Why I pick Heroku over AWS Lambda. But not always.
https://blog.checklyhq.com/why-i-pick-heroku-over-aws-lambda-but-not-always/
When adding a new feature to Checkly or refactoring some older piece, I tend to pick Heroku for rolling it out. But not always, because sometimes I pick AWS Lambda.
The short story:
- Developer Experience trumps everything.
- AWS Lambda is cheap. Up to a limit though. This impact not only your wallet.
- If you need geographic spread, AWS is lonely at the top.
For the long story, read the post on my "Building a SaaS"-blog
https://blog.checklyhq.com/why-i-pick-heroku-over-aws-lambda-but-not-always/
I totally agree with this for the most part. Currently, I'm on a Google Kubernetes Engine cluster which is EXTREMELY overkill. But Google gave me $20k of credit. When that credit expires next spring, I'll almost certainly move to Heroku because of the DX. I've actually considered moving anyway...
There is a third way. Check out Piku.
https://github.com/piku/piku/
Not for everyone, but a great fit for self-hosting bootstrappers.
Well, it looks nice but again you are managing your own infrastructure. The whole idea of Heroku and AWS Lambda (or serverless / FaaS) in general is that you do not manage your own infra.
Yep I hear you. I am one of the people hacking on Piku so I am biased but I can tell you that the "manage your own infra" aspect has been very low for me. There is a single script you run to set up Piku and then it's done.
Basically I pay for the VPS (just like paying for a Heroku instance) but other than that it just hums away without any intervention. It's all just
git pushand the whole idea of Piku is to reduce maintenance & deployment so you can focus on shipping code. YMMV but I would give it a try before you write it off.Also it is far cheaper than Heroku. I'm running multiple apps on a single $5/mo instance as opposed to Heroku's $7 per app.
Not disregarding anything. Piku looks great. But here are some questions for you that start popping up when running a for-profit company with customers relying on your 24 x 7 availability:
Your single $5 Digital Ocean box is suddenly a liability.
Of course, not every Indiehacker has this issue at the start. But when business takes of, you will.
Yes at scale those things become an issue.
Isn't that also the case for a platform like Heroku?
Currently I optimise for trying many experiments quickly, and for that use-case Piku is great.
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Yeah, not many companies have scaling issues. If you have, it's mostly a luxury. Doesn't mean you should ignore it, but you certainly should not optimize for it.