Terms of Deployment: The Process of Evaluating Hatchbox, Fly, and Render for Developers
Heroku has long been the mainstay deployment platform for Rails developers and agencies, but with several new options for hosting out there, is it still the best solution?
Jordan Burke
Senior Software Developer, Headway.io
Attendees
- Gary
| Relevancy | Interesting |
|---|---|
| ? | ? |
Notes
- Headway (consultancy)
- This talk is for deployment solutions for small teams & apps
- Hatchbox
- By rails devs, for rails devs
- Convention over configuration
- Bring your own servers if you want
- Eg aws activate ($1k credits) + hatchbox
- Handles the configuration so you don't have to
- Rails only
- From GoRails
- You can do whatever you want, but rails conventions by default
- Automatic deploy via webhooks / github
- Fly.io
- High availability servers that you put close to your users
- Bare-metal machines configured however you need
- Very responsive customer support
- Configurable environments with dockerfiles and customizable deploy process
- App-platform, not DB focused
- CLI command to deploy
- Can work with Github Actions for deployment
- Render
- Very fast setup
- Cheapest of the 3
- Want to replace Heroku as your 1-stop shop for static sites, web apps, DBs, cron, etc.
- Priced as the lowest cost option
- Has free tier
- Automatic deploy via webhooks / github
- Knowledge cost + technical cost + cost cost
- Knowledge cost
- Who has the experience
- What are the pitfalls in getting up to speed on [x]?
- How hard is it to transfer knowledge to the client team?
- Technical cost
- Is this the best use of the client's budget & trust?
- How much work is it to maintain the app on [x] host?
- How much work is needed to scale the product if it takes off?
- Cost cost
- MRSK is another option
- Look for a blog post from these guys and a notion checklist to help you choose for your app
- Heroku priced tiers haven’t changed, so really, for most clients, it works just as well as it did previously… its more of a psychological issue, wherein Heroku’s lack of free tier is an expression of a lack of commitment to give back to the community (hack-a-thons, training programs, etc), and that causes this author to want to look elsewhere.
- Recommends Render for your next free-tier Rails training program (seems closest analog to Heroku free tier)
- What would suggest you should shift from a managed db to an unmanaged db?
- Dedicated ops team
- Need to use extensions not supported by the host
- Foreign data wrappers