Item: Heroku Platform
Rating: 9
Author: Verified User

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Heroku extensively to build our products on; we make extensive use of Heroku's tooling and analytics to get software up and running with ease, and benefit from them abstracting away server instances so that we can easily scale up and down as needed. Beyond that, we also see a lot of value in a dedicated DevOps team handling issues like patching vulnerabilities, and handling underlying hardware failures – all of which would be prohibitively expensive before we really began to scale up. Heroku lets us access all that at a fraction of the price of an FTE dedicated to it.

Pros and Cons

Great APIs: Heroku's APIs are extremely useful and always improving.
Developer-friendly documentation: Heroku's docs are thorough and well-written.
Great Customer Support: Heroku's front-line support is great, and knows when to escalate directly to people working on the product.

Heroku Metrics is great, but we'd love to see direct API access (and the ability to add and customize our own metrics).
Heroku's status/downtime/maintenance notification system could be improved with better granularity to help filter irrelevant alerts.

Return on Investment

Lower up-front infrastructure costs.
Easy scalability.
Lowered development cost due to great APIs and documentation.

Usability

Heroku really sets the standard for how the usability of both the user-facing dashboard software is, as well as their CLI tools and APIs. They're predictable, well documented, and typically quite full-featured, and they've evolved considerably in the time we've been using them. That's married with great and extensive documentation, which is the final piece of the puzzle. That usability is what grabbed us initially, and it's kept us on the platform since then.

Support Rating

Customer support is typically quite high quality, with sharp front-line CS reps who are good at escalating any product issues directly to the developers working directly on the affected product. It's valuable to be able to speak directly to another programmer about an issue and not play broken telephone, and Heroku support usually manages to avoid that problem.

Alternatives Considered

OpenShift

We kicked the tires on OpenShift before deciding on Heroku, and found the platform to be much less intuitive and well-documented than Heroku. It felt like we were constantly trying to implement workarounds for esoteric platform problems, and eventually the work became too onerous. Heroku was a breath of fresh air after OpenShift.

Likelihood to Recommend

Heroku is fantastic at the beginning of a product lifecycle – in particular, because there are going to be some architecture decisions that will benefit from planning around a PaaS structure. Because of Heroku's fractional and low pricing, it's easy to start up on Heroku and scale up over time without incurring a huge up-front fixed cost.
At the other end, I'd imagine that larger organizations who have in-house staff doing DevOps might see a lot of duplication between those staff and what Heroku is doing to add value. At some point, the premium you're paying Heroku would probably prompt you to move those functions or keep them in-house.

Heroku Helps Us Get Things Done

Overall Satisfaction with Heroku