The best place I know to deploy a brand new Rails app
Updated August 13, 2019
The best place I know to deploy a brand new Rails app
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Heroku
Heroku has both, a free and a paid plan. I [have] used the free tier for many years now, and it's the best platform to deploy an MVP of a Rails application, no doubt. It provides all the tools you need to deploy and manage your application in production so that you can focus on the development of your product. The paid plan is a natural choice when you validate your idea since you're used to the tools and the application is ready for the infrastructure. Both, free and paid, are excellent products.
- The tooling is simply amazing. You can deploy your application in some minutes without any prior experience with the platform.
- Their way of building applications encourage you to think about scalability and composability of your app.
- They have a big community around the platform and many add-ons written by third-parties.
- The price is not so affordable when you start growing. For small companies, needing small containers, it works quite well but for large applications, it may be too expensive.
- A lot less time spent with infrastructure tasks
- Less money spent on a staging environment. We can use the free tier with the same app on a different scale.
- A guideline to develop scalable applications in a cloud environment
Better UI and tooling
Heroku Platform Feature Ratings
Using Heroku
3 - Developers and a manager.
2 - You definitely have to have some tech skills but you don't need to go hands on in coding or server maintenance. The manager can go there and restart servers, scale instances, and do some other simple things that can save the day.
- Infrastructure management
- Application scale
- Application development
- It's just a simple application. It uses the basic of Heroku and it's works great.
- We plan to use other add-ons. Redis is the next one we're going to try.
- We think about creating new pipelines so new developers can submit code to staging and we can promote it.
Evaluating Heroku and Competitors
Yes - We were using Linode before Heroku. It's a different use case, but we decided to refactor the app to be able to use Heroku. Building and maintaining your own server takes time and effort, and we just wanted to improve the application instead of focusing on the infrastructure side of things. Heroku is great for that.
- Product Features
- Product Usability
- Product Reputation
- Prior Experience with the Product
Product features is probably the most important factor. The idea of having an immutable infrastructure was something that made a huge difference for us. We don't want to keep maintaining our own server to have the application running.
I would choose Heroku once again.
Heroku Implementation
- Implemented in-house
Change management was minimal
- Changing the application to use 12factor.net
- The application had to be written to work good on Heroku
- Making the application use less memory and CPU. It was using a big server and we wanted it to use small heroku instances
Heroku Support
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
Good followup Knowledgeable team Problems get solved No escalation required | None |
I did not have the change to talk to the support team directly but I used their writen instructions many times. I have to say that its very well written and solved my problems almost every time. They even have instructions on how to improve your application so it can run better on Heroku. In my opinion, it's one of the best I ever used.
Using Heroku
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
Like to use Relatively simple Easy to use Technical support not required Well integrated Consistent Quick to learn Convenient Feel confident using | None |
- Their command like tool is awesome. You can do almost anything there.
- Creating a new database or a new app is fantastic.
- The fact that I can deploy my application by using git push is amazing.
- If you start growing, it's hard to keep the prices low. Everything is so easy to add.
Yes - I had to check charts and do basic scaling via mobile interface and it works good. It's not a fully-featured interface but it has all the basic functions you would expect if you're in need. Nothing to complain about that.