

No Thanks, We're Using Heroku - opdemand
http://www.opdemand.com/no-thanks-were-using-heroku/

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chatmasta
Your pricing strikes me as way too expensive. What are your variable costs
that justify a price of $249/month for three environments? Surely they can't
be very large, since your service is basically a web interface (that's not any
comment on the quality of it). Also, consider that the need for cloud
management service is much lower with 1 environment than 3 environments. If
you ask me, your introductory plan should be for 3 environments.

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opdemand
Appreciate the feedback. We've heard this from others. Then again, we have
customers happily paying these prices. If you look at competitors in the space
(RightScale, Scalr) we're on the lower end.

Keep in mind we include orchestration, monitoring, collaboration, real-time
log feedback, command-line interface, REST API, not to mention EC2 templates
for 1-click deployment of any open-source stack you can think of.

Besides making the introductory plan include 3 environments, any other
suggestions on pricing?

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DoubleCluster
> We created open-source Puppet modules that provide compatibility with
> Heroku’s cedar stack (process management, dependency management,
> concurrency)

If I had a Heroku app but wanted to move to EC2 that'd be great. The rest of
the stuff doesn't seem that interesting.

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opdemand
I'm curious. If you have a dozen or so Heroku apps and a few peers you
collaborate with, what's your management strategy?

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DoubleCluster
Would anyone actually do that? I run stuff on AWS using their excellent Java
SDK and I'm quite happy about the flexibility that brings me.

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opdemand
Firing off API calls with an SDK is great when you're a one-man operation.

At a certain point you need deployment automation that respects infrastructure
dependencies, change tracking with an audit trail, an at-a-glance view of
environments... all things AWS is not very good at. Though they're trying with
OpsWorks.

How do you work around that stuff?

~~~
DoubleCluster
Home-grown dashboard. Works fine for now. It was quite a lot of work to build
it but the code turned out nice and concise and I learned a lot in the
process.

