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Comment by moltar | Hacker News Reader

But the cost of Heroku on free, or nearly free tier, isn’t comparable to GKE. When I tried to launch a demo cluster it was basically launching numerous VMs just to support itself. I don’t know the monthly total, since I abandoned that idea pretty quick. But I imagine it’d be over $50/mo to run a tiny web app.

My point is that every offering has its place. Heroku is great for getting going.

Recently I’ve been experimenting with Dokku. I think it’s a totally viable alternative to Heroku. I do value my time, and understand the value of PaaS. But when Heroku starts charging insane amounts for Redis memory, it made me look for easy alternatives and Dokku fits the bill well.

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GKE is free. You could run a micro vm for 5$ with kubernetes orchestring it.

GKE itself is free - you have to pay for each node you use though, and GKE requires some core services that take up most of the space on 1-2 standard nodes in your cluster.

You can have it both ways by leveraging the free / hobby tier of Heroku with bringing your own data store. Nothing binds you to their resource providers. Just add an environment variable for your own database or Redis provider.

Then you lose some security though, because I think Heroku uses large IPs ranges [1]. There seems to be no way to allow database access from a private IP address, other than using expensive proxying addons. That means you probably have to open up your database to 0.0.0.0/0, which is not good at all.

[1] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/15512360/get-a-finite-li...

Heroku has "private spaces" which will give you a fixed set of outbound IPs, AWS VPC peering, and a firewall via Trusted IP Ranges.

Heroku is surprisingly nice as an enterprise customer.

https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/private-spaces#stable-...

Is Heroku Postgres locked down by default? Maybe I’m misremembering, but I’m pretty sure I’ve used the Heroku database url on my local machine before.

Nothing stops someone from spinning up a Heroku bash terminal and trying to access your internal DB either so it’s not markedly worse than pure Heroku.

You can get better firewall control than just open/shut

Would you mind sharing what you have in mind please? I'm genuinely interested in how that would work.

Sure, I have a PG database on the internet. It's firewall allows only traffic from my whitelist IPs. Additionally these PG servers require SSL[0] from only my CA so even if firewall is open, no access.

[0] https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/static/ssl-tcp.html

Redis has authentication.

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