Item: Heroku Platform
Rating: 10
Author: Chris Barretto

Overall Satisfaction with Heroku

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Heroku as our primary hosting service for our web application. It takes care of scaling when it comes to our database size, web traffic spikes, and background jobs. Deployment and maintenance come with ease without having to worry about managing our infrastructure. We have multiple web applications that serve as our staging and production environments, and we use a tagging system that rolls out our deploys quickly. The scheduler comes in very handy to mimic cronjobs necessary to run at specific times. Without having to worry about the systems side of development, we can concentrate more on features.

Pros and Cons

Pros

On-demand scalability
Ease of deployment
Command Line Interface

Cons

Fail safe when Amazon has problems. I understand that some of the ownership is on us, but we would prefer if we didn't have to resort to another service for backup.

Return on Investment

With the easy plug and play addons, it has been no-brainers to choose services that will easily integrate with our application. Choosing Redis, MemCache, and the Scheduler all were obvious choices.

Usability

Heroku is extremely easy to use. Once in production, scalability is just as easy when it comes to managing web servers, workers, or third party services. All can be done through the command line with easy to digest reporting. You can also set up certain services to scale automatically. This is a great win especially for smaller companies that do not have a dedicated DevOps.

Support Rating

I haven't had to use support much at all. That is how easy this platform is to use. One of the challenges that we did come across were timeout requests if a request takes longer than 30 seconds, but we support was timely in their response and it turned out to be an architectural change we needed to make on our own side.

Alternatives Considered

I've had experience with using Amazon EC2 directly, Rackspace, and EngineYard. Heroku has provided the best ease of use without too much hands-on management. Outside of that, I believe it provides the most value for what you pay for. As your needs increase, the price increases, but only at the discretion of what is mandatory of the application.

Other Software Used

IntelliJ IDEA, Sift Science, AWS Backup

Likelihood to Recommend

We like to keep our web workers around 3, but often times we need to send out newsletters to thousands of users in a timely manner. In this scenario, Heroku makes it easy to crank up the workers to 20, in order to run through the distribution quickly, and immediately scale back down on success of all the jobs. This avoids unnecessary costs to have that many simultaneous resources running all the time.

Heroku Platform Feature Ratings

Using Heroku

Usability Pros and Cons

Pros	Cons
Like to use Relatively simple Easy to use Well integrated Consistent Quick to learn Convenient Feel confident using Familiar	Requires technical support

Easy Tasks

Scaling web dynos and workers
Deployment
Reporting

Difficult Tasks

Targeting R14 memory quota exceeded error and how to handle them
What to do when your slug size exceeds the max allowed.

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Easy Peezy Heroku

Modules Used