I appreciate the great article. Heroku has been my go-to platform for personal projects. I'll research these Heroku alternatives. You've given me a terrific place to start and saved me countless hours. Best wishes for your relocation!
Life after Heroku: What's a dev to do?
61–70 of 107 posts
Re: Life after Heroku: What's a dev to do?
#62$7 is less than a single beer in the pub. If you can afford to devote thousands of hours to learn programming and then hundreds to thousands of hours to build an app then you can afford the hosting cost...
True, I noticed that too. I mean, how low do you value your time to not pay $7/mo for your a project you are spending significant time on?
On the other hand... there is a ton of intangible value in the form of knowledge to be gained from switching tech stacks and hosting platforms. So another way to look at it is, this is a chance to re-evaluate and potentially upgrade your tech stack or skils.
Re: Life after Heroku: What's a dev to do?
#63I've been using Google Cloud Run for one of my hobby projects and it worked like a charm. You can have a Google Cloud Build job that takes your GitHub repo from which it builds a Docker image. You make sure that the CMD in the container starts your server. When a request comes in the container is started within ms. You only pay for the storage for the image & the cost from actually executing the container. If you get no requests, it's practically free which is important for my side projects, since there is hardly any traffic.
I tried to get a similar solution with AWS Lambda and API Gateway and it was a huge PITA in comparison.
Re: Life after Heroku: What's a dev to do?
#64The article calls out having to learn how to create a Docker image for Fly.io as though it's a bad thing. I consider it a huge bonus if you like taking advantage of free tiers for services. The whole point is that if you're going to take advantage of a free tier you should do so in a way that switching is trivial. Docker goes a long way to achieving that. I personally just pay $10/month to Linode and self host these…
Can you speak to Nomad vs K8s for side projects? I’ve deployed K8s in the past but was curious if Nomad is lighter/easier
I've found nomad far easier to operate and maintain, and conceptually it's easier to wrap your head around as well. It helps that nomad is just responsible for container orchestration, that's it. You can use whatever you want for ingress routing (I really like traefik).
Re: Life after Heroku: What's a dev to do?
#65No discussion of Heroku and the free tier should happen without the context of the massive cryptomining scheme that was directly targeting their free tier: https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/massive-crypt... Note, oddly the article doesn't state Heroku by name, but the network diagrams all do.
> the article doesn't state Heroku by name
Heroku is mentioned in the first sentence.
Re: Life after Heroku: What's a dev to do?
#66https://neon.tech/ wasn't mentioned in the article, but I'm looking forward to trying it out. At the moment it's unclear if they'll have something suitable for hobbyists.
> "Neon is a fully managed serverless PostgreSQL with a generous free tier."
https://neon.tech/docs/cloud/about/
Seems neon is just a hosted database, not a heroku alternative? Will be interested to see what they offer when it's released.
Re: Life after Heroku: What's a dev to do?
#67Disclosure: former heroku employee.
I believe there is a new tier coming that that is a small price for dyno hours spread across all your apps. So if your apps sleep it could still be cheap.
Personally I just doubled down on heroku!
I cleaned up a lot of free apps. ‘git pull’ to grab the source is just as magical as git push.
I scaled the important ones up.
I simply don’t have time to learn another platform and its trade offs, or to repackage my apps. I definitely don’t have time for anything other than Postgres which isn’t standard or cheap on other platforms either.
Nothing else is free anyway and who knows how long other platforms will be around. The whole Docker fad has practically come and gone meanwhile build packs keep doing their thing.
In doing so I hit a problem redeploying and the docs and support response are as good as ever.
Thanks for everything up till now Heroku, I’m still a customer for life!
Re: Life after Heroku: What's a dev to do?
#68Re: Life after Heroku: What's a dev to do?
#69The article calls out having to learn how to create a Docker image for Fly.io as though it's a bad thing. I consider it a huge bonus if you like taking advantage of free tiers for services. The whole point is that if you're going to take advantage of a free tier you should do so in a way that switching is trivial. Docker goes a long way to achieving that. I personally just pay $10/month to Linode and self host these…
As someone who uses Node.js and is in the exact same situation as the author, requiring Docker is the #1 reason I'm not going with Fly.io. There's a standard for launching a Node.js project, and that's running the "start" script `npm start`, so switching is trivial. I switched from a Linux machine to my current MacBook and I didn't have to make a single change in any of my Node.js projects.
Adding docker means adding a whole new layer to ALL of my projects, which I'd prefer to avoid specially when there's no need as Heroku has very clearly shown.
Re: Life after Heroku: What's a dev to do?
#70The article calls out having to learn how to create a Docker image for Fly.io as though it's a bad thing. I consider it a huge bonus if you like taking advantage of free tiers for services. The whole point is that if you're going to take advantage of a free tier you should do so in a way that switching is trivial. Docker goes a long way to achieving that. I personally just pay $10/month to Linode and self host these…
As someone who uses Node.js and is in the exact same situation as the author, requiring Docker is the #1 reason I'm not going with Fly.io. There's a standard for launching a Node.js project, and that's running the "start" script `npm start`, so switching is trivial. I switched from a Linux machine to my current MacBook and I didn't have to make a single change in any of my Node.js projects. Adding docker means adding…
Using Docker is relatively simple and requires little to no configuration, arguably less than a standard node project.
Regardless, as someone who uses a variety of languages and is in the exact same situation, my generic Makefile is probably easier to read and understand than any standard that you have probably achieved.