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Comment by cabalamat | Hacker News Reader

The existence of Heroku/Appliku etc (and my personal experience) suggests that setting up web apps isn't hassle free.

Maybe the fix for this would be to have a language/library combination designed from the ground up to make it as easy as possible?

So for example, the language would come as standard with:

- a web server for production use - a web server for development use - a built-in SQL database - a built-in NoSQL database - a web server library

Then, as all the components for the system would part of the language's standard library/environment, the difficulty of configuring/running a server (such as a web server) on another machine would be limited.

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It's not that setting up a server is hard. The reason Heroku exists is because they are your devops team -as-a-service.

I would correct the last part. Appliku is an automated devops as a service. Heroku is selling you a very much overpriced complete service. And that's where Appliku comes in as a way to fight insane costs.

But yes, setting up a server is not super hard. Doing it often and with convenience that's where improvement is needed compared to doing it manually.

I think your project is cool, but deploying an application to a server on `git push` is not devops. Heroku is selling managed servers and databases with easy deployment, you're selling easy deployment to unmanaged servers and databases.

If I understand you correctly, you say that setting up a server isn't hard, but then you seem to imply that it's hard enough that you might want to employ a team of people to do it, which seems pretty hard to me.

So I'm not sure that I follow you.

Setting up a server and database is not hard. Maintaining and scaling it is. I don't want to use my valuable time on these things, so Heroku is worth the cost. People who say Heroku is expensive are not in their target market -- businesses who want to avoid their team unnecessarily spending time on infrastructure instead of product.

Heroku is much, much cheaper than 1) me spending my time on these things, or 2) hiring a capable engineer to do it for me. It's build vs buy. I'd rather buy.

But that's not to say I'm not interested in a Heroku alternative. But it needs to be a *real* alternative. :)

Dark has exactly that, https://www.darklang.com

I think you're missing a big part... getting it hosted on the internet, stable, and scalable. Can't do that from your laptop no matter what the language environment comes with.

Also every provider offers different things, at different costs, etc. So it is up to providers to build solutions that are easy with a given language or framework.

We aspire to build a convenient service for Python/Django and there is a long road ahead.

> getting it hosted on the internet,

This just needs a VPS, running a popular OS such as Ubuntu.

> stable

This is important, I agree.

> and scalable

The scalable part doesn't matter, since it's premature optimisation, which is the root of all evil.

Once the project is used by enough people that it cant run just on one dedicated server, then you'll hopefully have enough revenue coming in from it to make it scalable.

> Can't do that from your laptop

A VPS would typically have less power than a laptop.

Scalability does not only refer to the setup being able to serve a lot of users, but also to the development processes being scalable. Setting up and maintaining dev and demo environments needs a scalable process for example from the day you have a junior person on the team that cannot handle all the complexities by herself. Or, if you start to have multiple internal dev environments to evaluate different technology choices that might impact long term development. We‘re mostly JS based, and even though everything is dockerized, it still sucks to onboard people and manage multiple deployed branches on AWS EC2.

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