
New Heroku Dynos Get 2.5GB RAM - mrsflibble
https://devcenter.heroku.com/changelog-items/696
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jtchang
Is there anyone using Heroku that wishes they didn't start out using it? A lot
of my friends in hacker schools end up using Heroku which I think is great but
later on don't understand how to really deploy an application outside of
Heroku's platform.

Had pricing ever been an issue for any of you?

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liquidise
Your question is framed at someone who "learned" deployments via heroku. I
will answer it from a different perspective. I recently started at a company
who began their staging and production hosting on heroku. I would have a very
hard time recommending it to anyone.

In addition to uncompetitive pricing, the "add-on" architecture is itself
expensive and inflexible. Redis feels artificially limited, and the
scheduler's timing options are, i kid you not: Daily, Hourly, Every 10
minutes.

To people who know linux hosting: avoid heroku. To people who don't know linux
hosting: spend some time gaining a serviceable linux hosting skillset.

~~~
jday
don't use heroku's scheduler - it's a best effort scheduler that doesn't
guarantee it will even execute your jobs at the times you set.

the company i work for runs a rails app and we've ported almost everything
over to running with the clock gem instead of with heroku's scheduler.

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nieksand
Neat! That's five hundred MB more than my cellphone.

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passiveincome
Am I correct that this represents a 10x cost over an IaaS provider like
Digital Ocean? What features in the Heroku platform justify that? Not
trolling, but looking for some brief and logical input that'll give me that
'aha' moment

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eli
Isn't Digital Ocean just a VPS provider? I'd encourage you to give Heroku a
try (it's free to play with). It's pretty cool that with really minimal
planning on your part you can "git push heroku" and have a working app.

I don't know if this is an "aha" moment for you -- it might depend on how much
you enjoy provisioning servers yourself -- but when it works it's pretty cool.

I suspect there are people who are running apps "themselves" on heroku that
would otherwise require them to pay a server administrator.

~~~
passiveincome
That's the disconnect for me. There have to be prebuilt Amazon AMIs with push
to deploy functionality for various stack flavors. I guess the simplicity and
allure of Heroku's git integration makes it easy for developers to forego
research on those. It still seems one hell of a price to pay especially when
coupled with vendor lock-in (Disclaimer: I don't know if Heroku PaaS locks you
in as much as say, GAE)

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nothrabannosir
_Disclaimer: I don 't know if Heroku PaaS locks you in as much as say, GAE_

In my (limited) experience: not by a long shot. Heroku setups may seem locked
in, but GAE is obscene. No outgoing HTTP requests, no normal DB, basically
everything is GAE specific. Heroku is not the most generic thing out there,
but, by God, it's still miles better than GAE.

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arihant
No outgoing HTTP requests? GAE has URL Fetch API from first day.

Also, GAE can now run docker and also connect to MySQL running on Google Cloud
infrastructure, which is a separate offering.

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nothrabannosir
Sorry for not being explicit. My point was: you need to use a special API to
do outgoing HTTP requests. This leads to vendor lock-in. In Heroku, you just
do it.

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arihant
No you don't. You still use your language's standard library. But GAE uses
their own version behind the scenes. You code still uses urllib if on Python
and net/http if using Go.

So in GAE too, you just do it.

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PhantomGremlin
If you want to know, in general, what Heroku is, don't bother with their web
pages. It's marketing fluff.

The first paragraph in Wikipedia is a concise explanation.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heroku](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heroku)

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jurre
I'm wondering what people need this much RAM for? Wouldn't it make more sense
to just spin up more dyno's with fewer instances of your app running on each
dyno?

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beat
Depends on what you're doing. I've worked on systems where we had 72gb and
96gb of RAM, and we tuned them within an inch of their lives.

But hey, 512k is good enough for anyone, Bill Gates once said.

edit: If I was doing something memory-intensive or performance-intensive, I
wouldn't be on Heroku anyway.

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bdcravens
Worth noting that you can get 16GB RAM on AWS or Digital Ocean using Cloud66
and have almost the same deployment experience, for less.

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johnward
Off topic: What's the best free alternative for small side projects?

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detaro
Closest thing with a "full" free tier I know about is OpenShift. (For some
stuff, heroku's free tier still can work out fine)

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jslakro
Yeah. I think Heroku is the best choice right now. A web dyno and a worker
dyno running 18h/day for free

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johnward
How is time calculated? Is it actual hours in a day or actually calculated
when a dyno is serving something? For example if the app sits idle for a
couple hours a day would it still server content for 24hours?

