I use AWS extensively for other projects but it's just too complex. I'm looking for somethign that ticks most of the boxes and makes it easy to deploy apps and sites without total server oversight.
According to LinkedIn they have 141 employees, down 30% in 2 years. We had nearly 400 at peak I think. They had a significant layoff in 2020.
I would not recommend using it unless Salesforce turns things around and starts investing back into the platform. If you are currently on it you should be making plans to move off of it. Ask your sales rep about "Project Periwinkle", which is intended to spin down Heroku and just make it all various Salesforce services. "Periwinkle" being a mix of purple and blue.
EDIT: I want to add that the common trope of "Salesforce killed Heroku" is not true—or at least it's not the full picture. Salesforce bought Heroku in 2010, only 3 years after it was founded. Salesforce largely built Heroku and later suffocated it through not giving us any headcount. There was a time when they cared, and if you ever saw our old office you know what I mean. I have no idea why Salesforce gave up, but us ex-Herokai debate about it a lot.
https://developer.salesforce.com/docs/platform/functions/ove...
When I said "spin down Heroku" I probably should've said, "spin down the Heroku brand". Maybe that doesn't mean much to you, but I know a lot of Heroku customers probably wouldn't want to use a PaaS if it had only Salesforce branding—despite Salesforce running Heroku for the past 12 years.
It probably makes sense at this point for Salesforce to go this direction, but they're not being honest with their general purpose Heroku customers about where the platform is headed. I wish they would be.
Not very related, but this is an example of a service (maybe just for me) I've wanted to setup with LinkedIn: Given company X, find all people that work or used to work there, then get rotation statistics. You should be able to see how many people (and %) go in and in what time on average.
I know of a smallish startup (70 people) where execs (VP and C level) rotated pretty often because of the policies of the CEO (was extremely cheap). It would be a great tool to have when exploring new companies.
30% is likely over-estimating because there is likely some # of people that still work on Heroku but labeled themselves as Salesforce employees. There are also probably a higher number of people that work on Heroku part-time so also label themselves as Salesforce.
A tool like your suggestion could probably help but it would include folks that transitioned to a different part of Salesforce entirely.
Also, get rid of Webpacker. That shit will drive you nuts.
I ran several things in Heroku and besides having a point-and-click Postgres product and add-ons Fly can run your app pretty easily. Unless those are the things which you mean that make Heroku super simple.
Getting a Rails site up and running on them isn't quite as turnkey as what Heroku offers, but it still only took me a few hours to migrate one site composed of a Rails app server, Sidekiq+Redis job processor, and PG database, and that included puzzling through some lesser-explained parts of their documentation.
I really appreciate the fact that their prices scale mostly linearly, as opposed to Heroku's utterly indefensible pricing practices.
Render is still a fairly new company, which explains many of the feature gaps and lightness of their documentation, but I think they're well worth considering as a Heroku replacement. I have no regrets about making the switch.
Many of these services no longer offer free tiers apart from their heroku-specific integrations.
For tiny startup this makes a difference.
Does Render offer anything like this?
I use Amazon SES for mail-sending because I have issues with all of the Heroku free tier products. I think I might pay a dollar or two for this each month.
Render offers a managed Redis product with a free tier.
I haven't had need for anything else, so ymmv.
Which, following YAGNI, may not be an issue today, but does make your agility and ability to react to market changes (such as alternatives being a better option) much less. I try to keep my software platform agnostic because any tight coupling will haunt me in future.
You don't have to believe me...would expect nothing less : D the product and the way we ship what our users want speaks for itself.
I'm about to move our tiny startup off AWS, onto NextPAASPlatform and had both fly and render shortlisted. The latter just bumped a few notches higher.
FWIW: I'm moving off AWS because it is expensive in many ways: it's costing me dear time which I should spend on my product. And it's costing serious baseline costs: Just a CI pipeline, building a static site, a react app, and deploying a Ruby (not rails) backend to Beanstalk Staging and Production costs over $100/month. Before any traffic and scaling. And building and maintaining it costs me upwards of 90 hours now. I consider this wasted investments.
I’m very excited about the potential future of Render.
https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/heroku-postgres-rollba...
Upvote if it's what you are looking for. Leave a comment if you'd like to share more context or your needs are slightly different.
Is this possible at all on Render? I haven't gone through the process on Render yet, but it looks like it requires a visit to the site at some point for each project that you want to deploy.
If you have the time, please share in that thread what you love most about using CLIs for services like Heroku or Render.
Also, we just released a public API which was a dependency for the CLI.
- API announcement: https://render.com/blog/winter-release-new-features#an-api-f...
- API docs: https://render.com/docs/api
Once the team grows to even 5 or 10 engineers, I'm not a big fan. The model of encouraging anybody to do a git push to send their local copy of a branch to production is a little sketchy on even a small team. IMO you're better off having an automated build pipeline with CD by that point using something like gitlab or github actions, and putting your production environment into a proper VPC, i.e. generally starting to step up your engineering practices. You can still do these things with Heroku, but at that point you need to start kind of knowing what you're doing anyway and so you lose the main benefit of Heroku that it just magically works without needing to know anything about it. In my experience by that point you're fighting against Heroku more often than not and you're better off using something that is designed to be more flexible and give you more control like Kubernetes on GCP or AWS.
Does anybody still do that for major apps these days? We've used a custom chatops bot based on Hubot for all of our deploys on Heroku for the past ~8 years, and they've recently released their own chatops solution that I've used for smaller apps and enjoyed. Using their new chatops bot is extremely turnkey—you can set it up to autodeploy from a Github branch or deploy manually, just by connecting a Github repo
My ideal would be a service like Heroku that makes it easy to evolve. When the team is between 1-5 people iterating rapidly towards PMF, make ‘git push’ deploy.
As the team grows and CI is needed, make it easy to decouple git from the deployment and support multiple envs. This is where Heroku stops.
Finally when the app becomes larger and more complicated, it should be easy to spin up resources in AWS (or whatever cloud) behind a VPC. Migrating the heroku-like PaaS into this VPC should be easy.
Git push to deploy fargate containers + automatic CDN + easy custom domains + auto https + multiple services per environment.
Coming soon is databases, private workers, static sites, and multi service preview environments.
We set up everything with best practices using VPCs, etc. We link directly to AWS services from our dashboard, but you don't have to know anything about devops.
If any of you try it out, I'd love any feedback you have for us!
Fly has been the most responsive. They have a PR open at GitHub and are working towards “just run flyctl launch and you’ll have a rails app running”. Check that out at https://twitter.com/bradgessler/status/1488786188882178053 or comment on the PR at https://github.com/superfly/flyctl/pull/783#issuecomment-102...
If I was a betting man, I think they’ll be there in the next few weeks for Rails + pg. They said full auto-Redis provisioning could come later.
If you build Phoenix apps, fly is going to be your bet. The creator of Phoenix works there and he made deploying Phoenix apps super easy.
Render said “they have some ideas”, but I haven’t heard back from them.
I really hope more companies pay attention to making deployments as easy as Heroku. Most stop short of that and think it’s OK to ship basic building blocks with huge README files for “Setting up your first ____ App”. That’s fine for a first step, but hosting companies should seriously look at their setup docs as manual steps that they should automate.
I still recommend Heroku because it’s just so damn easy. Developers can focus on shipping their apps and worry much less about DevOps. It’s amazing for proof-of-concepts, but they are stupidly expensive when your app starts scaling based on how they price. I’m really hoping Fly, Render, and lots of other hosting companies up their game and compete so we have more choice and ultimately lower prices.
Check out Render or fly.io. I use beanstalk on AWS.
After a minute or so connections would get terminated.
^ begrudgingly because they nearly deleted a linearly-growing production database with a week's notice and without any forewarning or revocation of INSERTs (as their docs say should happen):
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30080563
Aside from that scare, and their support being about a 6/10 (which isn't too bad, all things considered), then I'd say it's pretty damn good, it certainly abstracts away a lot of complexity.
Lmk if you need enterprise edition at jarda@codenow.com
No one on our team has DevOps or DBA experience -- we feel good about Heroku PG (even as inflated prices).