[calinet6]

Good to know Circle is running on Heroku. At least now we'll know why our CI isn't up when there's another lightning storm in North Carolina.

Heroku does make a lot of sense: it's an abstraction. You're using a system designed to do a lot of the heavy lifting so you don't have to deal with those details, and for many startups and small operations, it's a great value proposition.

But you have to admit that it is only a value proposition; and fundamentally a tradeoff. The truth is, especially from the perspective of a seasoned operations manager, all of the things above are just not that hard, nor are any of the complaints outlined in the OP article.

The more layers you put between you and your infrastructure, the harder it will be to control your availability. When EBS's start failing and you have no idea why and Amazon only shows a green dot on their status page with a cryptic message like "minor availability issues experienced in certain availability zones; investigating." Now that is hard.

Cloning a server and keeping a mirrored backup in another data center if you really need the availability? On hardware you have full control over? Not that hard. http://whoownsmyavailability.com/