[bradleybuda]

We're big Heroku customers; despite that, I largely agree with the points in this article and there's a voice in the back of my head asking every few months "is this worth it?"

Whenever I research the new crop of Heroku clones (the one being hawked here, and others) the pitch is always "it's just like Heroku but you can run it in your own cloud". It's mind-boggling to me that none of the clones understands that I DON'T WANT TO RUN IT. Yes, I pay Heroku a premium because I like their software (the pipelines are great, dyno formations mostly Just Work) but what I'm really paying for is:

* Never typing "ssh"

* Never thinking about a full disk from a runaway log file

* Never thinking about a load balancer or a certificate

* Never waking up because a Postgres host has failed

* etc, etc

I have no interest in a "Heroku but you run it" PaaS but I'd pay though the nose for a "Heroku but it's actively developed" PaaS.

[ryanSrich]

Yes. Every. Single. Time.

I’ve been using Heroku since 2013. In both a hobby and professional manner. I was even one of the first employees at a Healthcare specific Heroku clone (before we expanded to other products). I’ve been extolling the virtues of Heroku for nearly a decade.

Whenever something new comes out there’s always some critical piece that’s missing. The simplicity and the “it just works” factor of Heroku cannot be understated.

Take logging for example. Let’s say I want to add papertrail to a Heroku project. How do I do that? I click one single button. Heroku handles the environment variables, standing the logging container up, making sure I have access to it, etc. I don’t have to do literally anything to get it to work. The same goes for any add-on or service. Need Redis? Sure! Just click this button. That’s quit literally all you need to do.

Compare that to AWS, which is a nightmare of config hell, permissions, roles, policies. And that’s just getting it created and stood up. Not to mention maintaining it.

[rawoke083600]

>Compare that to AWS, which is a nightmare of config hell, permissions, roles, policies.

Absolutely ! It almost get to the point now where you need to be a "level-100+ aws <user|expert|warlock>" to know what and how to do it.

PS. Focusing JUST on UI/Ease-Of-Use. Look at hetzner cloud. I just love their cloud-ui ! (I feel that german efficiency in there - lol )

It reminds me of FreeBSD VS Linux. It's so less complex and the whole system(ui) just "fits" in your head :)

I love their UI in comparison to their competition. Like say Scaleway which I like very much and use every day but their (Scaleway) UI is looking like

"12 year old girl's bubblegum-and-unicorns party theme"

PS2. Now if only Hetzner has a default FreeBSD install image for their VPS

[intrepidsoldier]

I had written down some thought about the various compute options available to run apps. One of my takeaways was exactly this - "Run your own PaaS on Cloud IaaS" seems too much work for too little gain.

https://ramansharma.substack.com/p/multiple-stops-on-the-clo...

[badestrand]

As always it depends on the context. I worked in a company where we streamed video to millions of end users and it was 10x cheaper to operate our own datacenter instead of renting cloud things for that. We also used hosted cloud offerings where it made sense, for other applications.

[dontlaugh]

AWS’s ECS Fargate with Aurora Serverless and AWS CA certificates is close.

[ketzo]

But even that stuff is gonna be more configuration than Heroku, right?

I wanna spend literally zero hours a month on server / dev ops, if I can manage it. I will pay for it and accept the constraints of simplicity.

[vlunkr]

You can invest more time up front and automate it with an IAC tool and and CI tool to build/deploy. Probably nothing will be as hands off as Heroku, but there are lots of measures that can get you closer.

[maccard]

It is more configuration, yes, but it's far less than say ec2 and nomad. We run a very light production load on it and in 6 months I've had to intervene once (to bump our limits because we spiked slightly more than I expected us to)

[txcwpalpha]

I think AWS App Runner (+ Aurora Serverless) could be even better. From what I can tell, App Runner is supposed to be the successor to Elastic Beanstalk and AWS's PaaS offering. App Runner seems a little immature right now (it launched last year and was missing some key features on launch), but it is actively being developed.

I've always been hugely disappointed that AWS doesn't have a better PaaS offering, given Heroku's languishing, and I was hugely disappointed when App Runner launched and was missing some key features... but there is at least a little hope that it's improving.

[statico]

Indeed. I wrote about recreating what I wanted from Heroku within ECS Fargate. There was a lot of initial configuration but very, very low maintenance work.

https://statico.medium.com/recreating-herokus-push-to-deploy...

[ozim]

I see bunch of people around me that want to run their own k8s.

People somehow magically forget that then they will need to run their own servers to host k8s and then deal with k8s and then deal with their app deployment.

If I can deploy app just like on Heroku and not have a server and not have to deal with orchestrator that is winning deal for me. Other way I will stay with my VPS setup and install apps directly on these.

[krthr]

GCP Cloud Run could be an alternative

[strix_varius]

You might like render.com

[thasmin]

I recently deployed a web app on render.com and it looks it fits the description. I just told it to set up a PostgreSQL database, pointed it at my git repo and told it how to build/run the static site, web server, and cron job. It was pretty simple, it's got great features like logs, a console, and monitoring. The price is reasonable too.