[lambdacomplete]

There are 2 major issues with this:

1) Small teams (~1-5 people) trying to seem "big" by working at Google's scale.

2) Heroku's prices. We are currently (successfully so far) migrating a small Django project from bare Amazon EC2 instances to ECS with Docker. Even using 3 EC2 micro instances (1 vCPU, 1 GB RAM) for the Docker cluster we would spend ~8 USD/month/instance. With Heroku the minimum would be 25 USD/month/dyno. That's a 3x increase in expenses.

It's very possible to take advantage of technologies like containers without getting too caught in the hype.

[baq]

wait. you're comparing $25 with $75. it is 3x but it's still accounting noise by any standard imaginable unless you're running a charity server for an open source project.

[lmm]

What about the standard of "I'm young and this is a side project I'm doing in a couple of hours at the weekends"? Of course once you have a real company with more than two customers $75 is nothing. But version 0.1 is often a tool that's only useful to you.

[jalada]

Heroku has free dynos for side projects, and hobby dynos ($7/dyno/month) for slightly-less-side projects. So that original $75/m quote isn't quite right for that situation.

[lambdacomplete]

Yes it is, our EC2 instances have 1 GB of ram, the 7$ dyno has 512 MB.

[vacri]

Young people doing side projects on the cheap... are they Heroku's bread and butter?

[zeveb]

> What about the standard of "I'm young and this is a side project I'm doing in a couple of hours at the weekends"?

Well, even someone who's young (for values of 'young' older than high-school age) is probably spending more than that every month on beer, food & entertainment each …

[baq]

i'd roll that into 'charity/hobby' part.

or you just host it on an old laptop hidden in your closet.

[lambdacomplete]

To answer the concerns raised in the comments: we are a real company and it took 2 weeks (while working on other features and bugfixes) to migrate to Docker. The plus is that now we have experience with the platform and we can streamline the process. Again: we are not using microservices or anything like that, simply Docker containers instead of EC2 instances, which makes life pretty damn easier (and cheaper).

And 25 and 75 are bogus numbers, what if we start running 10 instances?

[sleepyhead]

And what is the cost of the working hours spent to migrate to Docker compared to just doing a git push to Heroku?

[lambdacomplete]

A few hours a week dedicated to re-building our deployment process (which was a pain since everything had to be provisioned manually for each new project). Not saying it was the best approach, it sure was an improvement and worth the (relatively little) time.

Once again keep in mind that for new projects the process is so streamlined it will take a fraction of the time to set them up.

[StreamBright]

Indeed, the goal is to solve your business problem with technology, not use Docker for everything that you can find in your infra. Many people are mixing up the two. Docker can be replaced with anything that is hyped at this level.

[lambdacomplete]

Exactly. Docker provides a set of features that are nice to standardized development environments and deployments across projects. Anything else that accomplishes that works as well.

[philliphaydon]

Your micro instance has cpu credits while your docter cluster does not? So price increase is expected...