No one's watching. Your initial comment just really didn't add any value. Calling Heroku monolith compared to Amazon is an understatement and I don't see Heroku being "wiped off the map" from this.
> RDS 4XL vs Heroku Mecha: 40% cheaper on demand, 74% cheaper 1 year reserved, 82% cheaper 3 year reserved... with more features and capacity.
If that's true, Heroku's Postgres offering isn't going to do well. "Wiped off the map" may be an overstatement, but not by that much.
& it would be louder if the rest could figure out where to put the custom DB URL parameter ;D
It's a shame that Amazon has some proprietary idea of a machine image, but my ideal hosting scenario is just App Server Machine Image + DB + any Machine Images required for extra services. Shouldn't have to choose between several paid services that are just different APIs into an app server component you should have direct access to.
I don't understand how the open source community can be so into Heroku given that it's basically just wrapping open source software & charging for it, getting away with it by saying they're charging for the admin UI or whatever.
This could be a nice fire under Heroku's ass to get more competitive.
GitHub just "wraps up" git and charges for it and I am happy to pay them. Setting up a git server is a royal pain in the ass. Setting up a wiki, issue tracker, etc to go along with a git server is even more of a pain in the ass.
Well done cloud services make life simpler, and many people will pay for that simplicity regardless of how the internals are built.
If you add 5 services & then to switch hosts it's not another git push. You have to re-configure each of the services. If you'd done this yourself all along & made machine images it would have been less convenient at the time, but probably cheaper & a good learning experience. There are many other hosting platforms that offer Linux boxes so you could move your whole App/Software layer to another of these companies without much trouble.
I'm not saying Heroku is evil or anything. Yes, they provide a good platform. But I think any web company with a significant customer base would benefit more from the cost savings & freedom of a purer platform than the conveniences of Heroku.
Plus, there are so many configuration issues with their services. I have auto-scaling setup with Adept and still I see these long request-queue buildups now & then. I get the feeling I would not have the same issues with an AWS stack where I have CPU usage monitors that are very transparent & all the networking is trivial.
I still use Heroku as an app server & don't hate it enough to up & move (though a large factor in this is I'm not the one footing the bill, the client is...) but anything I can easily get on to AWS is a no-brainer. Database is one of those things -- a couple clicks to scale up/down every year is all thats really required.
CONCLUSION (cuz I rambled too much): I think Heroku offers scaling/convenience but AWS is just so rock solid & cheap that you can probably just buy larger instances than you need (to compensate for scaling) and have much better performance at the same price. Then you just need to learn how to install your tools & take a machine image as backup. Plus there's a lot of value in learning how to work with machine images that goes way beyond hosting a web app.
Every minute I spend doing that is a minute I spend not doing things I enjoy. YMMV though.
I prefer the Amazon model because you can stick these all on one server & as long as CPU isn't pegged at 100% you're good. I agree tho I'd rather not spend the time figuring it out. For now I only use it for RDS & for services not available on Heroku (some Adobe streaming server stuff).
Vendor lock-in is when you write your software on Oracle or MSSQL and moving away requires you to rewrite your whole thing. It's not losing the convenience of "got push" for deploys and having to spend time moving off their hosted versions of open source software and configuring and hosting it yourself instead.
Accusing Heroku of practising vendor lock-in is honestly absurd.
And as a point of interest, I think these days its probly much easier to convert your database than it is to switch hosting platforms (well... in some cases).
What do you think stops you from switching? We had no issues at all - definitely none from Heroku.
We still use PostgresSQL from heroku because it is still a solid service and comes with niceties like dataclips. I should confess that I have not explored the Amazon PostgreSQL offering but I am happy with Heroku for databases at the moment.