New Heroku Dynos Get 2.5GB RAM

Your question is framed at someone who "learned" deployments via heroku. I will answer it from a different perspective. I recently started at a company who began their staging and production hosting on heroku. I would have a very hard time recommending it to anyone.

In addition to uncompetitive pricing, the "add-on" architecture is itself expensive and inflexible. Redis feels artificially limited, and the scheduler's timing options are, i kid you not: Daily, Hourly, Every 10 minutes.

To people who know linux hosting: avoid heroku. To people who don't know linux hosting: spend some time gaining a serviceable linux hosting skillset.

Yeah. In my experience, Heroku starts being a drag at moderate scale:

1. You still have to worry about your systems, as Heroku has its own outages, not to mention the other pieces of your infrastructure like DBs, queues, etc.

2. Architecture flexibility goes way down, as vertical scaling isn't a real option on Heroku (and a surprising number of problems can be easily solved in the short term by just throwing big iron at them).

3. The premium you pay on the hardware you're using starts to add up, especially when you're in the realm of "let's solve this problem in the short term by throwing machines at it."

Of course, that's not to say you can't use a hybrid approach of, say AWS + Heroku to solve some of these, but it's a bigger hurdle to clear if you've outsourced all your systems work to Heroku from the beginning. You suddenly find yourself having to figure this stuff out at some level of scale, vs growing it organically and learning as you go.

Hosting is trending towards containers and a Heroku-like approach all over the place, it may not really matter if manually provisioning and maintaining servers stops being popular knowledge.

Pricing can be great if you're using a high-throughput language - I had a sustained 8 - 12k requests per second across 8 dynos years ago with nodejs.

The truth is you can pretty much do everything with AWS EBS that you can do with Heroku. I wish I knew about EBS earlier. But I don't thik EBS existed when I first began using Heroku.

It was mainly for throwaway projects. But you never know your throwaway project may start getting traction. And before you realize you may end up owing hundreds of dollars to Heroku.

Takes away quite a bit of administration work, which isn't exactly free either, especially if you don't have the expertise for it in your team.

Especially for smaller projects deploying them on heroku instead of worrying (and spending time on) about setup, deployment, patches, ... is an attractive option.

Dead simple stack deployment and automation. People are very willing to pay 10x the amount just to git init, git push and heroku add apps to their stack without worrying about anything else under the hood.

Just try it I'd say. Professionally, I do no Web development and software often runs on big iron machines. I tried out Heroku to inspire me on where I want my deployment process to be, and I might use it for the odd hobby project at home.

Isn't Digital Ocean just a VPS provider? I'd encourage you to give Heroku a try (it's free to play with). It's pretty cool that with really minimal planning on your part you can "git push heroku" and have a working app.

I don't know if this is an "aha" moment for you -- it might depend on how much you enjoy provisioning servers yourself -- but when it works it's pretty cool.

I suspect there are people who are running apps "themselves" on heroku that would otherwise require them to pay a server administrator.

Basically it comes down to time. I used to run a small business that depended on a Rails app. It was much easier to let Heroku manage the headaches of sys admin type duties than to manage servers myself. Below a certain scale, the money cost of using a platform-as-a-service like Heroku is cheaper than the dollar cost of managing servers and/or having an ops person.

"git push origin master" is effectively 100% of your DevOps. Running a web application reliably and at scale on IaaS requires effort and skill; Heroku will make it so you effectively don't have to have those skills or spend that effort, for a fee. Cheaper than hiring a DevOps team.

Most large tech companies with an infrastructure/DevOps team are trying to create an "internal Heroku" - and, at best, coming pretty close.

Heroku's value-add is that you don't need a system administrator: if they support the services your app needs, then they automate system administration for you.

Digital Ocean will sell you a VPS (essentially a machine) and grant you root-level access to it. You can run whatever you want, and deploy and manage it however you want.

Heroku will sell you a dyno (essentially a worker process) and grant you access to a set of deployment and management tools. You push your application code up to Heroku, and it automatically sets up the front-facing web server, the database, the cache service, etc., according to the add-ons you've selected. If you need to scale up, just purchase more dynos.

For complex apps, Heroku might not meet your needs and you might want some VPSs instead. In terms of price, though, you'd need to include system administration man-hours when comparing.

I wonder if the 2 cores presented are dedicated on DO?

It's all kind of opaque.

Digital Ocean, Linode, etc. are do-it-yourself platforms. If you have the time and knowledge to install, configure, secure, monitor, etc. etc. all the services that go into a typical application, then spending the time yourself will save you money.

On the flip side, if you have the money but lack time, knowledge, or desire to manage all that complexity just pay Heroku to do it for you... or any other PaaS for that matter.

I've never used Heroku, but long ago I reached a point where dealing with hardware, services, networking, server racks, etc. got really boring. Today, I expect computing resources to be little more than appliances where I can effectively say "Here's the code I want you to run. Make it happen." and not have to even think about firewalls, scalability, failover, backups, software conflicts/compatibility, security updates, and a hundred other things. If you're managing all that yourself, you're basically doing a job that a computer ought to be doing on your behalf based on a specification you've provided.

>What features in the Heroku platform justify that?

Not having to care about deployment that much.

It reduces the number of engineers you have to hire to maintain your DO / AWS deployments.

As engineering talent becomes more scarce and expensive, the appeal of such a solution ironically increases.

PaaS solutions are worth more than IaaS I think -- someone is applying security patches, autoscaling your app, load balancing, etc. For a more apples to apples comparison:

It's 5x the cost of Elastic Beanstalk... 250 / (0.067 * 24 * 365 / 12) = 5.11 -- though this is misleading because the closest instance was an m3.medium, which has 3 vcpus and 3.75gb of ram. You can also get a major discount if you go reserved.

It's 0.68x the cost of App Engine F4 instances (the biggest available).. 250 / (0.20 * 2.5 * 24 * 365 / 12), though those only have 1G of ram, so that's assuming you somehow buy 2.5 of them :p

It's 2.2x the cost of AWS Lambda... 250 / ((0.000001667 + 0.000002501) * 10 * 60 * 60 * 24 * 365 / 12) = 2.28, though this is misleading because it'm adding up a 1.5gb instance and a 1gb instance. Also it's likely much cheaper as Lambda only charges you for used time, and almost all traffic loads are TOD / DOW dependent.

I started with Heroku because it was so fast to get started. The documentation is very good and there are a lot of features that have allowed me to spend more time on building our app as opposed to doing devops/sysadmin. Some things I can do with one command: zero downtime deploy, rollback a release, add/remove dynos, provision a database. The list goes on. I've had several aha moments. My first rollback was a pretty big deal. I had a bunch of dynos running (12 or so) and I pushed a bad deploy. With one command, I was running the previous (working) version of the app. Actually, it was more like a "phew" moment.

Everyone here is right about the costs. It's very expensive. Especially compared to AWS and DO. But how much is your time worth to you? If I have to spend an extra $300 a month on hosting, that's fine--as long as I'm saving more than, say, 3 hours of time not doing sys admin. The dynos are expensive, but you don't have to provision machines and setup autoscaling groups. The database is expensive, but backups and upgrades take only minutes. The addons are all expensive, but... you get the idea.

I've run into limitations of Heroku and we now use AWS as well. I really like AWS, but it's a lot more work. The documentation takes more effort to read, initial setup is more complicated (AMI, IAM roles, Elastic IP, key pairs, etc). AWS is cheaper and the product is great and it does things Heroku can't, but I spend much more time on it.

Depends on what you're doing. I've worked on systems where we had 72gb and 96gb of RAM, and we tuned them within an inch of their lives.

But hey, 512k is good enough for anyone, Bill Gates once said.

edit: If I was doing something memory-intensive or performance-intensive, I wouldn't be on Heroku anyway.

I'm not that familiar with dynos but I can see how people would need even more than 2.5gb for specific jobs. We push the limits of servers with 512gb of RAM regularly.

I'd assume its for worker dynos with a process which cant easily scale horizontally.

I'm running a game server in node.js where the app's state is persistent so can't really so can't really spin up more dynos. The whole server lives in that particular instance.

Closest thing with a "full" free tier I know about is OpenShift. (For some stuff, heroku's free tier still can work out fine)

AWS opsworks is free, you pay for the instances. So a small app can be free with their free tier for one year.

convox.io is pretty awesome for deploying docker applications to AWS ~ part of the current ycombinator batch.