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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)

#91

Post by bradleybuda »

We're big Heroku customers; despite that, I largely agree with the points in this article and there's a voice in the back of my head asking every few months "is this worth it?"

Whenever I research the new crop of Heroku clones (the one being hawked here, and others) the pitch is always "it's just like Heroku but you can run it in your own cloud". It's mind-boggling to me that none of the clones understands that I DON'T WANT TO RUN IT. Yes, I pay Heroku a premium because I like their software (the pipelines are great, dyno formations mostly Just Work) but what I'm really paying for is:

* Never typing "ssh"

* Never thinking about a full disk from a runaway log file

* Never thinking about a load balancer or a certificate

* Never waking up because a Postgres host has failed

* etc, etc

I have no interest in a "Heroku but you run it" PaaS but I'd pay though the nose for a "Heroku but it's actively developed" PaaS.

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

#92

Post by anurag »

leetrout wrote: post #83
intrepidsoldier wrote: post #77

In the last decade, a vast majority of DevTools companies have positioned themselves as “A better Heroku.” And yet, when people actually need a Heroku alternative, everything comes up short. This is a testament to a solid product Heroku built. It was definitely ahead of its time.

Bingo. Porter is one of the only ones that seems to offer feature parity across aws and gcp. Render.com looks cool but is also AWS only.

(Render employee) We currently use AWS, GCP, and Cloudflare under the hood.

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

#94

Post by jacobsenscott »

chrisseaton wrote: post #80
ceejayoz wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you imagine their home-grown offering would have over using S3 directly?

I thought the entire point of Heroku was that it wrapped up existing essential basic AWS offerings into a more manageable package? I’d rather not have to manage a side account for AWS, and set up the connections to it and things. I’d rather it was just there, like their database.

I suppose that's what this is https://elements.heroku.com/addons/bucketeer, but using S3 is really easy. And honestly I wouldn't trust most heroku addons are maintained outside of the most popular - postgres, redis, memcache.

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

#95

Post by dontlaugh »

bradleybuda wrote: post #91

We're big Heroku customers; despite that, I largely agree with the points in this article and there's a voice in the back of my head asking every few months "is this worth it?" Whenever I research the new crop of Heroku clones (the one being hawked here, and others) the pitch is always "it's just like Heroku but you can run it in your own cloud". It's mind-boggling to me that none of the clones understands that I DON…

AWS’s ECS Fargate with Aurora Serverless and AWS CA certificates is close.

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

#96

Post by jopsen »

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…

Just saw someone else linking to railway.app, curious how does the scaling work?

The pricing showed a lightweight website priced at less than 1 CPU / month -- is there some undocumented fractional scaling going on?

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

#97

Post by petenixey »

simonw wrote: post #66
craigkerstiens wrote: post #7

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…

The first few years after the Salesforce acquisition were incredible - for quite a while I thought of Heroku as one of the best examples of an acquisiton where the product improved after the release. Sad to see that momentum eventually fade away.

Agreed - not least recruiting Matz which I thought was a huge coup

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

#98

Post by ketzo »

dontlaugh wrote: post #95
bradleybuda wrote: post #91

We're big Heroku customers; despite that, I largely agree with the points in this article and there's a voice in the back of my head asking every few months "is this worth it?" Whenever I research the new crop of Heroku clones (the one being hawked here, and others) the pitch is always "it's just like Heroku but you can run it in your own cloud". It's mind-boggling to me that none of the clones understands that I DON…

AWS’s ECS Fargate with Aurora Serverless and AWS CA certificates is close.

But even that stuff is gonna be more configuration than Heroku, right?

I wanna spend literally zero hours a month on server / dev ops, if I can manage it. I will pay for it and accept the constraints of simplicity.

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

#99

Post by krthr »

bradleybuda wrote: post #91

We're big Heroku customers; despite that, I largely agree with the points in this article and there's a voice in the back of my head asking every few months "is this worth it?" Whenever I research the new crop of Heroku clones (the one being hawked here, and others) the pitch is always "it's just like Heroku but you can run it in your own cloud". It's mind-boggling to me that none of the clones understands that I DON…

GCP Cloud Run could be an alternative

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

#100

Post by jeremyjh »

zoomzoom wrote: post #86

First off, I would strongly disagree with the idea that Heroku post-acquisition was stagnant. As well-said elsewhere, tons of product was shipped to industry-best standards: postgres/dataclips, Heroku Connect, buildpacks - as well as introduction of CI and preview apps. But it's clear that in the post-k8s and post infra-as-code world there's been a surge in new options for how teams manage their infra and DevOps tool…

I was just looking at AWS App Runner today and just thinking about how miserable it would be to figure out how to use AWS's proprietary build pipeline tools to replicate what I have with Heroku - and I've been using AWS forever - I just hate their UX, their docs, really every thing they do except the actual infrastructure services. So I was just thinking someone should build a product that gives me the Heroku CLI, pipelines, add-ons, review apps etc but implements it all on top of standard AWS services. No runtime services at all, just orchestrating configuration and metadata, service provisioning etc. I know there are other companies in this space but I wish someone would just blatantly steal the Heroku UX and then sell me that.
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