Hacker News Reader

Comment by mardix | Hacker News Reader

Heroku is getting hammered like crazy on HN this week

Rightfully so. They’ve been completely silent on the GitHub integration and when it might be restored. It’s also extremely difficult to migrate off of Heroku. It’s either stay in Heroku and hope it doesn’t implode further, or higher a DevOps person to wrangle K8s on GCP or AWS. It’s a nightmare and there really aren’t any alternatives to Heroku (I don’t care what anyone says about render or fly. They aren’t there yet).

Depending on your specific requirements, take a look at AWS Elastic Beanstalk, or GCP Cloud Run (some glue required for the latter). If you do end up going the DIY route, maybe take a look at Nomad before k8s, it's drastically easier. Disclaimer: i work at HashiCorp, but i've been blogging about this for years before joining (blog link in bio).

Azure App Service also...

It's odd how whenever someone on HN mentions a list of cloud providers, they will list Google, IBM, and even Oracle before Microsoft Azure, which is the #2 biggest provider after Amazon.

It's like when a parent lists their children and just "forgets" their second child.

"Oh, we don't talk about Timmy..."

To be fair, Azure has a bad reputation among non-"enterprise" folks ( the type of person who swears by IBM, Oracle, Cisco, etc.). I've only experimented with it briefly and it was underwhelming at best, and all of the things I've read and heard about it don't make me want it. Be it general slowness, really poor UI and UX, or terrible security vulnerabilities. No cloud is perfect, but Azure seems to be the least perfect of the big ones.

Totally agree that it's strange. I hate Microsoft MORE than the next guy. I will never get over the company they were in the 90's, and funding the SCO lawsuit against IBM. And I view the warm, fuzzy "Linux-friendly" Microsoft with high-levels of skepticism. That all being said, I have a couple of larg-ish, cross-departmental apps running on Azure infra, and I find their portal to be very good; a mile ahead of futzing around in AWS. (Of course, I understand that AWS was designed to be CLI-friendly first, but I don't need to deploy fleets of similar objects at a time.) So I can't fault Microsoft for Azure. I actually like it. One of my apps is a Rails app (with all the attendant nonsense) and one is the backend of a Windows-native app, and the integration with Visual Studio for deploying services to their cloud really is nice.

> I hate Microsoft MORE than the next guy.

> So I can't fault Microsoft for Azure. I actually like it.

You literally do not hate microsoft more than the next guy

We were able to migrate from Heroku to Render.com in less than a day. And they are absolutely there, plus some.

I should have been more clear. It’s not impossible because the physical act of migrating. It’s impossible because so many other platforms are missing tablestakes features (HA Postgres with auto backups as an example).

How non-trivial is your app?

React SPA front end. Hasura for GraphQL. Distributed Elixir (which Render handles brilliantly and Heroku is not even capable of). Also an old Rails app with web server & background job server.

I use RDS on AWS because I'm doing some weird stuff that Render hosted Postgres can't handle, but nor can Heroku Postgres.

It was really something special: it transcended what most software is capable of because of a lot of grit and talent.

I cried when Periwinkle was leaked: that's when the writing was on the wall and even the most optimistic of us realized we were doomed.

I appreciate the community seems to care about our story so much.

I have never used Heroku so I have no dog in this fight but it oddly seems like a weird smear campaign, esp accompanied by threads promoting it's competitors and all these weird brand new 'throwaway' accounts posting in these threads. I get that they have an ongoing issue but a month ago Jira had a multiple weeks long outage and it basically only got like 1-2 threads total that made it to the front page that I saw (one about the initial outage and one the postmortem).

It is very strange

The ongoing security incident has caused a cascading series of former Heroku employees to come out sharing their perspective. Not too strange given the circumstances.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com