[thedevil]

Anyone here have any thoughts on AppEngine vs Heroku?

I use AppEngine for my experimental projects because I can get a simple data model and some handlers running in minutes and a (supposedly automatically scalable) useful backend up in less than a day, and at very low cost. (Virtually free if I use an *.appspot.com domain).

You do get lockin issues but don't you also get lockin from Heroku? Is there big advantages to Heroku that make it worth it?

[_bpo]

You get lockin issues with any vendor - even server colocation :)

AppEngine is a great tool for a great price. It scales smoothly with an affordable increase in pricing.

Heroku is sort of famous for getting too expensive at large scale. Their advantages are their ecosystem (most of the additional services listed in the OP can be installed quickly, and you're still only billed by Heroku), and their UIs which tend to be easy to understand and operate.

[campers]

Parse.com is similar to Heroku in that its simple to get started and has a free tier but gets real expensive once you go over that. I'm rebuilding my Parse back-end and going with Google app engine managed vms for a number of reasons.

[mod]

I haven't used AppEngine, but getting a heroku instance up takes less than an hour. If I did it more often, I'd think it could be done for a typical CRUD app in < 30 minutes.

An instance on DigitalOcean would be more like 2 hours.

There's no lockin that I've experienced on Heroku.

[lotyrin]

The case I've always experienced, which is "<framework generator>; heroku create; git push heroku master" is a few seconds.

[mod]

Setting up your requirements for heroku is not that simple. You have to create all the necessary information, like your requirements.txt etc. Turn on some level of real postgres, things of that nature.

Most of my time is spent consulting docs.

[lotyrin]

Nicer framework generators will produce dependency configuration, have params for what database backend to produce configuration for, and produce applications prepared to be 12-factor (log to stdout, accept configuration via environment) out of the box.

More generators than those will allow you to create reusable app templates which have these features so you don't have to repeat the (still very simple) configuration process for each app.

[yeukhon]

Heroku offers more integration addon/services than App Engine ever does. Heroku was definitely invented to compete with App Engine. Google did not have a Cloud Platform at the beginning for you to create and integrate MySQL as a service with App Engine app.

[nostrademons]

Other way around, actually. AppEngine came out in April 2008; Heroku in November 2007:

https://web.archive.org/web/20071105005403/http://heroku.com...

It's fairly likely they were working on them in parallel without knowledge of each other, though.