Its been one hell of a rough go for Heroku lately.
I think you would be insane to start a new project with them today. Which is crazy for me to say, as I was one of their biggest fans for the last decade.
Did your total devops cost go up or down? I'm sure aws is less expensive than heroku but I assume now you are paying more to people to do what heroku did?
We are spending about 60% less. Workload has actually lessened since AWS is so much more stable. Getting to a similar DX as Heroku was quite the lift, but once it's done, it's done. These days we generally only have outages when we screw something up ourselves. I recommend https://github.com/aws/copilot-cli for starting out on ECS.
For all heroku's done wrong it has been rock solid for us for nearly 10 years. The only outage I can remember in all that time is when they were having issues with their upstream dns a little while ago. Even this incident isn't causing any down time for us - we just can't deploy updates until it is fixed. I guess if we had a critical fix on deck it could be considered an "outage" though.
I've had a generally great experience with Render. Really glad I moved my main side-project to it at the beginning of 2022. I saw usage of my project really ramp up over the course of last year, and I shudder to think of what my opex on Heroku would've been.
We really wanted to like Render, but the performance just wasn't there for us when doing a bunch of load testing against Heroku, which is a shame. Hoping they can make it better in the coming months/years cos we really liked the product.
Interesting. Could you share more about the types of loads you were testing with?
Our tests for simple JavaScript endpoints with a MongoDB call to be just as fast or faster on Render. Additionally the availability of far more tiers of cpu/ram meant we could see the same performance for half the cost.
Node.js + mongodb, definitely some not-so-performant pages with a few more db lookups than probably necessary. We also spun up a new Atlas cluster in the same region to rule out the cross data center latency.
That sounds very similar. We also spun up a Mongo instance in us-east-2 and the performance was fantastic. Round trip from the server to the mongo instance was super low and comparable to the Heroku / Mongo times on us-east-1
Bummer you had a different experience.
Hi Dom! After more evaluation, we think your experience was a Virginia vs Ohio problem. Once we have Virginia set up (along with a few other things our teams talked about) I'd love for y'all to give us another shot.
After the large pricing increases, the dumping of free apps, the lack of a facility to deploy to local (e.g. asia-pacific) regions without a "private space", and the astronomical prices for these private spaces, plus the complete lack of innovation, it's time for me to move on and learn a new vendor's offerings. Truly the last straw. Once a successful startup is purchased by one of these legacy giants, it really is the forbidding end of the invention that made the startup a winner to begin with.
To be fair, Salesforce bought Heroku in 2010, just three years after it was founded. Much of the innovation at Heroku happened under the Salesforce umbrella.
I remember reading a job posting from Heroku's heyday that said something along the lines of "Heroku haters need not apply". I think at the time they were just starting to cop some flak for their pricing. I wonder what the majority of the die-hard fans of yester-year did.
What's the least friction alternative? I'm find with my database being hosted on Heroku (for now), what other service can I set up as a git remove, transfer my env vars, update my DNS and be good to go?
I think you would be insane to start a new project with them today. Which is crazy for me to say, as I was one of their biggest fans for the last decade.