Zencoder joins the Heroku Add-on catalog | Hacker News Reader

Zencoder joins the Heroku Add-on catalog

zencoder.com

Awesomesauce. The more Heroku Add-ons the better.

This is something I have been thinking about recently.

I'm about to start a reasonably large project in rails and I've been trying to decide whether to host it with Heroku or Linode.

I've used Heroku before and I was really impressed, it's so simple to get started and I reckon it would scale well up to point I needed to start considering a dedicated solution.

My concern is, Heroku makes add-ons almost too easy, and in my opinion, it may become [for me] a form of vendor lock-in. I say this because I could easily see myself using several add-ons that I wouldn't otherwise, and many more that could really improve the efficiency of my application. But, how easy is it to migrate your application and attached add-ons from Heroku once you have installed / integrated through their platform?

All their add-ons are based on either open source or third party solutions. You can keep using the open source solutions by simply installing them yourself and the third party solutions all have API's or even gems to work with.

Right. This is more comparable to the lock-in you get by hiring than to the lock-in you get with proprietary software vendors.

My concern is, Heroku makes add-ons almost too easy, and in my opinion, it may become [for me] a form of vendor lock-in. ... how easy is it to migrate your application and attached add-ons from Heroku once you have installed / integrated through their platform?

Not that hard. Zencoder uses the same API whether you're a Heroku customer or not, and I expect that is true of most add-ons that are third-party services.

Yea. I just added the New Relic analytics add-on and was pretty astonished at how much valuable information you get with _zero_ configuration. Totally worth checking out.

IndexTank (ours) got added in this round as well. Thanks Heroku team, we are stoked.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1891907

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