
Ask HN: Heroku at scale? - ian0
Ive been a huge fan of Heroku since I first used it a few years back. Its amazing how quickly you can get up and running, deploy, add SSL, monitoring etc. The polar opposite of AWS. It has worked for me for a variety of applications, my only issues being their region support as it doesn&#x27;t match up with where our customers are, adding latency to the app.<p>However more than one person has mentioned to me that its not a suitable platform to scale and that eventually we will run into issues. I do notice that they have quite a few outages in the past few months, but I have no benchmark really to compare to running say direct on AWS.<p>Does anyone here have any experience scaling relatively large apps (say dozens of dynos) on Heroku? Or perhaps mission critical apps? Did you run into any issues? Or share these concerns?<p>As background we are running a B2B business with a few different websites and mobile backends. Various languages&#x2F;frameworks. There is a transactional component. Relatively low RPS.
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Rjevski
I have experience running an application with 9M users (around 2M active) on
Heroku. We had around 1,5k requests/second average, peaking at over 2k
reqs/sec. No major issues, although we were starting to hit the per-app dyno
limit (we could not go over 20 dynos) but this problem could be solved by
creating a second app.

Overall no issues and I would definitely recommend them.

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gitgud
That's amazing! What does that cost per month? (if I may ask)

Only 20 dynos? I assumed Heroku could scale to hundreds of dynos per app
deployment, as they assign a random local port to every dyno.

You could create a second app, but in certain cases, that violates their terms
of service, where you're not allowed to use many deployments to act as a
single webapp.

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Rjevski
> What does that cost per month? (if I may ask)

I don't actually remember but I did the test on my own Heroku apps now and
with Performance-M dynos (the ones we were using) we were looking at
$5000+/month.

To be fair the most expensive things were the add-ons; we were spending over
$10000/month for those.

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cyberpanther
I think the problem with heroku is not scaling but the cost. They use AWS
behind the scenes so you are paying a premium over AWS. Eventually that will
become expensive. But if you are saving money on labor it's worth it.

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ian0
>> But if you are saving money on labor it's worth it.

Yeah we definitely are. Labor and just plain hassle. It's great to be able to
deploy in seconds, rollback easily. Of course its possible to set that up on
AWS too - just in practice its always far more complicated than it seems.

The billing is very easy to understand, which is nice. Ive seen AWS billing
spiral out of control, yet to experience that on Heroku (touch wood).

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gitgud
As far as scaling Heroku, it's usually the cost that will limit you, rather
than the number of Dynos. Some alternatives, arguably cheaper:

\- Dokku: a Docker-based Heroku clone, self-hosted (cheap!), compatible with
Heroku build-packs, easy migration.

\- Firebase: Google's answer to an all in one deployment solution, scales
really well, fairly cheap too.

My view is; Heroku is a great option it's probably the fastest development
cycle you could possible get. Instead of preempting scaling problems, stick
with what you have, _then_ migrate slowly to something bigger _IF_ it becomes
an issue.

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ian0
> Instead of preempting scaling problems, stick with what you have, then
> migrate slowly to something bigger IF it becomes an issue.

Cheers - Yep that was our thinking too.

