My primary use case of this product is for hosting Ruby applications. Probably more than half of the people at our company use Heroku for applications. I am a customer of Heroku and a Ruby programmer.
Very good for implementing new apps and pushing changes
Pros and Cons
- "It's easy to push a change and to deploy new things."
- "Heroku doesn't support Docker images on the CI infrastructure."
What is our primary use case?
What is most valuable?
I like the operations of the product because it makes it easy to push a change and to deploy new things. We trust the store for add-ons, they are pretty good with some solutions like storage or login add-ons.
What needs improvement?
They used to have MongoDB add-ons, but currently I think they've stopped and I'm not sure why. There is an issue because Heroku supports Docker container images, but not if you're using the continuous integration infrastructure. I really think Heroku should support Docker images on the CI infrastructure. For now, you cannot use those images and have to use the certified ones they provide for continuous integration and continuous delivery.
They have a free plan but it only provides three hours of service, after which you have to switch to a pay plan. It's when you start to scale the application it becomes costly. There should be more scalability options for storage. It would be nice to have more official stacks, to try and support more languages to stack officially.
For how long have I used the solution?
I've been using this solution for eight years.
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What do I think about the stability of the solution?
There are some stability issues from time to time.
How are customer service and support?
The technical support isn't bad. The response time could be improved but I last contacted them some time ago when they were still using email and didn't have a direct chat option. It was either email or on a forum. It's probably improved since then.
How was the initial setup?
Deployment time depends on the type of applications you plan to use. Deployment usually takes less than three minutes.
What other advice do I have?
I would recommend this solution. It's very good for small organizations with low traffic that don't need a lot of storage. If you need more storage, you should use an extra add-on or connection like Amazon.
I would rate this solution a nine out of 10.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
Public Cloud
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Developer at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Good host for nodejs, but not the cheapest solution
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Engineer at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
Consultant
Dec 4, 2013
Some insights into PaaS market
Platform as a Service is a one of the GROWING sector of cloud computing. PaaS basically help developer to speed the development of app, saving money and most important innovating their applications and business instead of setting up configurations and managing things like servers and databases.
Other features buying to use PaaS is the application deployment process such as agility, High Availability, Monitoring, Scale / Descale, limited need for expertise, easy deployment, and reduced cost and development time.
Major forces driving the PaaS
- Pay as you Go
- Low start up cost
- Leave the plumbing to expert
- PaaS handles auto scaling/descaling, Load blancing, disaster recovery
- PaaS manages all security requirements
- PaaS manages reliability, High Availability
- Paas manages manay third party addon’s for you
Barrier to PaaS adoption?
- Less Control over Server and databases
- Have to be expert to mange security controls and audits
- Costs will be very high if not governed properly
- Premature and dobious in current day and age
Major PaaS providers are Heroku, Jelastic, and Engine Yard. When we talk about revenue, The global PaaS market is estimated to grow from $1.28 billion in 2013 to $6.94 billion in 2018 at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 32.54% in this period. In terms of geographies, North America continues to be the biggest market for PaaS solutions. In 2012, PaaS revenues ($1.2 billion) was the tenth of the size of SaaS ($14.4 billion), a fifth of IaaS ($6.2 billion), and just a tiny fraction of BPaaS ($84.1 billion).
PaaS has always taken a very small space in the cloud computing arena as compared to the other two segments: IaaS and SaaS. But the trend has recently shown a drift with PaaS market showing a very high growth rate in terms of revenue. Though it is still not as huge as the other two segments but now holds a significant proportion of the pie. PaaS has now been adopted by most of the big cloud computing and IT solution providers like Amazon, IBM, Google etc. as one of their main services.. Many small players have also emerged and made the market very dynamic and competitive. Application developers are benefiting from this fact resulting in more adoption and thus increasing the demand for PaaS all the more in various sectors.
We expect to see more and more application development companies choosing PaaS over IaaS or traditional Hosting, as they can then focus on driving innovation and building apps that change their interactions with customers, partners and community. It will make them free of the details of infrastructure, so they can push the possibilities of the latest technology to build great web and mobile applications.
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Engineer at a tech company with 51-200 employees
Vendor
Jul 19, 2013
How I hosted a local television contest for $2.37 on heroku
Big spender.
There’s my heroku bill after hosting the voting for a local television contest. $2.37. Over 40,000 people used the app over a period of 2 weeks.
I spent the same amount on coffee this morning.
What?! How?!
I’ve always been really interested in scaling and getting the best possible performance out of limited resources.
I had the opportunity recently to build out the voting back-end for a local television contest. Projects like this are fun because I had the flexibility to try out something new and a lot of people would be using it.
The Stack
I wanted to build an API to handle the voting and get the best performance out of it. Usually I’d use Sinatra for this, but this time I chose to try out Goliath, which is a non-blocking Ruby web server for building APIs. I also used Grape since it would make writing the API even easier.
I hosted it on Heroku. My initial goal was to see if I could keep it to only 1 dyno (more fun with a challenge).
If you’re not familiar with Heroku, a dyno is the equivalent of a small virtual server with 512mb of memory. They also give you your first dyno for free. So all I ended up paying for was the postgres basic database add-on.
Stress Test
Before releasing it, I did some stress testing with Siege. I couldn’t have this app failing when it went live.
212.45 transactions per second.
On only 1 heroku dyno.
WOW GOLIATH IS FAST.
Each transaction was a single GET request, that hit the database (postgres) and returned the count of contest votes. Postgres was probably the slowest part of each request. I could optimize even further by caching with memcached. Maybe next time.
The 200+ transactions per second was way more speed than I needed for this app. And much more than I expected to get out of a single dyno.
I knew that the traffic for this app would be pretty sporadic. Highly dependent on when it was mentioned on TV. Without Goliath, I would have needed to use more dynos to account for the spikes in traffic. But with the performance I was seeing out of Goliath, I knew it could handle the peaks with just 1 dyno.
See the details of the Seige test here.
If you’d like to try it out yourself, the app I used to run this contest was a modified version of Mathy Poll. Which is open source and you can grab it on github.
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Tech Lead Javascript Full Stack at a tech services company
It has improved our deployment speed without requiring time to configure some servers
Pros and Cons
- "Valuable for us was the fast deployment. This means the time to market is improved without pain for developers."
- "We don't find the pipelines intuitive. The user experience could be better. Having to set up multiple apps, then a pipeline, seems like an overkill on the amount of work to do."
Full Stack Web Developper, Freelance & Entrepreneur at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
Consultant
Jun 22, 2016
My story about going from being a fan of Heroku to leaving Heroku
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Heroku's support is very poor.