The Heroku Platform, now from Salesforce, is a platform-as-a-service based on
a managed container system, with integrated data services and ecosystem for deploying modern apps. It takes an app-centric
approach for software delivery, integrated with developer tools and
workflows. It’s three main tool are: Heroku Developer Experience (DX), Heroku
Operational Experience (OpEx), and Heroku Runtime.
Heroku Developer Experience (DX)
Developers deploy directly from tools like…
$85
per month
Zendesk Sunshine
Score 7.5 out of 10
N/A
Sunshine is the foundation beneath Zendesk that can be used by customers to build their own customer engagement solutions. Sunshine can be configured to meet the user's business needs using its available apps, tools, and pre-built capabilities that fits the user's own systems. Sunshine uses open standards and common languages, so it’s easier to create a support platform from a modified Zendesk, that may better suit the organization's specific needs.
Heroku is very well suited for startups looking to get a server stack up and running quickly. There is little to no overhead when managing your instances. However, you'll need a background in basic DevOps or system management to make sure everything is set up correctly. In addition, it's easy to accidentally go crazy on pricing. Make sure you're only creating the server instances you need to run the base application and set up an auto-scaler plugin to handle peaks.
For growing technology-based companies, Zendesk Sunshine is the best ally to provide email and chat support. It supports various integrations and can provide exceptional service that is fully customizable for both the customer and the agents using Zendesk. It is not appropriate for small companies, and for companies with a very small customer base, it is a considerable expense after a customer base of at least 10,000 customers.
Heroku has a very simple deployment model, making it easy to get your application up-and-running with minimal effort. We can focus on our efforts the unique aspects of our application.
The robust add-on marketplace makes it easy to try out new approaches with minimal effort and investment -- and when we settle on a solution, we can easily scale it.
Heroku's support is quite good -- their staff is quite technical and willing to get into the weeds to diagnose even complicated problems.
Large price jumps between certain resource tiers (2x Dyno for $50 per month versus Performance Dyno for $250). Free Postgres next jumps to $50 per month.
Marketing/Branding to non-technical stakeholders. As the years pass, I've had to fight more to convince stakeholders on the value of Heroku over AWS.
Improve Buildpack documentation. This is one area where Heroku's documentation is fairly confusing.
Heroku is easy to use, services a ton of functions for you out of the box, and provides a means to get a software product off the ground and managed quickly and easily. The tools provide allows a small to medium size org to move very quickly. The CLI tools provided make managing an entire technical infrastructure simple.
Easy to use web based console and easy to use command line tools; deployment is done directly from a GIT repository. What more could you ask for? The one thing that keeps me from giving it a 10 is that custom build packs are almost incomprehensible. We used one for a while because we needed cairo graphics processing. Fortunately, I was able to figure out a different way to do what we needed so that we could get off the custom build pack.
Because it is a tool that we use on a daily basis and has provided confidence for the massive use that is given to it, it has also been the expected product, allowing customization and optimizing processes, saving us a lot of money and time. Definitely, the ability to track customers and the way to automate all customer support processes becomes totally easy and intuitive.
Heroku availability correlates pretty strongly to AWS US EAST availability. We had a couple of times where there was a Heroku-specific issue but not for the last 7-8 months.
I've used it for many years without facing any major problem. It's not hard at all to get used to it, it's documentation is outstanding and simple. We are close to 2020 and I don't think most of the existing companies or startups should still face old problems such as wasting time deploying code and calculate computing resources.
Due to the implementation and the few issues that ha In summary, there are few times that we have had to use this functionality, but the help that Zendesk has provided has been of another level, complying with our standards and SLAs so as not to interfere in the operation or processes.ve arisen, it is a platform that provides a fast, intuitive and tailor-made service for each user.
Be ready to pay a bit more than expected in the beginning if you're migrating from a big server. The application is probably not ready for the change and you have to keep improving it with time.
It's also important to consider that you can't save anything to the disc as it will be lost when your application restarts, so you have to think about using something like S3.
Heroku is the more expensive option for hosting compared to some of the cloud platforms we investigated, but it's worth it for us because of the plug-and-play nature of Heroku deployment. We can be up and running in a few minutes and know with precision how much it will cost us each month to run the application, unlike Amazon Web Services where you have to go to great pains to configure it correctly or else you might end up with a shocking monthly bill. Overall, spending the time to configure Amazon Web Services or one of its competitors is likely the more affordable and powerful choice, because you have control over so many specifics of the configuration. But it also requires the burden of continuing to maintain and update your AWS instance, whereas with Heroku they take care of security fixes and platform upgrades. It's a great service and we are happy to pay the extra cost for the value-adds Heroku provides.
