DEV Community

Discussion on: Recipes for scalable, cost effective web apps in Heroku with npm, NodeJS

 
spygi profile image
Spyros Gi • Edited

Thanks for the clarification. Yeah, Heroku is a Paas (Platform as a Service) like GAE. I chose it over GAE because it gives you more freedom on what you run on top of it so not so strong of a lock-in effect (at the cost of having more to setup of course)

Theoretically you could work with serverless functions and it might make sense from a cost perspective for the very first MVP (<100 users) but I don't think they are the right candidate for this kind of application and setting them up is not trivial either (e.g. you still need to persist their output or ping them periodically to avoid cold starts so you need a "backend" anyway). I am not so much into the details but there are also other limitations like 1000 concurrent executions (at least in AWS).