However more than one person has mentioned to me that its not a suitable platform to scale and that eventually we will run into issues. I do notice that they have quite a few outages in the past few months, but I have no benchmark really to compare to running say direct on AWS.
Does anyone here have any experience scaling relatively large apps (say dozens of dynos) on Heroku? Or perhaps mission critical apps? Did you run into any issues? Or share these concerns?
As background we are running a B2B business with a few different websites and mobile backends. Various languages/frameworks. There is a transactional component. Relatively low RPS.
Overall no issues and I would definitely recommend them.
Only 20 dynos? I assumed Heroku could scale to hundreds of dynos per app deployment, as they assign a random local port to every dyno.
You could create a second app, but in certain cases, that violates their terms of service, where you're not allowed to use many deployments to act as a single webapp.
I don't actually remember but I did the test on my own Heroku apps now and with Performance-M dynos (the ones we were using) we were looking at $5000+/month.
To be fair the most expensive things were the add-ons; we were spending over $10000/month for those.
Yeah we definitely are. Labor and just plain hassle. It's great to be able to deploy in seconds, rollback easily. Of course its possible to set that up on AWS too - just in practice its always far more complicated than it seems.
The billing is very easy to understand, which is nice. Ive seen AWS billing spiral out of control, yet to experience that on Heroku (touch wood).
- Dokku: a Docker-based Heroku clone, self-hosted (cheap!), compatible with Heroku build-packs, easy migration.
- Firebase: Google's answer to an all in one deployment solution, scales really well, fairly cheap too.
My view is; Heroku is a great option it's probably the fastest development cycle you could possible get. Instead of preempting scaling problems, stick with what you have, then migrate slowly to something bigger IF it becomes an issue.
Cheers - Yep that was our thinking too.