I generally speaking agree with this in spirit, and I've been the one in the seat making the Heroku <-> AWS decision. But for the last 3 companies I've made that choice, the decision to move from Heroku to AWS doesn't start to make sense until the ~25 team member size and several years into the life of the company. It doesn't happen all that quickly, at least in my experience.
[Edit: so what I'm saying is the characterization of heroku is only good for very tiny teams/projects/etc has not been true for me.]
YMMV of course - depends largely on what you're building.
Re:The Decline of Heroku
by AlchemistCamp on Tuesday April 13, 2021 @12:39AM
(#26788181)
I agree with you for the Heroku of a decade ago.
Now, I'd say Render is the modern version of what Heroku was. It's super easy to use for Rails/Laravel/Node/etc, it doesn't break clustering of Elixir apps and static sites are free.
I keep seeing render come up, but every time I am shocked they paid money (I assume) for that domain name, as there will be no way to google "render rails deployment", "render react deployment" etc. What a horrible name for a company like this.
It's interesting you don't see it. I wonder what sort of profile google's made of you.
I get their website as the first result for both queries, both in my signed in profile and in a clean browser session over a vpn.
> it doesn't break clustering of Elixir apps
Interesting! I've been experimenting with Gigalixir for a Heroku-ish experience that supports Elixir clustering... I'll have to give Render a look and compare the two.
Re:The Decline of Heroku
by kingosticks on Tuesday April 13, 2021 @04:06AM
(#26789447)
Unless you have a static site, in which case there are loads of options out there, there doesn't seem to be a free tier. Wouldn't fly.io be the modern version (I'm not saying heroku is outdated, I think it's still brilliant)?
I love Render. Really nice services, good UI, and they keep iterating.
What is Render and what is does?
It wasn't really as simple as that though. I set up a couple of apps on their free tier, and there is a Heroku way of doing this that was quite different from having access to a VM and installing and configuring things manually, which is what I was used to at the time.
There is also something I like to call the Ruby on Rails dilemma. Rails is a beast when it comes to rapid prototyping and small teams. I don't think anything else comes close. But as your team and system grow, all the conventions that let you speed ahead in the beginning start holding you back. Now you are digging through Rails code and doco trying to find ways to override defaults without destroying everything else.
Heroku is the PaaS version of Rails. Small projects are super easy to get going. You don't get a better starting experience. But as you grow, all the conventions of Heroku that helped you launch with ease start becoming month-long expeditions for work-arounds. Worse, Heroku isn't open source. You can't look at the code to understand your issue. It doesn't take long for someone to lose their minds and spend a weekend creating a presentation on the benefits of moving to another platform.