Heroku vs EngineYard: which one is more worth the money?

Question

I looked at it on Google, but wanted a bigger opinion before I dedicated myself to any service. Has anyone had experience with (or possibly both) services? Are there any advantages or disadvantages that stand out for none? Special areas of interest:

• Security
• Sustainability
• Scalability.
• Price

Answer 1

I assume that you are talking about the hosting of Engine Yard EC2, and not about the full service stack?

I work with Heroku and love him. For the price, Heroku is a clear winner for me. Bandwidth costs are abstracted by Heroku, which is a big win.

On the security fronts, it’s hard to say what is one of the cloud’s common criticisms. You do not have much understanding of the stack working on any service.

Heroku has invested heavily in technology to monitor and seamlessly manage application instances. Something went wrong and the instance is deleted and a new one begins. Great stuff.

As for scalability, both of them are supported on Amazon and use EC2 and EBS, therefore, they are probably almost the same in terms of raw capacity.

Answer 2

Funky

I worked for Engine Yard, so let me provide you with information about our Engine Yard Cloud service (works on AWS). I will leave you to do your own research on your other options.

• Security Every Engine Yard Cloud account is its own full Amazon account behind the scenes, which means you get complete hardware, virtual machines designed to run your application. Thus, cybercriminals using a buffer overflow with a zero day, etc. People have C Gems, Ruby, passengers, linux, etc. Access to only one account. There is no common infrastructure in the data path. We review security vulnerability reports for all elements of our stack, and you automatically receive new patches when you redeploy. You get full access to SSH for your instances and get a normal server environment when you need to install packages like Solr or Sphinx or image manipulation, etc.

In my opinion, hardware-level virtual machines are one of Amazon’s bottom lines for success and why nothing like this happened before the virtual machines matured (but I’m biased because I was a VMware guy and saw this in real time)

2. Sustainability We have a lot of experience in what you can trust and what not in Ruby / Rails components. Currently on our Do Not Deploy list there are ferret, juggernaut and awstats. Otherwise, we inherit AWS uptime because we don’t have a common infrastructure in the data path. AWS’s uptime was pretty good, but I wouldn’t just start a nuclear power plant on it. Lately, the deployment of reliability has been mixed - Amazon seems to be getting a little closer to the wind in terms of capacity utilization, so in some cases the request for capacity addition will fail and should be re-issued.

3. Scalability

   . We have great applications running on the Engine Yard cloud. Last November, Playmesh launched the number 1 iphone app, and its ability to handle it was pretty good. We even compared a small instance (4 mongrels), capable of processing 85M / Reqs per month at constant load (a very simple application). We recommend that people work in large instances, if they need a lot of disk I / O, Amazon provides better I / O throughput for large instance sizes. In any case, the addition or removal of capacity occurs literally at the touch of a button.

4. Price Starting a small copy (4 mongrels) full time for a month will cost you $ 79 on EY Cloud or 0.11 per hour (versus 8.5 cents on a bare Amazon). This includes database management, but you will pay a small amount for storage and bandwidth - that Engine Yard Cloud costs AWS. We are very confident that as soon as you reach any reasonable amount of traffic, we are the killer's business.

Let me add some more criteria that you might consider ...

5. Support → you get free community / forum support, but we also have a ticket support option, a premium support option allows your application to watch 24x7, and we will notify you when your application goes down and fix it for you if it is a supported stack , what a problem.

6. Community → Some people care about this, some people don't, but Engine Yard sponsors 2 full-time Rails members, a three-person team from JRuby and the next generation of Ruby VM, Rubinius. We strive to help make Rails and Ruby a better platform for developing web applications.

7. Automation -> you just need to watch the demo to see it in action, but it's neat. We also deploy in the beta version with the git command line, check the knowledge base to see it in action.

Answer 3

These are completely different approaches.

Heroku is a ruby ​​PaaS solution similar to the Google engine. This allows you to scale the application without system administration skills if your application fits into the ecosystem they provide.

Engine Yard is a more traditional service that gives you access to boxes and provides you with tools that make your life easier. Since this is less abstraction, it offers you more flexibility, but also requires great sys-admin skills on your part.

Answer 4

This is a pretty old thread with pretty old answers, so I thought a more recent answer might help some people.

I have a lot of experience using both Heroku and Engine Yard for some fairly large and complex web services. My company uses the Engine Jard to launch the Andromo App Maker for Android, and we use Heroku to launch the AirBop Push Messaging Service for Android. Each platform has its own unique features.

Your question is a little difficult to answer simply because most of the criteria that interest you are not distinguishing features of each platform. In any case, I will answer these questions, but I will also touch on the general philosophy of each platform and the differences in technical support, which, in my opinion, are more useful in your decision.

Security, stability, and scalability are a wash. Both services are as reliable and stable as any Amazon EC2 instance. Scalability is also realistic. While Heroku limits you to a few hundred small ones (512 thousand copies) (or now "double" small size), Engine Yard will allow you to use Extra Large with a bunch of processor and memory, but in the real world it's all about the same in the end. With Heroku, you may need to create a swarm of cheap small servers to handle your cargo, or with Engine Yard you will use several more expensive large servers. For web requests this probably doesn't matter.

Price is a factor that I can decide a little better. First of all, if you just mess around, Heroku is free. Just do not confuse that with meaning you can really run a real website at your own free level. You can not. Engine Yard gives you the chance to play with them for free, but let me talk about real-world applications. Heroku smoothes prices by charging for "dynos" (those small web servers I mentioned) and the PostgreSQL database plan. Their prices include storage, backup, bandwidth, etc., so it’s quite easy to make a mental calculation of what it costs. Engine Yard breaks the situation, and you will need to use your calculator to figure out what it will cost, but all this is presented to you before you decide to launch a new "instance".

I find that Heroku's database plans are very expensive (compared to the fact that they use an EC2 instance). They definitely make up their profit here. What looked cheap for the speakers now needs a database for $ 200-400 / month (to start getting a level of reasonable performance, you can look more like $ 800 +). I also hate the way they hide / obscure the database specifications - you will need to make a conclusion about the possibilities by going to the Amazon instance size data and looking at the "memory" that Heroku uses for the "cache".

An Engine Jard database is just any server instance you want. They are tied to the same EC2 markup as for web instances. There is no gouging. It is more transparent.

Is one cheaper than the other? Maybe, but I would not allow a few dollars to muddle your decision.

After all, I like Motor Yard for its bare metal. We need this for Andromo, since we generate and compile Android applications on the fly and have some very specific requirements. Engine Yard gives us full control over each server, Unix, SSH packages, etc. On the other hand, Herkou works very well in situations where you can abstract your application from hardware and enter into this swarm of dinosaur thinking. They do this very quickly and easily, to launch dozens in a couple of minutes. As I mentioned, we launch AirBop on the Heroku platform and automate the creation / destruction of instances using HireFire - which works very well for us, as our workload varies greatly and unexpectedly.

Another thing to consider is technical support. In my experience, Heroku's free support / support is next to useless, while Engine Yard is very good. EY, used to charge basic support, but began to include that with all their plans (plus they have a priority opportunity 24/7). I found that they really know what they are talking about.

Hope this helps!

Answer 5

I tested Bitnami, Heroku, and Engine Yard and ran serious tests against heroics, and Engine Yard and Engine Yard were definitely the winner. Heroku does some really weird things, like shutting down 250 MB processes, and their answer is that you need to manage your own memory. I saw serious spikes in performance on the hero, and it seems that sometimes processes just hang and do not restart for a minute when several network dinosaurs are working (which should not happen). Plus heroku puts processes to sleep if they are not and there is a strange problem when starting up even with multiple speakers. In addition, additional inconvenience that I could not get in the log files on the hero and find out what was happening. Having deployed the exact same code on Engine Yard and watching it scream without any funky bursts of performance, I have to say that Engine Yard is by far the winner and easiest to deploy as soon as you get your system setup. The cost is actually cheaper on Engine Yard than on the hero when you start adding web dynodes and performance is the way to go, especially if you switch to the JRuby stack. I tried to create something on the Beats, but from the fact that, as I recall, it was difficult to work. I think heroku is a good solution if you are not interested in performance or scalability and just want to deploy a simple web application that is probably easier to use than Engine Yard for this kind of thing.

Answer 6

I run critical Rails and Sinatra apps on Heroku and Engine Yard and PHP apps in the Engine Yard Cloud, and my comment is on # 2, stability. Engine Yard wins, shrinks. The reason is staff support. If your application is absolutely necessary to work, and you need help promoting it, then Engine Yard will help you, especially if you are investing in premium support. They are absolutely fantastic. Heroku is tidy when it works, but when it does not work, their support staff is nowhere suitable as helpful.

Here is an example from a few months ago when I needed to deploy a critical internal application a couple of days after receiving a request from my staff:

Continuous timeouts from an application that should never timeout (NOT "R12 Request Timeout Error")

I have many applications running on Heroku, and none of them have ever had the mysterious web operations problem that I had with this application. Just to assure you that I know what I am doing and that this is not a developers mistake. Further assurance that the same code works fine, since I moved it to Engine Yard when I could not get help from Heroku. They finally answered a few days after I needed to run the application, letting me know that I can fix performance issues in my application using NewRelic. Excellent thank you.

The way I look at this, paying for premium support from Engine Yard, costs LOT less than hiring web operations users. And I get extremely competent support from a network of people who always have specialists to consult when they don’t know. Let me repeat: Engine Yard support staff is incredibly large.

I suppose I can comment on security a bit, because at some point our SaaS application was attacked by a DDoS attack. This may not be the issue in question, but I am using it as an excuse to talk about support again. I was never attacked by a DDoS attack, and I did not even know why my servers were not working properly. They diagnosed and helped me get started on mitigation. They helped me set up some special filters in HAProxy and nginx to block the attack for a while, and it bought me enough time to set up DDoS mitigation.

... then the time came when the entire Amazon US-East-1 data center exploded and some sites went offline for several days. Engine Yard at that time only offered hosting in this data center. After a few minutes, they turned on deployment capabilities on US-West-1, and they helped all their affected customers move. Without their help, we would not be in a hurry in our prime time that night (we are SaaS for nightclubs), and we would probably lose a lot of customers because it was a night on Thursday. Great night for us. Many of the people who worked with Heroku apps that day were just SOL, but we worked immediately in California with the help of Engine Yard.

There were other times when they saved our company from a certain death. No kidding. I could keep telling stories. But you got the idea. Engine support staff is the reason I'm deploying all-new critical applications to the Engine Yard Cloud.