
Heroku CI in public beta - manojlds
https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/heroku-ci
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markonen
Was very excited about this during the private beta, when the only pricing
indication was about the dyno usage (billed by the second). Now, the GA
pricing of $10/mo/pipeline doesn't seem like much, but with our small startup
already at 32 pipelines, it ends up blowing past what we're currently paying
for CircleCI.

I guess that's actually a more general criticism of Heroku in the
microservices context; high availability (at least 2 dynos per service) and
predictable performance (non-shared dynos, Performance-M at minimum) combine
to make the cost of a "production" setup start at $500/mo/service. Non-issue
for a monolith, quite tough for small microservices.

(To be fair, we compromise on both of those requirements and use both single-
dyno apps and shared dynos, and so Heroku is very affordable for us. But the
downside of those choices ends up biting us often enough that I, in turn, end
up lamenting about it on HN.)

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jacques_chester
Heroku's strategy is about locking you in through services. It's the same
playbook being followed by AWS, Azure and GCP. The concept of spinning up and
scheduling containers is now well below the value line -- there are many
competing platforms in this space. Raw compute is nearly a fungible,
undifferentiated product at this point.

Insofar as you can decouple yourself from Heroku service offerings, you are
able to decouple from Heroku.

Whether that's a full-service standalone platform like Cloud Foundry (partly
inspired by, and partly sharing code with, Heroku), an IaaS-smoothing platform
like Convox (founded by Heroku alumni), integrating some intermediate
platforms like Deis or rolling your own with Kubernetes or Marathon.

Disclosure: I work for Pivotal, which sells a commercial distribution of Cloud
Foundry. And I work in the Cloud R&D section on opensource bits of it. So I
have a horse in this race.

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gkop
If you were Heroku, how would you plug the hole of people running some parts
of their deployments in AWS us-east-1 to save on their Heroku bill?

~~~
dbbk
Maybe I just have the wrong idea, but I'm pretty sure the whole USP of Heroku
is easy deployments without having to worry about Dev Ops and infrastructure.
If you want to use AWS directly, that's great... but that's not the customer
they're targeting.

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fdim
For anyone using github and heroku - this may be convenient, but for anyone on
bitbucket side - there is built in alternative (even within free tier). I'd
say that they are quite late in the game

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beager
Congrats to the Heroku team for pushing forward with this. While it's not
attractive to this Heroku customer due to my preference for CI solutions that
are agnostic to the rest of the deployment workflow, I'm sure this is a great
prospect for orgs that are 100% Heroku ride or die.

I'm curious about the pricing model. Other hosted CI solutions have a low-
power free tier or provide totally free services to OSS. I wonder if Heroku
would consider providing a free version of CI with hobby dynos and other free-
tier addons.

Also hoping that charging pro rata for usage is something that can be extended
to hosting dynos.

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dbbk
> Also hoping that charging pro rata for usage is something that can be
> extended to hosting dynos.

All dynos are charged pro rata are they not?

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7ewis
Want to start learning more about CI tools, as Heroku CI hasn't been released
yet, is there something similar I can try? Would Travis be a good start?

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ieatkittens
I personally use the GitLab CI. It's great.

GitLab as a whole is brilliant, tbh.

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sytse
Thanks! I saw someone in this thread mentioning the markup that various
services charge
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13902492](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13902492)
With GitLab CI we want to make sure it is easy to test your code on any
infrastructure. So you can use runners we host, but you can also bring your
own runners from any (public) cloud. This way you can use whatever solution is
cost effective for you.

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andrewbarba
The most interesting problem they are trying to solve is the way this
integrates with their addon partners. Typical CI you specify services like
MongoDB, Redis, Postgres, etc. to be installed directly on the image that your
tests are running. Heroku seems to be literally creating accounts with their
partners, forcing them to spin up necessary resources, and then just churning
the account as soon as the tests are done. Most Heroku partners offer a free
tier assuming they can get a percentage to switch to the higher tiers, but
this is going to increase usage of those free tiers by a very large amount and
I don't see it converting well for the partner.

Edit (clarity): They didn't solve the problem yet, and are limiting the addons
to just Heroku services (Postgres/Redis) until they figure out best way to
handle with partners. I will be keeping a close eye, very curious what they
land on.

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sbkg0002
Still JSON? Why not YAML?

