Heroku is a “Platform As a Service” (PaaS) product, which we could deploy our entire Digital Collections application on.
Currently, we deploy to “self-managed” AWS (Amazon Web Services) resources. The current approach is not long-term sustainable with the termination of the Systems Administrator position who took care of managing the AWS resources.
Heroku is one option for paying for a more expensive platform that will do for us some of the things the Systems Administrator position used to do.
Heroku is a significant cost – we estimate the monthly cost for our application will be $660-$1240/month. This is mostly on top of our existing infrastructure costs, it doesn’t replace very much of them. However, this is still significantly less expensive than an FTE.
….
Pro
Eliminate need for local skillset and time to manage AWS resources directly. This is the main motivation for heroku. We would no longer need to maintain the ansible playbook at all. We would no longer need a “management”. We would still be managing our S3 buckets directly in AWS, and maybe some other minor simple services, like
SES
for email delivery.Heroku is a popular and high-quality product. It’s feature set, developer UI, documentation tend to be very good, and we found this true in our testing. It’s been around for a while, has many customers (often startup/ecommerce), specifically including other Rails apps, and is generally considered a top-of-the-line service.
Heroku has no contract. And all billing is pro-rated to the minute. If we ever choose to shift our infrastructure yet again, we can switch at any time.
Con
cost
some loss of flexibility/customization
some developer tasks are slow
heroku maybe stagnating a bit under current management.
infrastructure-as-code
Cost Estimate Detail
Component | Low-end/month | High-end |
---|---|---|
Web workers
Staging: 1 standard-2x dyno, at $50 | $170 | $550 |
Background workers Production:
Staging:
| $200$200 | $230 |
Database | $100 | $100 |
Redis | $30$30 | $60 |
Solr | $40 | $80 |
Autoscaling hirefire.io. $15/month, or $25/month with “overclocking”. | $15 | $25 |
Logging Papertrail, not entirely clear what tier we need for our traffic, we’re guessing the $16 or $30 plan. | $16 | $30 |
Sub-total | $571 | $1015$1075 |
Add 10% 15% margin Hard to estimate costs including:
| $57$85 | $101$161 |
TOTAL: | $628$656 | $1116$1236 |