HACKER Q&A
📣 _bxg1

Do people still use Heroku and the like?


With Docker-based deployments being the current hotness, you don't really read about services that do source-based deployments as much these days. Are they being truly supplanted, or are they still going steady just outside of the limelight?

Edit:

Did some research and found this good comparison: https://rubygarage.org/blog/heroku-vs-amazon-web-services. Looks like the technical terms are "Infrastructure as a Service" vs "Platform as a Service", where the latter is Heroku's main product.

Still interested in people's anecdotes, though!

  👤 dhruvkar Accepted Answer ✓
Yes!

In fact, I was using Digital Ocean for our company and in process of transferring everything to Heroku. It's been such a breath of fresh air/load off of my shoulders.

As the sole developer, I don't need to worry about my server going down and worrying about the database (although DO introduced managed databases recently). Heroku is perfect for our needs -- lots of scheduled one-off scripts and a rough API.

👤 tnolet
I noticed many folks swept up by the docker hype actually moving to Heroku. Turns out dockerizing your apps only brings 5% of the benefits a platform like Heroku brings you.
👤 mtmail
Outside of limelight I think. There's no new features to report. Heroku works fine what I use it for, it scales, pricing is stable, at some point they will move from Postgresql-11 to 12. During my work week it's one piece of tech I least think about.
👤 freehunter
I still use “the like” for most of my projects but not Heroku specifically. I love Heroku’s service but for a small bootstrapped company it’s really expensive.

Specifically I use dokku on a DO droplet. It does mean I have to manage the server myself which Heroku removes from the user, but again for a small company it’s just one server so it’s maybe an hour or two a month I spend on server admin. But my monthly cost for 15 projects running 24/7 is $10, compared to $100+ on Heroku. It’s not a huge difference if you’re funded or have a very profitable business, but my margins are thinner than I could afford with Heroku.

👤 duxup
You can use docker images on Heroku so I don't see any reason they would be supplanted automatically.