Comment by dnsmichi | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dnsmichi | Hacker News Reader

Author here.

This post doesn't live up to its title, I'm sorry about that.

The title should have been 'We are building a better Heroku FOR PRODUCTION APPS' (we'll add the 'for production apps' to the title)

It should have emphasized the _building_ part, we're just starting. The current 5 minute production app doesn't hold a candle to Heroku at the moment.

It should have made it clear the goals is to improve the speed with which you can configure a production app, not a development app. Development apps on Heroku are already close to perfect. The examples in this post are contrived since it talks about a development app, as rightly called out by Heroku people https://twitter.com/johnbeynon/status/1374306499426652161

It should have gone into why hyper clouds might be preferable https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/5-minute-production-app/deploy...

It should have talked about state, we made a small improvement in https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab-com/-/merge_request... but we should have done the planned work in https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab-com/-/issues/11137 and made one post out of it.

Yeah, I agree with the comments that the "for production apps" distinction is a bit weird. I would title it "We are building a Heroku-like experience for big cloud providers".

I can see the point of a service like this and the comparison is cool but there's no need to complain about Heroku, especially when the Gitlab services are not 100% equivalent. If you come for the champ, you'd better not miss and all that.

I like that title a lot - it is a more concise statement.

The title you came up with makes WAY more sense than the actual article. Now I understand what they're doing and that's honestly pretty cool. They just need a better writer.

Can you explain what you mean by ‘for production apps’? Because some people are definitely using Heroku in production.

Production apps in a hyper scale cloud

What do you think where Heroku apps run? Why would anyone truly caring about hyperscale trust Gitlab to handle that?

yeah, i've worked at "hyperscale" and not once have we ever thought about gitlab... (nor heroku - but we loved heroku for many small projects)

I assume above commenter was missing a /s. Personally, I don't get the distinction the author is making between production and development apps with regard to heroku

> I assume above commenter was missing a /s.

given that they are a GitLab employee, I doubt that.

Heroku apps run in a hyper scale cloud, sure, but they abstract away all of that. When you "graduate" from Heroku you have to move your entire app and re-architect the entire thing.

The idea behind this effort is to put you in a cloud native hyper cloud environment of your choice to start with and make that just as easy as Heroku. The big difference will be when you "graduate" - you'll already be in AWS or what have you, and under the covers isn't a black box but is a well formed set of GitLab primitives that you can now continue to use and expand upon.

I think the mention "hyperscale" is unnecessarily confusing here. At least in my perception, nearly nobody uses that term when they just talk about "using cloud services from AWS & Co", presumably you don't insist on limiting your product to just those (i.e. Terraform will happily talk to smaller Cloud providers like Hetzner too, presumably you don't intend to exclude them by design, but just understandably focused on the large names first?). People more usually (again, from what I see, you might have different experience with your target groups) explicitly say hyperscale when what they are doing is at that scale, and that's a level of complexity that's never going to be 5 minutes.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com