Heroku Is Down

https://status.heroku.com/

by pankajtanwar • 4 years ago

110 105 4 years ago

status.heroku.com

agd2• 4 years ago

I was just hit by this - can't deploy, can't sign in, and can't access logs via cli tool.

Fingers crossed everything is fixed soon.

rrjjww• 4 years ago

Hmm. I got an email yesterday saying my Heroku database was automatically upgrading, something I’ve never seen before. Maybe related?

grombear• 4 years ago

Those are pretty common. Definitely unrelated

nomilk3• 4 years ago

Did it have subject line

Maintenance is required for your database

If so, they're pretty common; almost certainly not related.

henryaj• 4 years ago

FYI it's not really "down" - Heroku apps are still up and running. But the API (and so Dashboard and CLI) are down.

aosaigh2• 4 years ago

Do people still recommend Heroku? I'm looking for a IAAS/PAAS for "simple" web apps and websites. At the moment I'm using Digital Ocean App Platform and am relatively happy so far, but I can see that it's pretty new and not very well documented.

I use AWS extensively for other projects but it's just too complex. I'm looking for somethign that ticks most of the boxes and makes it easy to deploy apps and sites without total server oversight.

jelling• 4 years ago

Yes. Pipelines is the new killer feature; super easy dev ops with review apps.

colinramsay• 4 years ago

I really like it, but I'm only using it for fairly low traffic apps. I've heard it gets expensive quickly.

BoorishBears2• 4 years ago

I had to leave DO's App Platform because either SSE or WS just wouldn't work (It's been a while but leaning towards it being SSE)

After a minute or so connections would get terminated.

pgm87052• 4 years ago

Odd. We've been using DO App Platform with Web Sockets in production for over a year and haven't had any issues.

nomilk3• 4 years ago

I begrudgingly^ recommend them.

^ begrudgingly because they nearly deleted a linearly-growing production database with a week's notice and without any forewarning or revocation of INSERTs (as their docs say should happen):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30080563

Aside from that scare, and their support being about a 6/10 (which isn't too bad, all things considered), then I'd say it's pretty damn good, it certainly abstracts away a lot of complexity.

rpicard• 4 years ago

I think fly.io is the new serious contender in this space.

yroc922• 4 years ago

I use fly.io in production. It’s very good if you’re comfortable with a CLI. However, I wouldn’t say it’s nearly as beginner friendly as Heroku. Heroku is dummy easy to get started. Netlify is about as simple too.

berkes3• 4 years ago

I'm hearing a lot of love for fly.io. But what about render.com? They are another serious contender, if I believe their own marketing (which I don't really, ever).

waffle_maniac2• 4 years ago

If only because they have faster dynos? It's way easier to get started on Heroku than any other cloud service thing. Even AWS Beanstalk is just horrible. You're constantly fucking around with configuration.

Also, get rid of Webpacker. That shit will drive you nuts.

aaronbrethorst2• 4 years ago

I'm hosting a few sites on Render and have been pretty happy with them so far.

Getting a Rails site up and running on them isn't quite as turnkey as what Heroku offers, but it still only took me a few hours to migrate one site composed of a Rails app server, Sidekiq+Redis job processor, and PG database, and that included puzzling through some lesser-explained parts of their documentation.

I really appreciate the fact that their prices scale mostly linearly, as opposed to Heroku's utterly indefensible pricing practices.

Render is still a fairly new company, which explains many of the feature gaps and lightness of their documentation, but I think they're well worth considering as a Heroku replacement. I have no regrets about making the switch.

nix23• 4 years ago

+1 for fly.io

dnilasor• 4 years ago

Haha, for what it's worth, I'm the lead for their marketing, and also an eng who took the job because I loved using Render and wanted a change from working in DevOps.

You don't have to believe me...would expect nothing less : D the product and the way we ship what our users want speaks for itself.

crcastle3• 4 years ago

My story’s similar to @dnilasor’s sibling comment except with a little twist. I’m a Dev Advocate at Render now but used to be a Dev Advocate at Heroku.

I’m very excited about the potential future of Render.

chasd002• 4 years ago

a good alternative to heroku that i use for all my personal or side projects is dokku. Think of it as an open source on-prem heroku

https://dokku.com/

wusher• 4 years ago

In my recent experience, heroku is still much easier to deploy. I've tried render.com a few times with a pretty basic rails 7 internal app and I haven't been able to get a successfully deploy.

dopeboy• 4 years ago

After 6 years on Heroku, I gave Render a try for my current startup. It's good, better than Heroku.

7sigma• 4 years ago

I've tried render as well and so far it's working well.

jessecurry• 4 years ago

I enjoy Heroku for database-backed web apps, but lean towards Vercel or Amplify if I’m hosting a single-page app or a basic website.

danjac• 4 years ago

Lots of suggestions here, my personal favorite for small apps is Dokku running on a Digital Ocean droplet. I've also heard good things about Caprover and DO apps but not tried them.

Hackbraten• 4 years ago

For simple apps and dynamic websites, I write them in Python and use Zappa [1] to deploy and run on AWS Lambda.

[1] https://github.com/zappa/Zappa

friedman232• 4 years ago

Vercel is really good, I see no reason to use heroku.

mattwad• 4 years ago

I use Vercel for the app and Heroku to host the database. I don't think you can do that on Vercel?

pc86• 4 years ago

I would try Azure - it has almost all the same service offerings as AWS, but (strictly IMO) the UI is better to work with. They do a good job hiding some of the more complex things that most people don't care about. The defaults can be annoying (e.g. you get defaulted to a $200/mo managed Postgres cluster when there is a $10/mo option available) but I just make sure to double-check pricing before creating anything and have never had an issue.

yroc922• 4 years ago

I tried out DO App Platform and it’s pretty decent. There were a few bugs I encountered. One glaring issue is the lack of static IP’s which was a must for me. They claim they’re working on it, however.

herokaithrow4• 4 years ago

I worked for them for a long time. They've been under a feature freeze and slowly but surely losing headcount for years. The engineers still there that I know have really lost any enthusiasm for the platform as a result. The engineers that originally built Cedar are probably the best I've ever worked with which is how it's been remarkably stable for so long to end-users.

According to LinkedIn they have 141 employees, down 30% in 2 years. We had nearly 400 at peak I think. They had a significant layoff in 2020.

I would not recommend using it unless Salesforce turns things around and starts investing back into the platform. If you are currently on it you should be making plans to move off of it. Ask your sales rep about "Project Periwinkle", which is intended to spin down Heroku and just make it all various Salesforce services. "Periwinkle" being a mix of purple and blue.

EDIT: I want to add that the common trope of "Salesforce killed Heroku" is not true—or at least it's not the full picture. Salesforce bought Heroku in 2010, only 3 years after it was founded. Salesforce largely built Heroku and later suffocated it through not giving us any headcount. There was a time when they cared, and if you ever saw our old office you know what I mean. I have no idea why Salesforce gave up, but us ex-Herokai debate about it a lot.

wuliwong• 4 years ago

That's a bummer. I have built a ton of nights and weekends projects using Heroku. I've even used it in my professional career getting the real estate software we were developing to get up and running with a very small team. We eventually moved to AWS but Heroku made it easy for us to just focus on the product.

barkerja• 4 years ago

Any insight into the Heroku Connect platform? We're a BIG user of this product and the only reason we have any direct dealings with Heroku.

chasd002• 4 years ago

Salesforce just released a feature called Functions (not the best name) that relies solely on Heroku based on what i see in my logs. Maybe Salesforce doesn't have big plans for Heroku but they do seem to care at least enough to release a new product on Heroku.

https://developer.salesforce.com/docs/platform/functions/ove...

xtracto• 4 years ago

According to LinkedIn they have 141 employees, down 30% in 2 years. We had nearly 400 at peak I think. They had a significant layoff in 2020.

Not very related, but this is an example of a service (maybe just for me) I've wanted to setup with LinkedIn: Given company X, find all people that work or used to work there, then get rotation statistics. You should be able to see how many people (and %) go in and in what time on average.

I know of a smallish startup (70 people) where execs (VP and C level) rotated pretty often because of the policies of the CEO (was extremely cheap). It would be a great tool to have when exploring new companies.

cactus2093• 4 years ago

At the very smallest scale for a solo developer or a team of just a couple of people it can be a good option.

Once the team grows to even 5 or 10 engineers, I'm not a big fan. The model of encouraging anybody to do a git push to send their local copy of a branch to production is a little sketchy on even a small team. IMO you're better off having an automated build pipeline with CD by that point using something like gitlab or github actions, and putting your production environment into a proper VPC, i.e. generally starting to step up your engineering practices. You can still do these things with Heroku, but at that point you need to start kind of knowing what you're doing anyway and so you lose the main benefit of Heroku that it just magically works without needing to know anything about it. In my experience by that point you're fighting against Heroku more often than not and you're better off using something that is designed to be more flexible and give you more control like Kubernetes on GCP or AWS.

enahs-sf• 4 years ago

As a solo developer, running a small instance yourself and just SSH’ing in or writing a few simple scripts to deploy is probably more worthwhile. You have to deal with the “headache” of setup but at least you know what’s going on underneath the hood.

nightpool• 4 years ago

"The model of encouraging anybody to do a git push to send their local copy of a branch to production is a little sketchy on even a small team"

Does anybody still do that for major apps these days? We've used a custom chatops bot based on Hubot for all of our deploys on Heroku for the past ~8 years, and they've recently released their own chatops solution that I've used for smaller apps and enjoyed. Using their new chatops bot is extremely turnkey—you can set it up to autodeploy from a Github branch or deploy manually, just by connecting a Github repo

bradgessler3• 4 years ago

What’s annoying about Heroku and AWS is they made it an “either/or” situation that I don’t see a lot of people challenging.

My ideal would be a service like Heroku that makes it easy to evolve. When the team is between 1-5 people iterating rapidly towards PMF, make ‘git push’ deploy.

As the team grows and CI is needed, make it easy to decouple git from the deployment and support multiple envs. This is where Heroku stops.

Finally when the app becomes larger and more complicated, it should be easy to spin up resources in AWS (or whatever cloud) behind a VPC. Migrating the heroku-like PaaS into this VPC should be easy.

bastawhiz2• 4 years ago

Absolutely not. I was a heroku proponent for many years, but the sheer stagnation and lack of bug fixes (for the price they charge) is entirely unacceptable. Frequent outages. Unpredictable performance. Weird reliability issues, and support only tells you to install New Relic and move along.

Check out Render or fly.io. I use beanstalk on AWS.

zapinek22• 4 years ago

Codenow.com

Lmk if you need enterprise edition at jarda@codenow.com

giglamesh• 4 years ago

There is no free tier and the free trial is only 14 days?

fulafel• 4 years ago

AWS Copilot is quite good in many respects, a bit like a reboot of AWS Beanstalk built on newer low level services, and has a good CLI/console dev experience if that floats your boat.

sciurus• 4 years ago

I haven't used it, but on the surface AWS seems to be finally targeting Heroky's simplicity directly with App Runner.

https://aws.amazon.com/apprunner/

hankchinaski2• 4 years ago

I completely agree. i am also on Digital Ocean App Platform. It works fine so far. I was considering trying Cloudflare Workers + Cloudflare KV as an alternative as it seems way cheaper, albeit slightly different. It has some limitations, like only use Typescript and non relational db and a bit of a vendor lock-in but it seems very interesting proposition and offer very generous quotas. AWS/GCP/Azure seem too complex and overpriced for small side projects. The alternative is going down the VPS route but it's more costly to maintain

shakezula• 4 years ago

I have a hard time figuring out the right balance for my side projects, too. I've used Heroku for a long time, and it used to be the best offering period, there wasn't any competition about it, but lately offerings like Render and Vercel have been compelling alternatives.

bradgessler3• 4 years ago

I’ve been bugging https://fly.io/ and https://render.com to pay closer attention to making it as easy to spin up applications as Heroku makes it. Thread at https://twitter.com/bradgessler/status/1482045147625918467

Fly has been the most responsive. They have a PR open at GitHub and are working towards “just run flyctl launch and you’ll have a rails app running”. Check that out at https://twitter.com/bradgessler/status/1488786188882178053 or comment on the PR at https://github.com/superfly/flyctl/pull/783#issuecomment-102...

If I was a betting man, I think they’ll be there in the next few weeks for Rails + pg. They said full auto-Redis provisioning could come later.

If you build Phoenix apps, fly is going to be your bet. The creator of Phoenix works there and he made deploying Phoenix apps super easy.

Render said “they have some ideas”, but I haven’t heard back from them.

I really hope more companies pay attention to making deployments as easy as Heroku. Most stop short of that and think it’s OK to ship basic building blocks with huge README files for “Setting up your first ____ App”. That’s fine for a first step, but hosting companies should seriously look at their setup docs as manual steps that they should automate.

I still recommend Heroku because it’s just so damn easy. Developers can focus on shipping their apps and worry much less about DevOps. It’s amazing for proof-of-concepts, but they are stupidly expensive when your app starts scaling based on how they price. I’m really hoping Fly, Render, and lots of other hosting companies up their game and compete so we have more choice and ultimately lower prices.

anurag3• 4 years ago

Thanks for pushing us at Render. We want to make sure we build it right (updating the dashboard without too much special casing is a bit more involved than a CLI update) but we're certainly on it, especially now that we have managed Redis.

rcarmo• 4 years ago

Have a look at https://github.com/piku (it started out as a quick hack, is still useful to me after many years).

yesdocs• 4 years ago

Heroku is crap. You can’t deploy without dropping requests, it’s tools are lame and any serious monitoring costs you big $. ‘It just works’ is a layman’s response to the fact that it really doesn’t.

agd2• 4 years ago

For starting new projects it does 'just work'. Super simple to set up and maintain.

Yes, it might not work as well when you start to get more traffic, but for getting setup I have no complaints (aside from this downtime!).

pythonaut_16• 4 years ago

I wouldn't call it crap. It certainly has limitations, but for many projects those are an acceptable tradeoff for lower friction. For many projects those limitations cost less than not launching the project at all.

Heroku definitely has a ton more competition these days though. Containerization has really encroached on their main value proposition. Fly.io, AWS ECS and Fargate, Managed Kubernetes, even just Docker on a VPS mostly don't require much more effort than Heroku.

nomilk3• 4 years ago

I'd be interested to hear recommendations on what a heroku user should try instead? (particularly for rails/postgres stack, but in general also).

dtech2• 4 years ago

Netlify or Amplify if you want simpler. Managed k8s (e.g. AWS EKS + Postgres RDS) will quite soon be worth it if you need more power than Heroku.

dtech2• 4 years ago

It absolutely has its limitations, but you can certainly enable rollover to prevent dropping requests [1]

Note that the default was chosen in a world where it wasn't natural that 2 versions of an app could be running side-by-side harmoniously, e.g. due to database evolution.

[1] https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/preboot

hankchinaski2• 4 years ago

I used to be on heroku but to be honest it’s extremely expensive for what it provides. Same value for money I moved to digital ocean app platform and I am very happy with the service.

ecedeno2• 4 years ago

One thing to worry about with DO App Platform is egress costs. They charge more than AWS!!

aosaigh2• 4 years ago

Can you elaborate? Is that on files served from the App Platform CDN itself or files that are hosted on Digital Ocean Spaces? I'm trying out App Platform for a few projects at the moment

CPLX• 4 years ago

Good thread timing. I was literally just about to deploy a toy proof of concept rails app this afternoon and start having some people on my team play with it.

Good excuse to try something else instead. What's everyone's favorite for semi-idiot-proof one click style rails app deployments these days?

pgm87052• 4 years ago

I use Dokku for all my toy or side projects. Super easy to set up on a Digital Ocean droplet, and depending on the size of your droplet and the memory footprint of your app, you can deploy and run many apps on the same server.

abadger9• 4 years ago

I deployed a personal app to Heroku when i was quite young and Heroku was barely a company. I lost access to the email that was tied to that heroku account, to their credit, the app is still deployed (and quite embarrassing to look back on). I've tried contacting support to remove the app multiple times but they've refused citing "security" concerns.

devoutsalsa• 4 years ago

I like Heroku, haven’t used it much lately.

Out of curiosity, does Cloudflare offer enough functionality to cover one’s computer, database, and file storage needs? I know they’ve been expanding their offerings, but I don’t know if they offer enough to host a full blown web app.

sudhirj2• 4 years ago

My biggest beef with them is that they’re so feature frozen that they threw a billion person country off rather than update billing.

India recently passed a credit card tokenisation law that needs changes in an invoicing system, and Heroku sent me an email saying my 10 paid production apps would all just be shutdown because they’d rather just drop support for Indian customers.

I happened to be working at Fly.io at the time, so had a clear alternative, but the way Heroku handled this really sucks.

aerovistae• 4 years ago

Well, if it was going to be a large, time-consuming, costly upgrade that was only for one country - and if they had a real minimum of customers from that country - it's a fairly sensible business calculation.

japhyr2• 4 years ago

The problem is, this fits the pattern with what Heroku has been doing for years now. Whatever works and keeps working, they're happy to steer you towards. Whatever isn't working, they're just kind of hands up in the air letting things stagnate.

sudhirj2• 4 years ago

That's the kind of cost-benefit analysis that's lazy on Heroku's part though, and doesn't properly track brand damage or even attempt to think about second order effects. The country has a huge developer population, massive internet penetration among the entire economic range and fast moving fintech scene. This is the kind of cost benefit that signals an inability to change or adapt rather than a projection of the real benefits.

Stripe handled it transparently, as did many other payment gateways — the changes were somewhat in the vein of European 3DS / SCA changes anyway, and it's quite possible that the EU will adopt similar measures — not to mention that adding flexible invoice payment options allows customers to use many more international payment methods.

The sad thing is instead of seeing the benefits the change would unlock it looks like Heroku focussed on the cost of doing it and gave up.

yunohn• 4 years ago

they’d rather just drop support for Indian customers.

Heroku and Firebase used to be my go-tos for quick deployments - disappointing to see them fall so far after acquisitions…

I’ll check out fly.io - been meaning to amidst their top-notch blog posts.

spookthesunset• 4 years ago

That India banking regulation really threw a wrench in a lot of businesses. Our company had to do a mad scramble to support it, and what we came up with was a worse customer experience than before. It will take some time for us to make billing as easy to use as it was before the regulation kicked in.

bastawhiz2• 4 years ago

I work at Stripe. We hustled too. But frankly, the scope of PDE that needs to be located in India is pretty small. If I was a company whose whole business was making it easy to deploy and manage software, I would be thoroughly embarrassed that I couldn't spin up a twelve factor app with a year of notice.

didip• 4 years ago

Is Heroku still relevant in the public cloud market?

Their price point and compute power looks very uncompetitive.

zapinek22• 4 years ago

Have you tried codenow.com? That's a piece to checkout, they got free cluster trial, basically automates everything

rsanheim• 4 years ago

Sad to see Heroku falling by the wayside.

It was truly revolutionary when it came out, and I have yet to see anything that makes it so dead simple to spin up a side project or just a 'live mockup'.

It still works great for my team for review apps on every pull request, which is great for live testing and avoiding contention around a staging server.

quartz• 4 years ago

Vercel kind of feels like Heroku's spiritual successor.

sergiotapia2• 4 years ago

render.com is the successor to Heroku I feel. Really simple to use and get started but with realistic use cases and pricing baked in.

jaequery• 4 years ago

Their pricing is what turns me off most. Just to run an instance with 1gb of memory is like $50/month. Anything over than that next pricing was like $250/month, no thanks, I’ll manage my own instances.

Marchooch• 4 years ago

Heroku isn’t running single tenant resources and has an abstraction as a PaaS that’s in between the cloud provider entirely. MedStack Control runs independently of the clusters it provisions directly upon Azure, and are all single tenant, so outages to MedStack don’t disrupt cluster availability; only management.

Heroku Is Down

Related Stories