What are the alternatives to Heroku? I'm looking for something that makes it easy to deploy and launch services. http://deis.io looks promising but it isn't production ready yet.
I literally just discovered Dokku (https://github.com/progrium/dokku) yesterday - a "Docker powered mini-Heroku in around 100 lines of Bash". You can roll your own PaaS infrastructure on your own VMs.
It took a few hours, but I was able to get my Heroku-based Rails app up and running on a Dokku droplet (to be fair, the most time-consuming part was getting the SSH keys right and figuring out that I needed a domain name - e.g., couldn't just set it up with a droplet's IP address - at least not with the DigitalOcean tutorial's instructions: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-use-...).
Serious, non-sarcastic question: So now you have your own mini Heroku on your own VM somewhere. Is the probability of downtime now smaller than it was on heroku? It seems to be it would be higher...
Yes, but now you can at least plan/schedule downtime according to your particular needs, and unscheduled downtime is at least a little more transparent to you. Sounds like that's what the original article wanted, in any case.
That's a legitimate benefit, although I was suggesting it's offset by the greater chance of something going wrong when you are managing your own servers, especially if you're not an expert sysadmin. I would assume Heroku instances are secured better than a box you're locking down yourself.
If you have a Rails App, you should consider Ninefold.com. You deploy direct from Github (or your Git Repo) and can have a VPS in the same security group if you need a utility box.
Depends on your use case. Advantage is around performance, and that you don't have to focus on the devops part of deployments that Capistrano requires. You get full access to servers & free SSL for rails apps. Strong engineering support.
Deis has quite a few successful deployments in the wild. Most of the work being done today is around automated testing, platform hardening, HA/failure modes, etc. A stable release is not far away.
Deis is for software teams who need to operate their own servers (for a variety of reasons). If you're a "regular developer with little real world Ops experience", I personally recommend sticking with Heroku or equivalent hosted services despite the occasional outages.
seriously, don't host your own PaaS. It simply add more complexity into the game. When things went wrong, you have no clue how to bring the PaaS back at the first place.
Learning how to secure your servers and scale your app is not an overhead, it is a competence compared with those who don't.
