Surprisingly not as much as I'd thought when they took it over. They just never adjusted pricing to remain competitive. The experience is still some of the best you can get for RoR apps. But nobody in their right mind deploying a new application today would look at their insane 10 year old dyno pricing and be like - yup - reasonable
in fact, if you actually look at the historical timeline, many of the things we think of as core to developer experience only were released after salesforce acquisition.
I think even multiple buildpacks at once only came a couple years after acquisition.
Possibly they were in the pipeline before acquisition, sure.
But I'd agree, heroku is still a better DX than almost any competitors, although it's features and pricing have really stagnated. So better DX as long as you don't need any features it doens't have. But it hasn't really been 'ruined' in any way, it just started appearing frozen in amber some years ago.
The new 'fir' platform is promissing, before that I didn't really know that any actual development was taking place in heroku, but it's a big move, modernizing things and setting the stage for more. Including slightly improved resource-to-pricing options. We'll see if it all works out...
We got rid of all Rails apps (that needed a backend). We've moved our Postgres databases to Neon, and run our docker containers on Google Cloud Run (these are containers that don't need to run 24/7, we're paying just a few cents each month, also cold starts are much faster and more reliable than on Heroku).
>> and what did you use to manage git push deployments, setting env vars to replicate the heroku features?
Yes Digital Ocean did all this, they were very feature-close to Heroku. We have over time migrated everything stable/prod to AWS just because AWS has more products and hence you have everything in one place inside a VPC (e.g. vector db)
For Replit, i'd use it for anything I can in early-stages. It helps to prototype ideas you are testing. You can iterate rapidly. For PROD we'd centralize onto AWS given the ecosystem.
> and last q :-) re AWS - once you moved there, did you use something like elasticbean or app runner? or did you roll your own CI/CD/logging/scaling...?
We started with Lambdas because you can split work across people and keep dependencies to a minimum. Once your team gels and your product stabilizes, it is helpful to Dockerize it and go ECS, that is what we did. Some teams in the past used EKS but IMHO it required too much knowledge for the team to maintain, hence we've stuck with ECS.
All CI/CD via Github --> ECS. This is a very standard pipeline and works well locally for development also. ECS does the scaling quite well, and provides a natural path to EKS when you need the scale bigtime.
For logging, if I could choose I'd go Datadog but often you go with whatever the budget solution is.
