Heroku (who we’ve covered here, here and here) provides provision-less hosting for Ruby applications, letting developers focus on developing. The hosting service allows developers to just push their code and it’s up in running – no worrying about running scripts, or setting up servers. Heroku recently came out of beta and now offers commercial, paid service. A few weeks ago, I had the chance to speak with Heroku’s CEO, James Lindenbaum, about their recent developments:
Sazbean: So it’s been a few months since the commercial launch, how have things been going?
James: They’re going really well. The uptake has been pretty incredible and we’re trying to keep up with it in terms of young billing systems, etc. Lots of people are finding a lot of value in what we’re providing and there’s a good mix of paying customers – some previous beta customers and some new people. Lots of people really liked our service but had a lot of questions about what the service was going to cost when it came out of beta. Now that we’ve answered that, more people are comfortable with signing up.
Sazbean: Why’d you decide to go with the tiered ala-carte pricing?
James: We spent a lot of time thinking about pricing. We tried different types of pricing with some of our beta users and got a lot of feedback. We’re in a very interesting spot. We’re a very modern, sort of next generation platform which takes advantage of the cloud. A lot of people wanted to see a usage-based, metered system – pay by the drink – and we’re able to do that because of the cloud infrastructure. On the other hand, we wanted to provide a very simple, easy way to do things – the small/medium/large idea.
So, we’re trying to satisfy both groups with a hybrid model. If you don’t want to think about it, pick based on the size of the database, choose the appropriate dynos and go. Or you can fine tune all of your performance options. But, it’s still a work in progress – it’s a good first step and we’re going to continue to work on it. It’s been very well received so far – even better than we expected.
Sazbean: What was the reaction at Railsconf in May?
James: It was pretty good. We had very good acceptance. We changed the format of Railsconf this year with 4-5 minute vinettes about different features. People really loved it and felt it provided a lot of good information. We had a lot of good questions in our product talk. We have 12 people at the company now, and a lot of good thought leaders in ruby, who were able to get out there and talk. We love conferences because it’s nice to feel the enthusiasm and energy from the ruby community – and a great opportunity to get face-to-face feedback and reactions from people.
Sazbean: What should non-technical business people know about Heroku?
James: Most of our future development will be in the add-ons section of our service. We’ll be providing functionality higher and higher up the stack in terms of application performance management, monitoring and data replication, which will be more business-value oriented and less technical in nature. We’ve checked off the low-level prerequisites and more business-value oriented features are coming. It’s as easy as ever to deploy applications using our platform. We have many people using the platform for enterprise, mission-critical applications and there are a lot of success stories where they’re either saving a lot of time or able to use a lot of agility in the development process due to our platform. We’re selling productivity, time and agility.
Sazbean: Why should business people want Ruby on Rails (ROR) used for their applications instead of other languages?
James: Exact same story here. You can be so much more productive using ROR. It’s so much faster to write a usable, useful application, and a lot easier to do things the right way on rails. With rails, out of the box, as long as you don’t do anything unusual, you have an application that just works – it spits out all the proper caching headers, provides restful resources and APIs, helps you not repeat yourself, keeps your model/view/controller logic separated – just makes it easier to write a good application.
Java lets you do things the right way, but it’s a lot of work – it’s very heavy-handed. And even with the newer stuff, it’s also not as flexible. When you want to make significant changes to your business process, you have a lot more work with Java than a language like ruby.
Php doesn’t have enough structure. I love php and wrote a lot of enterprise php applications. The newer frameworks are pretty good, but it still doesn’t get you as far as you are with rails.
.Net is similar to Java – very heavy handed, a lot more work to do things. It’s not rocket science, it just takes a lot of little elements to get things to work. And if you don’t have to do all those little things, you can concentrate on the more important things. It’s like carrying a really heavy backpack all the time – you get used to it – but one day you don’t need it anymore, so you set it down – and all of a sudden it’s incredibly liberating.
Heroku is trying to provide that same level of benefit for hosting that rails provides for development.
More of the interview in Part 2, tomorrow…..
Related posts:
- Heroku Out of Beta – Fast, Easy & Cheap Ruby Hosting
- Heroku – Technical notes
- Interview with James Lindenbaum, CEO of Heroku
Technorati tags: heroku, ruby, rails, programming, hosting, ruby on rails, ROR, web programming, agile development, web development
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The post Another Interview with James Lindenbaum, CEO of Heroku – Part 1 appeared first on Sazbean.