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Comment by davidlumley | Hacker News Reader

I used to prefer the flexibility and efficiency of having my VPS setup, and it's certainly cheaper. Over the past 2 years though, I've saved so much time and sanity using Heroku.

I certainly can understand saving thousands of dollars and improving performance by moving from Heroku to a VPS or bare metal solution, but $90 is not uncomfortable enough for me to warrant the change.

Interesting article!

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Question -- do you have any background as a sysadmin? If not, then I can totally understand the attractiveness of something like Heroku. It really does take care of a lot of nastiness.

From my side, I've got a fantastic Ansible setup for databases, security, ssl certificate distribution, and so on, and so Heroku doesn't really buy me anything for the extra money.

None as a fulltime sysadmin, most of my experience has been in operations, and in configuring servers for my own projects.

I've used Puppet and Chef before, haven't checked out Ansible. My main dissatisfaction with those tools was that there wasn't a super easy way to get started on a new VPS. I had to configure roles and settings to install Puppet or Chef, and _then_ I could get started automating things. It's certainly not hard, but I've never been in a position where it was something I did full time so have really valued platforms that do a lot of this for me.

That's why I picked Ansible. The only dependency is SSH, and you can write modules in whatever language you choose.

Plus -- and this is a big win -- Ansible actually has usable documentation and practical examples, which coupled with a really clean design, make it way easier to get developers up to speed on the operations half of things.

Can you recommend tutorials, examples for Ansible? Is Ruby knowledge required to efficiently use Ansible? I would like to automate the installation of nginx, php, nodejs, mysql, etc. incl. modify a few config files.

Ansible is written in Python, so no you don't need Ruby knowledge, and I've found the documentation -- especially the tutorials -- to be very helpful: http://docs.ansible.com/intro.html

Ansible is mostly configuration based - Ansible itself is written in python but all you'll typically need to write for most usages is configuration in YAML. So no ruby at all.

There are likely existing roles for most things at http://galaxy.ansible.com/

The Ansible docs at http://docs.ansible.com/ are pretty good, and there are lots of getting started guides most weeks on the Ansible weekly mailing list (https://devopsu.com/newsletters/ansible-weekly-newsletter.ht...)

And there are a few pages on my github blog on a few fundamental principles of modelling configuration e.g. http://willthames.github.io/2014/03/17/ansible-layered-confi... http://willthames.github.io/2014/04/02/modelling-credentials... to give a bit of flavour of how to manage more complicated setups. Installing things is easy, getting the configuration right for your needs is the tricky bit!

Thanks, David. We use Heroku a TON at work and I absolutely love them. For my small-ish app, I just couldn't afford the extra cash to pay Heroku to manage my app. Thanks for reading!

Ah, that makes a lot more sense! I quickly skimmed through SproutMark and it seemed great so assumed it was a full time job.

That's the best compliment I've gotten all day. Thanks! :)

Heroku apps aren't performant in many areas of the world e.g Australia like where I am, Amazon EC2 has an Australian region which is amazing

I'm also Australian, but we have a fairly international customer base so the ~150ms difference for requests that hit the application hasn't been that big for us in the scheme of things.

Yeah we have a near-realtime app and all our customers are in Australia. Tried heroku meh. Silly thing is they run on Amazon so should be able to deploy to Australia.

We also do thing heroku doesn't support with some vpn setup etc but all good for those who can use it.

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