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Comment by craigkerstiens | Hacker News Reader

Bit of a shameless plug, but we just announced official support yesterday on Heroku (https://blog.heroku.com/archives/2015/7/7/go_support_now_off...), graduating from our community supported buildpack. We allow you to pick pretty freely which databases and other services you want to you use from our add-ons. We also have a free tier.

Finally if you do give it a try would love to hear any feedback you have.

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Personally, I don't put stuff on Heroku because it's costly and inefficient.

Let's say I have a bunch of pet projects and applications I want to run (blog, IRC bouncer, some kind of photo management). They take negligible CPU most of the time and ~128MB RAM each.

If I throw these on Heroku, I have to pay $7/each for 3 separate dynos, for a total of $21. Alternatively I can pay nothing but deal with my stuff being down 25% of the time.

If I throw them on Vultr or DigitalOcean, I pay $5 for a 512MB (768MB on Vultr) box and they all run happily ever after.

Heroku forces me to buy 4x the resources I actually need, which is a huge waste. It'd be nice to share my pool of resources so that if I use 384MB of RAM, I pay for 384MB of RAM or at least only pay for 512MB.

I know it's very unlikely you care about users like me and that's totally fine, I know things like this aren't particularly lucrative. Just thought I'd mention it since you asked about feedback.

Heroku isn't selling blank VMs, though. It's a value-added service -- you don't have to configure servers, build docker images, manage logging, wire up routes, inject service dependencies ... it goes on and on.

PaaSes are expensive if your time is free.

I work for a company which donates enormous engineering resources to an opensource Heroku competitor (Cloud Foundry). As a note, Cloud Foundry lets you specify exactly how much RAM you want to use. You can try it on Pivotal Web Services[0] (hosted by my employers) or BlueMix.

[0] https://run.pivotal.io/

Hey, great! I've been using Heroku for a Node apps and was sad that deploying Go apps required a custom buildpack. I'll check it out!

Except automatically deciding what buildpack to use, what does it offer more to have official buildpack ?

I mean, when you know about Heroku's buildpacks you have access to all of Heroku raw power.

Buildpacks are definitely worth understanding to get the most out of Heroku, but not having official support is a negative. Also, I can't recall what it was but I did check into the community buildpack and it seemed like more effort than it's worth.

That said, I didn't take a very close look so maybe it was easier than I anticipated!

Another shameless plug -- Go has been an officially supported buildpack on Cloud Foundry for more than a year, based on the same buildpack which Heroku have now adopted as official.

You can try it on Pivotal Web Services or BlueMix.

Disclaimer: I was seconded to the Cloud Foundry buildpacks team for ~7 months.

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