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Re:Ask HN: Best alternative to Heroku? by acjohnson55 on Friday April 26, 2013 @01:51AM (#5611686)
In my experience Dotcloud has the advantage of giving you more control over your instances and the ability to SSH into them. But I had issues with the reliability of deployment there. I used to love the sandbox, but I dropped Dotcloud as a provider after that was removed without a drop-in replacement. However, I still use them to serve Redis, and so far, it's way cheaper than using a dedicated Redis service.

I looked into AppFog, but it was not nearly customizable for my fairly intense Django app. I found too much of the configuration to be baked in.

On Heroku, I really like the ease of connecting third party services, and the fact that many of those services have free tiers. I love their New Relic pricing as well. I like that Foreman/Honcho make for a pretty awesome staging environment. What I don't like is the inability to directly connect to dynos.

So far, of the products I've tried, Heroku seems the closest to being fully baked, but it's still a ways away from hitting it out of the park. I'm really glad this question was brought up, even if it's quite frequently asked. There are so many players and the scene is so rapidly changing that information is constantly going out of date. It seems to me that what's really needed is some sort of ongoing comparison tool/site to track the whole PaaS scene.

Re:Ask HN: Best alternative to Heroku? by pearkes on Friday April 26, 2013 @02:26AM (#5611748)
> giving you more control over your instances and the ability to SSH into them.

FWIW you can do:

    heroku run bash
Which let's you mess around on a new dyno (not an existing one).
Re:Ask HN: Best alternative to Heroku? by edanm on Friday April 26, 2013 @03:46AM (#5611889)
Didn't know about this. What's the difference between a new dyno and an existing one? Why would they act differently?
Re:Ask HN: Best alternative to Heroku? by ncrit on Friday April 26, 2013 @04:48AM (#5612022)
They don't act differently, its just a dyno separate from the web and other processes.
Re:Ask HN: Best alternative to Heroku? by acjohnson55 on Friday April 26, 2013 @01:07PM (#5614021)
That's good for things that change shared state, but you can't do anything that would alter a running dyno or interrogate its state, unless you built your own hooks or something. But building something like that would kind of obviate the perks of a NoOps system.
Re:Ask HN: Best alternative to Heroku? by vishal0123 on Friday April 26, 2013 @04:19AM (#5611955)
The changes you made by running 'heroku run bash' is temporary and can be reverted any time.
Re:Ask HN: Best alternative to Heroku? by fabiokung on Friday April 26, 2013 @05:06PM (#5615496)
`heroku run bash` is still the best option, but I've always wanted to ssh into heroku dynos myself, so I did this:

https://github.com/fabiokung/heroku-ssh

Re:Ask HN: Best alternative to Heroku? by bluedino on Friday April 26, 2013 @07:48AM (#5612424)
> giving you more control over your instances and the ability to SSH into them.

I thought the point of Heroku was not having to SSH into your servers?

Re:Ask HN: Best alternative to Heroku? by acjohnson55 on Friday April 26, 2013 @01:09PM (#5614028)
Sure, and maybe one day they can make that need obsolete. I just don't think that day has arrived yet.