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Comment by jacobsenscott | Hacker News Reader

For all heroku's frustrations (and I agree with all of them in the article), it is still the only thing that "just works" for a standard monolith web app. Heroku is not cheap, but it is still cheaper than a couple full time employees + aws.

It is really too bad they aren't innovating - they are just burning up their 10 year lead in the space. I wouldn't start a new project on Heroku - not because of the cost, but because I don't expect them to last another 10 years.

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I'm currently evaluating PAAS services. The use case is early-stage SAAS with very small dev team who want to focus on the product and not have to deal with Kubernetes or the AWS services soup. Maybe further down the line that might be necessary but right now there isn't sufficient time or people for devops time-sinks. So PAAS it is.

I've used Heroku before and it was fine, and price as you say is not an object compared to developer time, but when I see people not being able to deploy for 2 weeks that rings very loud alarm bells. It means they don't have enough people to fix the problem (whether customer service or developers) and they can't afford or don't want to hire more people. Salesforce clearly are happy to let Heroku die on the vine, and are OK with current customers slowly leaving the platform while they squeeze the last drops of profit from them. That's a shame, but it is what it is. So instead currently looking at other options - Render, Google Cloud Run, fly.io etc.

It blows my mind that they don't provide an object store. Almost all web apps in my experience need an object store of some kind.

I use Bucketeer plugin on Heroku but I am planning to move to S3, that is around 20x cheaper.

What do you imagine their home-grown offering would have over using S3 directly?

I thought the entire point of Heroku was that it wrapped up existing essential basic AWS offerings into a more manageable package?

I’d rather not have to manage a side account for AWS, and set up the connections to it and things. I’d rather it was just there, like their database.

A lot of AWS’s offerings are hard to use. But s3 really isn’t. There’s also firebase storage and backblaze b2 in this space. And they’re all easy to use standalone.

I suppose that's what this is https://elements.heroku.com/addons/bucketeer, but using S3 is really easy. And honestly I wouldn't trust most heroku addons are maintained outside of the most popular - postgres, redis, memcache.

Yeah I agree. Having to have Heroku and AWS simply because of this missing feature is annoying.

Lol Whot ?

Not trying to be a d*k or saying you are wrong, maybe I've only worked on simple-silly projects in my "medium'ish-long-career" so far but:

Why do you say that ? Really interested ?

Where do you store things like images, PDFs, binary files etc involved in your web apps? Most CRUD apps in my experience involve some kind of artefacts that need to be stored in some way.

You can store these on Heroku, but you have to remember that the volumes are volatile - so, you don't really know when given environment will restart and wipe all your temporary files that are not committed to the repo.

If your resources are required, then they should be committed. If you want persistent cache, there are options both inside and outside Heroku.

I think I agree with you though - it's weird for me to have code on Heroku, and then log in to AWS, to put stuff in S3 manually.

What if your artifacts are db-records ?

Heroku already provides a managed database service using Postgres, so you're fine for that.

It's if you want to store any kind of user uploaded or generated binary or large content - images, PDF reports, audio files, videos, JSON documents, code, logs - all common things you may want to manipulate in a web service.

It's honestly strange how no one has eaten their lunch yet. Besides the extra services they now offer (which you aren't required for hosting a simple app), you could probably have a team bang out the basics in a few months.

You could even just be a layer on top of AWS and probably make profit from not many users, as long as you're cheaper.

There are a lot of startups that have banged out the basics in a few months. The are getting mentioned all over in the threads under this article. But the basics aren't good enough. Heroku looks simple, but does a lot, and pretty much does it all right. Their documentation alone is amazing and it would take more than a few months to create docs of the same quality.

Yuuup. That is the genius of Heroku. They make almost everything very simple and the tougher stuff relatively easy to understand and configure. All of that took many many years of iteration and refinement, which is why the competitors are going to take awhile to get there.

> You could even just be a layer on top of AWS and probably make profit from not many users, as long as you're cheaper.

Isn't Heroku exactly that?

Heroku is not _the only thing that just works for standard monolith web apps_. Plenty of others in this space, like netlify, vercel, firebase, etc. I don't know how they all compare to each other, I don't use any of them.

Netlify and Vercel are great, but they're limited for deploying backends. You're limited to a FaaS paradigm with the languages they support, and if you need a database you'll need to host it somewhere else. It's a long ways from the flexibility of running arbitrary containers + a managed database that's easy to connect to.

Most of those others don’t offer traditional compute. And “functions” have a lot of limitations, and a pain to work with locally.

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