[Kaedon]

To me, the article boils down to an argument that says "You should learn how to be a DevOp. It's not that bad." I don't think that's a trivial thing to pick up. I think it's important to develop some of these skills but I wouldn't describe it as easy.

I think the key argument for Heroku is that it enables you to delay (sometimes indefinitely) learning the skills required to deploy a production application and managing it. In some cases, such as security, it can be a real bear to keep up with the latest developments in addition to managing the application itself.

Ultimately, I view Heroku as similar to an ORM. With an ORM, it will get you most of the way most of the time, but there's some instances where it starts to make sense to dig into the raw SQL below it and get the performance you want.

[grey-area]

To extend your analogy, if I may, Heroku is like an ORM which charges per month, and where it costs more to use relational finders. You're paying extra for each convenience and giving up some control, and this is an ongoing cost. For some people this is a great fit and they really don't want to know about this stuff, are building a demo, or working on a smaller site where you don't want to have to babysit the server and are willing to pay a little extra for that.

For others who are on a tight budget, or have an ops person or willing devs who would prefer to control the server setup, heroku is not such a good idea. I think people overestimate how hard it is to get a typical stack up and running and keep it up - for a small server or vps (i.e. most startups) it's probably only a few hours a month work plus a few hours learning setup, if that. The second one you set up can be up in minutes, and it gives you greater control in the long term, plus obviously it's cheaper. If the amount you pay heroku is less than a few hours of your time, then why not use heroku? However if you grow and are spending a lot of money with them, you've probably outgrown them IMHO. I do like their service, and have tried it out, but the convenience comes at a cost, which increases rapidly the busier your site is.

[Kaedon]

I think you bring up a couple of great points. It can be hard to escape the sort of lock-in effect if you've got a larger app on Heroku. For instance, I'm guessing it would be difficult for RapGenius to move somewhere else at this point. I think you also touch on the key argument for Heroku which, as far as I can tell, is "If the amount you pay is less than few hours of your time, why not?"

Thanks for the amendment to the comparison. In a sense, an ORM can still have ongoing "costs" as it tends to run a little slower and require more processing, so it might require additional hardware eventually as the scale goes up. Maybe I'm belaboring the analogy too much at that point.

[AznHisoka]

I actually thought deployment was a very challenging, nightmarish thing to do. Heroku, and EngineYard are charging me an arm and a leg - of course it must be hard as hell, right?

But I took the afternoon to learn how to actually deploy, and the next day, I cancelled my EngineYard account. It's not trivial, but on a scale of 1-10, it's a 3 or 4.

And even if you can't afford the time/energy to learn it (ie if you're a startup and just need to launch), you can easily do "poor man's" deployment just by sshing, "git pull", "bundle exec unicorn restart" (or something like that). Deploying an app on production is almost the same as deploying on your development machine. Why give Heroku your money when you can do it yourself?

[Kaedon]

That's true. For me, I view redundancy as one of the values of Heroku. If you're deploying on your own, that may still require provisioning additional servers as needed, manually backing up databases periodically, etc etc. It can be a time cost beyond just deploying it once in some cases. Still, is the cost of Heroku worth it? It's an important question and a personal one for most I think.

I tend to think of deployment as a challenging thing too but the more I discuss it the less I think of it as a mystery. Thank you for sharing.