heroku free product plans

#409
post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why even bother with contacting an account executive? It's $7 per dyno per month for the cheapest hobby tier. That's peanuts compared to any fees for a paid bootcamp. Heck, with inflation, that barely buys a bag of peanuts. Plus the students would have an incentive to learn about shutting down unused resources that would pay dividends if they ever deploy to AWS. It'd be like a home economic lesson for hosted services…

Yes, but you also really need Postgres and that's now an extra $9/month too. $0 -> $16

Heroku Dyno + free cochroachdb instance, reasonable enough

Re: Removal of Heroku free product plans

#410

This is a sad day. Pricing changes are always hard, and having been through some of the earlier pricing changes at Heroku you can't make everyone happy. But, so many developers deployed their first app on Heroku and was a staple for so many bootcamps. Without it I'm confident we'd have less developers in the world. It is still one of the gold standards for developer experience. Years after its heyday companies and to…

I agree that the Heroku developer experience has been second to none. I'm a front-end & DX engineer at Northflank and we're working hard to evolve and create a next-gen iteration of the Heroku experience anchored around 12 Factor Applications in a Kubernetes/cloud native era. We're getting very close, come and see for yourself: https://northflank.com . Some key features: * As simple as `git push` to build & deploy se…

https://northflank.com/docs/v1/application/billing/project-t...

> You can have one free project on your user account, and the resources you create within it will be limited. You will not be billed for any usage within a free project, but you must add a card to your account for verification first.

not having to add credit card info before using the free tier is one of the main reasons for Heroku being so popular with students and toy projects, truly a friction-free experience.

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