Blog We are very far from a better Heroku for production apps in a hyper cloud
Published on: March 22, 2021
2 min read

We are very far from a better Heroku for production apps in a hyper cloud

GitLab is building Heroku for production apps in hyper clouds, integrated into your DevSecOps workflow: The 5 minute production app.

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Update: This post does not live up to its original title We are building a better Heroku. It shows my own personal experience and reflects poorly on competitors. I am sorry about that.

It should have emphasized the building part, we're just starting. The current 5 minute production app doesn't hold a candle to Heroku at the moment. It should have made it clear the goals is to improve the speed with which you can configure a production app, not a development app. Development apps on Heroku are already close to perfect. The examples in this post are contrived since it talks about a development app, as rightly called out by Heroku people. It should have gone into why hyper clouds might be preferable. It should have talked about state, we made a small improvement in this MR but we should have done the planned work and made one post out of it.

We are very far from a better Heroku for production apps in a hyper cloud.

Creating a web application has become very convenient and easy. You’ll start in your local development environment, run a dev server and verify the changes looking good. At a certain point, you want to share it with your friends on the internet. A service or server?

Use Heroku

I have been a backend developer in the past 20 years. Web development is often fighting with Javascript and CSS. Especially Heroku as a deployment platform is a new area for me.

Let's start with creating an account, login, and follow the web instructions to create a new app in the documentation.

Let’s try a fun demo, a battleship game to learn Javascript on the client and NodeJS on the server.

$ cd ~/dev/opensource
$ git clone https://github.com/kubowania/battleships
$ cd battleships

Test it locally, optional.

$ npm install
$ npm start

Install the Heroku CLI, on macOS with Homebrew.

$ brew install heroku/brew/heroku

$ heroku autocomplete

This opens a new browser window to login. Lets create an app.

$ heroku create
Creating app... done, ⬢ nameless-mountain-48655
https://nameless-mountain-48655.herokuapp.com/ | https://git.heroku.com/nameless-mountain-48655.git

The CLI command adds a new Git remote called heroku where we need to push into.

$ git push heroku main

remote: 

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