Heroku is our genie in a bottle.
Overall Satisfaction with Heroku
We are a mobile data collection company. We host the server component of our application and our customer data through Heroku and its plug-ins. As such, it is the technological backbone of our company. As we are a small company, we do not have sufficient resources to manage our own server infrastructure - Heroku fills this role nicely. It allows us to easily scale our resources, up or down, to meet customer demand. It offers plug-ins that help expose the issues customers are having, and help gather and report metrics for determination of ROI.
Pros
- Very low (or no) cost initially for full functionality. Great for a start-up.
- Highly scalable. Adding computing power to an environment, or creating a new one, takes seconds.
- Plug-ins. A wide variety of plug-ins exist for a variety of purposes: data storage, error reporting/logging, metrics gathering, backup and many more.
- Simple. Get up and running in a couple of hours. Documentation is available for all tasks.
- Seamless integration with Git, a quick Git push and your server is updated instantly.
Cons
- Heroku does not support .NET, only Ruby, Java, Node.js, Python and a few others
- Heroku can get very expensive if very powerful hardware is required. Not all plug-ins are free; the monthly cost can easily creep up.
- The potential for downtime increases as more plug-ins are used, if you're not careful in how you bring everything together.
- Heroku seamlessly connects you to the plug-ins you use via user accounts for those plug-ins' web sites; however in some cases, such as Mongo HQ, Heroku creates the account for you and it can be difficult to gain access to the plug-in directly if needed.
- Increased employee efficiency. There is no IT infrastructure on site that must be managed. Rolling out new servers for customers is nearly instantaneous. Plug-ins supply functionality that might otherwise have to be manually built. Changes can be pushed to server code in seconds to address immediate customer concerns.
- Faster path to proof-of-concept. As a start-up, it is critical to be up and running with a product as quickly as possible.
- Increased responsiveness to customer issues. Plug-ins provide insight into problems, and seamless Git integration facilitates a timely fix.
- Faster customer on-boarding. Customer trials are up and running in literally minutes.
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