We use Heroku heavily, and we went from 2 full time devops engineers to 0. Everything is now buttons and sliders. There are no "security patches". The CEO could log in and scale if he needed to; it's a slider. We get monitoring for free (labour free, not cost, i.e. the "good" free). Memory usage, CPU usage, HTTP status codes, logging: it's all there. We spend no time thinking about rsync or devops or any of that: we just solve the problems we're good at.

Of course, everything is a matter of scale. Legend has it, Deliveroo UK only moved off Heroku after they grew so large, Heroku wasn't willing to offer them more dynos on their account. That sounds like a reasonable time to go in house. But any <100 people company.. why bother? focus on what you're good at, and let other people do devops.

It's all well and good at the "we need Kubernetes" scale to say you need specialists, but a team that can't manage a VPS is strange to me.

I don't know what Heroku is offering, but Lightsail and ECS instances also have metrics and pretty graphs (tho admittingly I rarely check them myself), maybe it will save me some ssh sessions to manually update security patches, I was recently able to upgrade my Lightsail instance to the latest Ubuntu 18.04 LTS with just:

  $ do-release-upgrade

Because it's 5x more expensive.

> focus on what you're good at, and let other people do devops.

But it already takes hardly any time/effort to keep doing what I'm already doing.

I guess it's for different Companies who see the value-added benefits that justify the cost, but it's being propositioned here that everyone should be using Heroku first, just boggles my mind why most people would do that as the first option when it's so much more expensive. I already think the cloud is too expensive, so there's little chance I'm going to be paying a re-occurring premium for something that's not going to save me any time over what I'm already doing.

But where is that actually the case and your app can run comfortably on Heroku?

At multiple jobs I've been the only person who could credibly claim to understand the entire stack used at the company, from the web frontend to the OS the backend database runs on and the person to whom teams would come to validate their designs for scaling and reliability. I didn't write product code in those roles. But I multiplied the effectiveness of the people who did.

Heroku is a wonderful tool that doesn't get you the actually hard parts of the job req.

How do these costs scale with 10x or 100x the traffic/load?

1) Negotiate with Heroku for an enterprise contract 2) Consider migrating to a more cost effective platform 3) Dedicate time home-growing a solution.

Part of the reason Heroku charges so much is because their customers are typically small, but they'd likely rather find a price that keeps you on their platform vs. home-growing a solution.

That is what snapshots are for.

Moreover, if you're having someone else manage your systems and they upgrade them, now what do you do when the new version causes problems?

I ran into an issue recently where newer systems default to a newer version of a protocol but the implementation of the newer protocol has a major bug the old one didn't. When that happens on your systems you roll back until you can solve the issue. When it happens on systems managed by someone else, better hope you can identify and solve the issue quickly because in the meantime your system is broken.

So, what's your plan in case Heroku shuts down, or gets bought and changed completely? Isn't that also a strategic liability, just a much larger and arguably less likely one?

If you have 12-factor apps then you have a fighting chance of moving off it anyway.

Apart from Dokku, I'd say Cloud Foundry is the closest next environment that you can install and operate directly, though it's an 800-pound gorilla by design. But there are fully hosted services for it (eg. Pivotal Web Services, IBM BlueMix, SwissCom Application Cloud). There're also semi-hosted options (Rackspace Managed Cloud Foundry) and IaaS-provided installer kits for AWS, Azure and I think GCP as well. You can also buy commercial distributions from Pivotal, IBM, Atos, SUSE, IBM and SAP.

Disclosure: I work for Pivotal, we sell Cloud Foundry and Kubernetes distributions (PAS and PKS).

It really doesn’t take a devops engineer to run these if your app still fits on Heroku. A little bit of overhead goes into learning the service, much like you’d learn any new API or programming library.

The pain of setting it up, applying security patches, making sure you set it up securely to begin with. The pain of having a mental model more complex than "the server is what I git push to."

> I probably have over 50 sites I'm currently hosting so using anything that much more expensive wont enter into consideration.

No one would argue someone in your position should use heroku. It's for people who are willing to pay to avoid sysadmin work... which is a lot of developers.

My biggest fear with managed hosting and managed databases is being given too short of a window before they update.

tl;dr: You get a few choices of Ubuntu LTS releases, which they maintain for a long time (currently they still support 14.04, now nearly 5 years old). Or you can push Docker images, at which point the underlying OS is squarely back in your court — technically they must be applying kernel patches, but Linus is fairly religious about not breaking userland.

Btw watchtower seems abandoned, anyone know is there a story to it?

And how do you update the OS and the kernel without downtime? Do you setup a new machine, deploy to it, switch the traffic to the new machine, and decommission the old one?

I'm asking because these are the kind of things Heroku and other PaaS do for you.

Two: here I'll teach you, take over DevOps so I have more time.

10 person team, everyone new and your application runs in the cloud. The person who took over, by now, left the company. Extended the infrastructure, didn't inform you and the application has been reworked so it runs on the cloud.

Welcome to the perils of working with people.