
Heroku: Best money ever spent - tortilla
http://www.elctech.com/articles/heroku-best-money-ever-spent
======
immad
I am using Heroku for a few small projects, including Swinefighter, which
seamlessly got to the front page of digg and Techcrunch'd on Heroku.

Once you get used to it, it really is amazing to deploy apps in 2 minutes and
not do any sysadmin, and know that it can scale.

------
ngrandy
while remaining dead simple to use, heroku is also becoming an increasingly
sophisticated platform, capable of handling a wide variety of app
requirements. eg - background workers and memcached support are available in
beta. since i started using heroku for tripeedo.com, the traditional server
hosts are looking a lot like dinosaurs.

------
knowtheory
It's worth pointing out that Google App Engine + JRuby & Rack Apps is
considerably cheaper than Heroku.

You can build a full Rack app w/ DataMapper, one that is portable (i.e. no
lock in) and scalable, w/o having to pay anything, prior to some serious
traffic.

(Caveat: Tool chain for Ruby on Google App Engine is a little raw at the
moment, but it's coming along)

~~~
teej
That's not the point. The point is to deploy in 15 minutes and then -never
think about infrastructure again-. In the early days, anything that's keeping
your product from customers is getting in your way.

~~~
mrkurt
To be fair, Google AppEngine gives you that same ability. The difference is,
you have to build your app for AppEngine rather than building a plane jane
vanilla rack/rails/sinatra/whatever app with postgres.

The app I have running on Heroku uses a number of prebuilt gems, including
things like twitter-auth that sort of assume you're using migrations and
ActiveRecord with it. I may move it over to AppEngine at some point, but the
absolute fastest way for me to get an app up and running was with Heroku.

~~~
knowtheory
You're not entirely correct on that point either.

The goal that i have as someone who's building tools for GAE, is to
sufficiently abstract the GAE tools so that you _aren't_ building specifically
to AppEngine's infrastructure. DataMapper is a great example of an abstraction
layer that allows you to build application code that is portable across
infrastructure.

The goal is to be able to build an application on GAE, and if your
requirements change at some point and GAE doesn't fit, you can migrate off of
it without substantial pain.

------
datums
I'm really happy with the easy to deploy options being made available. I'm not
too sure about the "it scales" attitude with any of these products. Scaling is
not about the platform, the platform is one component.

