In the fall of 2018, I decided it was time to put my application design and development knowledge to use in order to provide a modernized solution ...
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Great writeup! Wanted to share a cool thing as I have a similar workflow. Setting up a build process with CircleCI (and more recently GitHub actions) has made it a lot easier to jump into old projects and push changes without having to remember the minutia of deployment for each project, creating a consistent workflow across projects. I highly recommend it 👍
What about the price?
Yep using the Hobby plan. I did end up paying for some services in the end. I'll address how much and why in the final part of this series. But still you can do a lot for free, and then pay as you grow (tiers are at heroku.com/pricing). I know there are large companies doing things on Heroku that have custom pricing to save on costs, but I don't really know details past that.
I'm curious about this also. Though assuming the author is on the hobby tier of Heroku, it might be between $7 to $14 a month.
Heroku is really great, but at the same time it also deployed on AWS. So it's essentially moving to a "wrapper" around AWS and it has a price. I agree with almost everything but companies, in the long run, should definitely think about the coming migration. Stay long enough with Heroku and on a certain level, you're going to find yourself paying 2,3 times what you'd pay for doing it on your own.
Yes, doing things on your own takes time and effort and these are resources with a price tag so everyone should do their own due diligence.
Other than that, great post and the most important point in my view is "Developer Ability to Focus". Enabling that means everything.
AWS does offer some services like Beanstalk that helps you set up and get most of the things you described like deployments, autoscaling monitoring, logging, etc. It can take a company pretty far with relatively low effort. Food for thought.