Developers migrating from Heroku
First let's start by recognizing that Heroku is an amazing PaaS that developers love. Today Heroku has 100k+ developers.
?After Salesforce acquired Heroku, they have made some product roadmap tradeoffs decisions and there are two major reasons developers still build applications on Heroku:
Four major reasons developers are looking for alternatives
Cost?
Cost is a major deal-breaker for everyone actively looking for a Heroku alternative. Heroku costs 3x-5x of an equivalent IaaS infrastructure setup. For example, a standard 1 CPU, 512 MB RAM will cost you $25/month on Heroku, whereas it is approx $5x/month on other cloud providers like Google Cloud or Digital Ocean.
This might not be a problem at a small scale application or very early startup (pre-seed to A round). But as soon as your app scales, your pockets begin feeling the heat, and that’s when most people look for alternatives, and that is when both Cloud Run or GKE become great alternatives.?
Flexibility
While Heroku is at ease of use, it takes flexibility away from you. You can’t ssh into your servers. You can’t fine-tune the OS, the container size, the firewall and so on.
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While this is not a major deal-breaker for most of the simple applications out there, but if your app is remotely complex, you can’t even start with Heroku.
Vendor Lock-in
All the easy-to-use abstractions or features Heroku provides are specific to their platform, and it's not based on open source technologies.This is one more reason why companies look for alternatives sooner than later.
There are many more reasons look for a Heroku alternative. However, costs and flexibility are by far the most significant pain points of using Heroku in production.
Lacks of Smart Data and ML capabilities
Once startups scale or large organizations scale their applications, then they start to pursue new capabilities to add on the application to slice and dice all data within the platform to improve the customer experience and/or create new product features to bring more value towards their customers.?
At this moment, developers and product managers see the need for data warehouse or machine learning solutions, and at this moment they see themselves out of option within the Heroku and unable to tap into ISVs or Cloud Providers smart analytics or machine learning solutions?
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Chief Marketing Officer | Product MVP Expert | Cyber Security Enthusiast | @ GITEX DUBAI in October
2 年Fer, thanks for sharing!
I help healthcare companies build scalable, high-quality software without the typical delays and budget overruns
2 年Fer, thanks for sharing!
Very valuable thing to know about. These should come in knowledge of everyone. Thanks for this??
Technologist and Product Leader
3 年My personal site is a very simple go app that’s mainly a static site wrapped in a go handler that deals with some special redirect and 404 logic. For $7/mo I can run on Heroku, with my vanity URL, and with certs automatically managed and renewed by Heroku. Plus I can edit my site on my phone on GitHub and it shows up live in seconds. I think it would actually be free except for the managed cert piece. I looked around a lot for different platforms and their cert management solutions, Heroku’s was the best and cheapest. Comparing raw compute cost is a red herring IMO. When you look at *everything* you need to run your app, the calculus prob sways more towards Heroku in terms of ease & cost.