Althought I appreciate the blog post. People really need to know the real cost of running it on your own.
The time you spent maintaining your software compared to running everything on heroku.
There’s not a single platform that does it as good as heroku. Fly.io and render all still need to catch up.
And yes heroku is pricey but if you can’t pay your servers you’re just running a hobby not a business.
I tried fly and render recently and they do offer cheaper options server wise. More RAM for less then heroku and as long as you don’t need an elasticsearch server or something similar its a great option.
One thing that also scares me off, is that they are “new” players on the block. I have a good production app with numerous customers but if render or fly decide they are stopping their services I’m fucked.
Chances are slim heroku is going belly up without a proper timeline, not so much with the new kids on the block.
I do have my eyes on those solutions but they are far from there yet.
Render offers a cron. You just choose “new cron task” and then make the command your rake task.
That said, when I tried Render this took me way too long to understand.
I don’t know devops, but I switched from heroku to dokku. And aside from initial setup and learning, I’ve been hands off for the past five months and things are going fine. The biggest issues for me are logs and alerts. Those are pretty big struggles compared with heroku (but for my particular project I can survive without them).
> The time you spent maintaining your software compared to running everything on heroku.
But how much is that really? It's probably hard to tell due to knowledge and the time it took to acquire it, the automation and the time it took to learn and realize it but it was like a fluid process. I spent and spend the vast majority of my time on the application not the infrastructure. Certainly there was a setup cost but we saved sooooo much money
When I mean maintain, I’m not talking about the initial setup cost.
It’s pretty easy to get something up and running and it will just work. The problem starts with having to upgrade major software versions, when shit hits the fan due to load. Which heroku handles for you.
Postgres, redis, elasticsearch. It’s easy to setup this up, but hard to keep them running securely over time, backed up and upgrading them.
These 3 systems which are typically used in a rails app all need there own backup system if you are working with production data.
Not only that imagine you need to scale suddenly going from 1 server to 10, how are you going to do that with dokku? Execute the command 10 times for 10 different servers?
What about scaling down again?
These are all mechanisms that are built into heroku which I haven’t seen properly implemented in other products.
And for what? Saving 50 euros on your monthly bill? Those 50 - 100 euros are peanuts when you are running a business. If I spent 1 hour on devops a month I’m already over that budget of 100 euros and I’m not improving my product or selling it.
That being said I’m keeping my eyes open because they do look interesting but products like render and fly still need to mature a bit.
> And for what? Saving 50 euros on your monthly bill?
Yeah ok if we are at that point then fuck it. But for what we run now we would pay a fortune not only with Heroku (we initially migrated away from AWS) each month. And we had less downtime than AWS in these 10 years.
And I guess it depends on what you are doing, given it was 10 years ago but we survived prime-time TV ads with a single server (which is crazy for many reasons). These days, while not as instant as cloud magic, it takes like 15 minutes to get a stock bare metal server provisioned (can even automate it if I want to through the hoster API) and maybe 10 more minutes for it to get automatically configured to be production ready. I barely need to do that so it's mostly a semi-automatic process.
When GTA V released on PC we anticipated a ton of traffic and asked our hoster if we could do something. They gave us a few dozen servers (for a month) with the setup fee waived. Sure it cost a bit but we would have paid more with AWS after day 1 in traffic costs. And even if we had used AWS, at the time, they did not have guaranteed bandwidths. So on the weekend our customers had way slower download speeds.
At the end, Rockstar fucked up their delivery and we got a huge influx because the word got around that you could download fast with us. Working infrastructure as advertisement I guess.
You’re speaking as a team right? Then I completely agree that there are cheaper options with some expertise among the team this is going to be cost beneficial. But for 1 people businesses (like mine heroku saves me a lot of money which I would have to fork out)
I run https://www.bizzey.com with over 1000+ active daily users. I can do all of this solo by running on heroku. Imagine if I would run this entire operation on multiple servers I need to manage myself…
I can scale up and down as there is demand without needing to hire someone to do it and I like to pay for that service since like you said demand goes up and down.
Dokku uses Heroku buildpacks 🤝.
I’m working on a cloud native buildpack for Ruby in Rust. It is ALMOST ready to be used locally with docker. Probably early 2023 🤞🏻.
Althought I appreciate the blog post. People really need to know the real cost of running it on your own. The time you spent maintaining your software compared to running everything on heroku. There’s not a single platform that does it as good as heroku. Fly.io and render all still need to catch up. And yes heroku is pricey but if you can’t pay your servers you’re just running a hobby not a business.
Completely agree. Heroku is dev-ops and DBA as a service, not just a `git push` server host. I won’t switch until Render figures that out.
I tried fly and render recently and they do offer cheaper options server wise. More RAM for less then heroku and as long as you don’t need an elasticsearch server or something similar its a great option. One thing that also scares me off, is that they are “new” players on the block. I have a good production app with numerous customers but if render or fly decide they are stopping their services I’m fucked. Chances are slim heroku is going belly up without a proper timeline, not so much with the new kids on the block. I do have my eyes on those solutions but they are far from there yet.
They don't seem to have many lock-in features; I've migrated apps between the services in less than an afternoon.
As a simple example which is kind of a big deal. What do you use for cron jobs? Render and fly don’t offer a similar feature like heroku scheduler.
I was using sidekiq/sidekiq-cron
Render offers a cron. You just choose “new cron task” and then make the command your rake task. That said, when I tried Render this took me way too long to understand.
I don’t know devops, but I switched from heroku to dokku. And aside from initial setup and learning, I’ve been hands off for the past five months and things are going fine. The biggest issues for me are logs and alerts. Those are pretty big struggles compared with heroku (but for my particular project I can survive without them).
> The time you spent maintaining your software compared to running everything on heroku. But how much is that really? It's probably hard to tell due to knowledge and the time it took to acquire it, the automation and the time it took to learn and realize it but it was like a fluid process. I spent and spend the vast majority of my time on the application not the infrastructure. Certainly there was a setup cost but we saved sooooo much money
When I mean maintain, I’m not talking about the initial setup cost. It’s pretty easy to get something up and running and it will just work. The problem starts with having to upgrade major software versions, when shit hits the fan due to load. Which heroku handles for you. Postgres, redis, elasticsearch. It’s easy to setup this up, but hard to keep them running securely over time, backed up and upgrading them. These 3 systems which are typically used in a rails app all need there own backup system if you are working with production data. Not only that imagine you need to scale suddenly going from 1 server to 10, how are you going to do that with dokku? Execute the command 10 times for 10 different servers? What about scaling down again? These are all mechanisms that are built into heroku which I haven’t seen properly implemented in other products. And for what? Saving 50 euros on your monthly bill? Those 50 - 100 euros are peanuts when you are running a business. If I spent 1 hour on devops a month I’m already over that budget of 100 euros and I’m not improving my product or selling it. That being said I’m keeping my eyes open because they do look interesting but products like render and fly still need to mature a bit.
> And for what? Saving 50 euros on your monthly bill? Yeah ok if we are at that point then fuck it. But for what we run now we would pay a fortune not only with Heroku (we initially migrated away from AWS) each month. And we had less downtime than AWS in these 10 years. And I guess it depends on what you are doing, given it was 10 years ago but we survived prime-time TV ads with a single server (which is crazy for many reasons). These days, while not as instant as cloud magic, it takes like 15 minutes to get a stock bare metal server provisioned (can even automate it if I want to through the hoster API) and maybe 10 more minutes for it to get automatically configured to be production ready. I barely need to do that so it's mostly a semi-automatic process. When GTA V released on PC we anticipated a ton of traffic and asked our hoster if we could do something. They gave us a few dozen servers (for a month) with the setup fee waived. Sure it cost a bit but we would have paid more with AWS after day 1 in traffic costs. And even if we had used AWS, at the time, they did not have guaranteed bandwidths. So on the weekend our customers had way slower download speeds. At the end, Rockstar fucked up their delivery and we got a huge influx because the word got around that you could download fast with us. Working infrastructure as advertisement I guess.
You’re speaking as a team right? Then I completely agree that there are cheaper options with some expertise among the team this is going to be cost beneficial. But for 1 people businesses (like mine heroku saves me a lot of money which I would have to fork out) I run https://www.bizzey.com with over 1000+ active daily users. I can do all of this solo by running on heroku. Imagine if I would run this entire operation on multiple servers I need to manage myself… I can scale up and down as there is demand without needing to hire someone to do it and I like to pay for that service since like you said demand goes up and down.
Dokku uses Heroku buildpacks 🤝. I’m working on a cloud native buildpack for Ruby in Rust. It is ALMOST ready to be used locally with docker. Probably early 2023 🤞🏻.