Ask HN: Do people still use Heroku and the like? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Do people still use Heroku and the like?

14 points_bxg113 comments

With Docker-based deployments being the current hotness, you don't really read about services that do source-based deployments as much these days. Are they being truly supplanted, or are they still going steady just outside of the limelight?

Edit:

Did some research and found this good comparison: https://rubygarage.org/blog/heroku-vs-amazon-web-services. Looks like the technical terms are "Infrastructure as a Service" vs "Platform as a Service", where the latter is Heroku's main product.

Still interested in people's anecdotes, though!

View on HN

Yes!

In fact, I was using Digital Ocean for our company and in process of transferring everything to Heroku. It's been such a breath of fresh air/load off of my shoulders.

As the sole developer, I don't need to worry about my server going down and worrying about the database (although DO introduced managed databases recently). Heroku is perfect for our needs -- lots of scheduled one-off scripts and a rough API.

As the sole dev in my company, I have spent last few weeks to look at other solutions to DO as well. I can work it out fine as is, it's just that nowadays I am getting more and more security questionnaires sent by customers and it would be such a relief to just say that the security of the platform is managed by someone else.

Have been looking at beanstalk but no. Now its between app engine and heroku. Question on heroku: It feels a bit weird they not support hardware 2fa, doesn't it?

Do you have any other insight to give me on your transition?

It's too new for me to have any meaningful advice. The transition has some bumps as I was trying to figure out the Heroku ecosystem (e.g. how to install a python package from a private pip repo, how to use a google credentials file, how to schedule scripts and test them, etc.)

I looked into app engine a few years ago, but it felt more restrictive at the time.

I noticed many folks swept up by the docker hype actually moving to Heroku. Turns out dockerizing your apps only brings 5% of the benefits a platform like Heroku brings you.

Outside of limelight I think. There's no new features to report. Heroku works fine what I use it for, it scales, pricing is stable, at some point they will move from Postgresql-11 to 12. During my work week it's one piece of tech I least think about.

I've had a similar experience- I use it for a website I built for a small business and for my personal website, as well as basically any other personal project I want to throw up on the internet. It's been a very positive user experience; mainly I was curious how well both its features and pricing scale to a "real product".

PostgreSQL 12.x became available on Heroku earlier this month: https://blog.heroku.com/posgtresql-12

I still use “the like” for most of my projects but not Heroku specifically. I love Heroku’s service but for a small bootstrapped company it’s really expensive.

Specifically I use dokku on a DO droplet. It does mean I have to manage the server myself which Heroku removes from the user, but again for a small company it’s just one server so it’s maybe an hour or two a month I spend on server admin. But my monthly cost for 15 projects running 24/7 is $10, compared to $100+ on Heroku. It’s not a huge difference if you’re funded or have a very profitable business, but my margins are thinner than I could afford with Heroku.

You can use docker images on Heroku so I don't see any reason they would be supplanted automatically.

I didn't know Heroku offered that service. In any case, my question was really about source vs containers. The nice thing about the former is most of the infrastructure is taken care of for you, so you don't need a devops person or a docker workflow.

I suspect Heroku is pretty much fine. As the other poster noted it has a system setup that is really stable, and probabbly is efficient to run.

Maybe not the most wiz bang / get the attention more complex deployments have, but I suspect it is heavily used.

You could also check out https://render.com/ . I personally prefer it to heroku and they have amazing support for containers as well. It kind of gives you the advantages of both IaaS and PaaS at the same time

There are actually two ways to do Docker with Heroku.

You can let Heroku build your image during the deployment phase by simply having a `Dockerfile` in your repository [1].

Or, you can build the image yourself on your CI service and push it to Heroku's registry and then trigger a release. This last option is useful if you want to run tests against the exact image that is going to be deployed without having to rebuilt it [2].

[1] https://blog.heroku.com/build-docker-images-heroku-yml [2] https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/container-registry-and...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com