51–60 of 230 posts
Not having any sort of basic disk/storage solution has been painful for us. There's been a lot of situations where I would love to store a big blob of data on the disk while processing it but if that Heroku dyno reboots - poof, its gone.
What kind of workflow are you trying to fit? My impression is that this lack of 'instance storage' is by design, as well as other constraints that can be mapped to these: https://12factor.net/
However what happens if you're doing something that doesn't really fit that definition. For instance we have a Rails app with some background workers doing data processing. I would very much like to have these workers just dump to disk, so I can take a big chunk of data and move it into Postgres at once. But I can't do that with Heroku.
So basically this is something that Heroku isn't designed to do, but its also something I would rather not need to go one level of abstraction deeper, to AWS directly for instance, in order to do. And its also something that every single one of their competitors offers.
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…
Would you be willing to go over our Heroku environment to see if we'd be a good fit for Railway? I can't tell from the demo if you have things like automated backups, rollbacks, workers, add-ons for logging/monitoring/performance/etc. Those are all tablestakes for us. But Railway certainly looks great.
I can tell you a couple things off the bat:
- We have automated backups but they're for our own internal disaster recovery. User backups are something we want to do but haven't put on our roadmap yet
- A key thing with Railway is "It's just code". So, a worker is just another service. We don't have special casing for specific types of code. We just run the code! So, yes we do support them
- We have a lot of stuff built in, but we also support deploying say, a containerized DataDog agent, or a Dockerized sidecar, or application level Sentry integrations
We have a very particular vision of how this stuff should be done, so it's going to take some time. My promise is to always be super honest about the platform, so it would be more of an "Customer Discovery" vs a Sales call
If that all sounds well and good, you can email me at jake@railway.app! Offer goes for anybody interested but again, I'm not here to push the platform just to gain clarity on what we're building :)
Ultimately platform-as-a-service has always been a dead end. Companies either want more control over the infrastructure (so use plain VMs or Kubernetes), or want to forget about servers entirely (opting for services like Lambda and now edge computing). Everything in the middle (Elastic Beanstalk, App Engine, Heroku) has been stagnant for a long time now.
Alternatives to Heroku besides Porter?
It is really too bad they aren't innovating - they are just burning up their 10 year lead in the space. I wouldn't start a new project on Heroku - not because of the cost, but because I don't expect them to last another 10 years.
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.
This is just an ad for their own service. Heroku is doing fine. They provide exactly what they advertise, and the service has been rock solid for over a decade. Sure it doesn't fit everyone's use cases, but it doesn't need to. Ultimately platform-as-a-service has always been a dead end. Companies either want more control over the infrastructure (so use plain VMs or Kubernetes), or want to forget about servers entirel…
As someone that was there at Heroku after the acquisition, I don't think you can state that since the acquisition it's been consistently downhill. There isn't much debate that things have stagnated in the last 5-7 years which is a longer story on why probably. Some examples of innovation that happened and were launched after the acquisition: buildpacks (at the time of acquisition Heroku was still Ruby only), Heroku P…
https://render.com is my favorite in this space
For all heroku's frustrations (and I agree with all of them in the article), it is still the only thing that "just works" for a standard monolith web app. Heroku is not cheap, but it is still cheaper than a couple full time employees + aws. It is really too bad they aren't innovating - they are just burning up their 10 year lead in the space. I wouldn't start a new project on Heroku - not because of the cost, but bec…
You could even just be a layer on top of AWS and probably make profit from not many users, as long as you're cheaper.