[okfn-labs] Heroku as a deployment platform for OKFN apps?

Tue Aug 7 09:01:11 UTC 2012

On Sun, Aug 5, 2012 at 3:55 PM, Tom Oinn <tom.oinn at okfn.org> wrote:
> On 5 August 2012 15:42, elf Pavlik <perpetual-tripper at wwelves.org> wrote:
>
>> for PaaS solutions Platform-as-a-Service lately i came across this OPEN stack:
>> http://nodester.com/
>>
>> i looks like node.js only but it seams that they share all their code, which one can't say about Heroku or Nodejitsu :(

Just to say that I'm a big +1 on Heroku for hosting smaller OKF
applications. AnnotateIt is now running on Heroku, and a number of
other bits and pieces (taxman.openspending.org, ok-api.com) are as
well.

As for the open platform/closed platform debate; I think this is a bit
ridiculous. As Tom, I consider the openness a second-order concern.
Attempting to put a 7 month old Node-only platform and the largest
polyglot PaaS provider in the world on equal footing seems a bit silly
to me =).

In terms of "lock-in", there is none. From the perspective of your
application, Heroku requires you describe how to run it in a
Procfile[1] and load config variables from the application environment
(which is advocated by the 12 Factor App anyway --
http://www.12factor.net/). That's it. Is replicating that spinup
environment on your own server really that hard?

-N

[1]: A de-facto open standard, with extant open source tools that
parse them: https://github.com/nickstenning/honcho