back
74 comments
Python 2.7? They’re years ahead of Google App Engine!

Addendum: The previous statement is slightly tongue-in-cheek, but: (1) GAE is running a version of Python (2.5) so old, that it’s hard to get fully patched binaries of it anymore (depending on your platform); and (2) By “years ahead,” I don’t mean it will take Google years to catch up, but merely that their Python version is years old. Puzzling, given that Guido works for Google and has for years.

Second Addendum: Linked: an issue opened in 2008 pleading Google to add 2.6 support. Three whole years ago. (Ironically, perhaps, the issue was closed as a duplicate of a 2010 issue asking for 2.7 support.) http://code.google.com/p/googleappengine/issues/detail?id=75...

App Engine announced they will release a Python 2.7 runtime in several months. It's currently in their trusted tester program.
More details on 2.7 and GAE: https://sites.google.com/site/gaepython27testing/
I can confirm this. It's also very easy to switch old apps to 2.7.
I know this pain; I am forced to work with GAE every day now. And let me tell you, the only thing worse than not having 2.7's features is having un-patched bugs from as early as 2008--like one that prevents keyword arguments from being unicode strings, for instance! Seeing the other list of changes/"mandatory improvements" in child's link makes me weep all the more. I will have to start another crusade to get 2.7 support and between stuff like documentation, testing (gasp!), Django-nonrel, and HRD, I am fresh out of crusade slots.
As much as I've come to enjoy and appreciate the various start-ups whose mantra was "We're Heroku with Python/Django capabilities", it will be interesting to see which of those survive the next 8-12 months now that Heroku officially supports that stack.

It'd be a shame to see ep.io and Gondor go the way of the dodo bird, but what sets them apart now?

> ...but what sets them apart now?

As a very happy user of some of Python PaaS services [1], there are a few reasons why I don't see myself switching to Heroku:

* These services are written by our community, for our community. The principles at most of these companies are people I've known for years. I've reviewed their code; they've reviewed mine. We'd argued, commiserated, and bought each other whiskey. They've helped shape the Python/WSGI/Django ecosystems. Their tools embody the best practices from our communities because they were there when those practices were debated and determined.

This is by no means a slight on Heroku's staff: I've met people from their team, as well, and they're wicked smart, very motivated, and highly focused on delivering an awesome product. Which it is! But as a company, Heroku is going to have to do some work to get to the same level of trust as the companies that have grown organically out of our community.

* Deploying a Python stack on Heroku is something of a small pain: there are few defaults, so you're left to do most of it by hand.

Take, for example, the bits from the Heroku/Django tutorial about configuring Celery. Not a lot of work, to be sure, but it is some work, and the result won't perform well at all (it uses a database for message transport instead of something that'll perform better). On mot Python-specific PaaS offerings, a single line in a config file (or checkbox in a web UI) gets you a fully-configured, optimized, ready-to-roll Celery setup.

I'm pretty damn good at deploying Python setups. I'm not going to use a PaaS offering unless it provides similar features to a hand-rolled setup for less work/money.

* On Heroku, I'm a small fish in a large pond. I'm the weird customer doing Python, but the bulk of their cash (presumably) comes in from their Ruby customers. Deploying Python on Heroku feels rough around the edges. A trivial example is the broken links in the Python documentation: it's no big deal, and easily fixed, but the many similar rough edges send the message that Python support is a hobby project, a sideline to the main business.

This will probably be fixed with time, I think, but again: it's going to be quite a while until I feel I'll get the same level of support on Heroku as on a tool that comes out of the Python community.

* Finally, Heroku really expensive compared to most of the Python-specific offerings. Maybe a typical Django site features more "pieces" than a typical Ruby one (???) -- a standard "smallish" site of mine will consist of Django, a task queue (Celery), a search server (Solr), a non-relational DB (Redis), and a relational database (PostgreSQL).

On Heroku, this will easily run me $100/mo. By comparison, I'm paying between $15/mo and $50/mo for sites of similar size on some of Heroku's competitors.

So all this to say: I welcome Heroku to this space; more competition is awesome. It'll really make life better for every Python web dev. But it's going to take some serious work to convince me to switch.

[1] I'm really sorry to be obtuse here, but I'm trying to be careful not to write anything that might be construed as an endorsement. As a Django core dev I don't feel comfortable playing favorites (just look at the drama that ensued when GvR had the temerity to say that he liked Django...)

> These services are written by our community, for our community. The principles at most of these companies are people I've known for years.

Of all the points you raise, this is probably the least relevant in business terms. PaaS is about opening up platforms to all comers; one's standing in relatively insular language communities doesn't say much about one's marketability outside those communities.

Epio cofounder here - we're not worried by this, and we've known it was coming for ages now.

The hosting market is plenty big enough for more than one player - we're expanding to multiple languages, much like Heroku expanded from Ruby, which provides an ample feeding ground of old-style hosts to slowly steal business from - and there's also still a lot of room for innovation.

Heroku, as much as I like their product - and I do, which is why we started this a year ago - still has its flaws and idiosyncracies, some of which are those low-level-design type of choices where if you go the other route, a different set of people complain. You can't be all things to all people, and I don't think anyone will end up being that.

"some of which are those low-level-design type of choices where if you go the other route, a different set of people complain"

This is actually a wonderful scenario. If either party successfully grows the market, both can benefit.

Heroku is owned by Salesforce now and subject to their agenda. Could be a good thing for some reasons, but it leaves room for a nimble startup to use the start-up advantage (fast moving, close to customers, unencumbered by a corporate leash) to compete. They're going to have to keep moving though.
Choice. For many, simply that there is an alternative is enough to not only keep other providers around but also thrive. The hosting world is huge.
How many domain registrars and hosting providers are there? As long as a lot of people are using Django, there is plenty of room for competition.
I loved Heroku, many moons ago when I was working in Rails. As I've emigrated away from Rails to Django, I've found dotcloud to be the premiere platform -- I want to qualify this, it is the premiere polyglot platform, but for each individual environment I've deployed on dotcloud, their experience has been the best.

I haven't used dotcloud's Ruby/Rails stack, so I can't compare that, but Heroku is definitely fighting a hard battle if they're going to swing me from dotcloud, but it's always good to have competition, and if anybody is going to bring their A-game, it will be Heroku, who were sort of pioneers in the space.

The Heroku Python Free platform might be better in some instances than dotcloud's, and I'll definitely investigate that, but for anything I can think of using, dotcloud has been amazing for me.

I still find Dotcloud's pricing violently expensive (and I have a free VIP plan). YMMV I guess.
Any reason why you left Rails for Django?
I've been using Flask on Heroku since the Facebook apps announcement, and set up a boilerplate template here: https://github.com/zachwill/flask_heroku
Heroku's cedar stack can now detect apps using:

  * Ruby
  * Node.js
  * Clojure
  * Python
  * Go ??
  * Scala
  * PHP
  * Java
  * Perl ??
Anything missing here? That covers a lot of whats out there.
R -- http://groups.google.com/group/rrook/browse_thread/thread/33... (although detect isn't really the case, but run certainly is)
Scala works on Heroku: https://github.com/lstoll/heroku-playframework-scala
Everything else? Because you can just deploy anything actually?
This is great! Looking at the Django tutorial in the docs [1], I think it's too bad, though, that they don't provide a build-in, well tuned WSGI Server. This way, you have to choose your own WSGI server, configure and update it yourself.

[1] http://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/django#using_a_differen...

We do not automatically use a wsgi server because we want to offer flexibility to our users. Additionally we felt that having less magic in what we automatically do to your application (other than run it) was more of the Python way.
$ ls

app.py,requirements.txt,Procfile

$ git init

$ git add .

$ git commit -m "Init"

$ heroku create --stack cedar

$ git push heroku master

With that Heroku becomes the Heroku for Django.

$ epio upload -a appname. epio is epio for Django.
Anyone know if there's a self-contained way to spool up a dyno sporadically to complete scheduled tasks?

I have a webapp now that's hosted on a VPS and uses Celery to schedule tasks. The tasks themselves only take about a second, the dyno needs to stay active for ~5 minutes to service a bunch of HTTP requests from another webservice that will result from the task, and then shut down until the next task. There are O(100) tasks spaced throughout the day, and they each must be completed at a very specific time. My aggregate dyno-hour requirements are very low, but I haven't figured out a way for a dyno to turn itself on and off for scheduled tasks this way. Admittedly, my use case is a bit niche, but a solution sure would be useful. Whiteboxing my webapp in such a way that it could be deployed on Heroku would be great, but keeping a dyno running all month to run the Celery polling process, when 'actual' computing is happening << 1 percent of the time, is a bit steep :)

Use a single dyno, and set the caller's HTTP timeout threshold to a high enough point that it can deal with the delay associated with reallocating your app.
Some time ago Ask The Pony blog made a detailed tutorial on deploying Django on Heroku and how to make it perform 8 times faster than usual using some nice tricks: http://www.askthepony.com/blog/2011/07/getting-django-on-her...
Interesting... I wonder if this makes Google App Engine more appropriate for internal apps for Google Apps customers? For quick/easy personal hacking/development having a Python stack on Heroku seems pretty attractive now.
Personally I don't like Google App Engine, but I can understand its value -- it has reasonable free quotas (even now, after the pricing scheme changed), and your app ends up running on Google's infrastructure which is rock solid.

However, I never understood why people like Heroku ... it's like renting instances on EC2, only 10 times more expensive.

Of course, people then start enumerating a whole bunch of stuff that they don't have to worry about when using Heroku. However, when starting out, configuring a server is just like configuring your localhost development environment. You just have to start with something that works, then gradually keep learning.

Heroku doesn't provide anything to me other than an unreasonable free quota that's basically useless for serving anything other than static content (poorly) ... even GitHub does a better job with their static pages option, since GitHub's servers don't go sleeping when unused.

Also, to get something up quick and dirty with a vps or shared host, is fairly easy, I'll agree with you. However, as you need to get more power, it becomes more problematic. With Heroku, the "quick and dirty" way is actually quite robust and can scale well.

But I'm with you that I find it a bit too costly as I know (and actually like) configuring my stuff.

Awesome news topped with even more awesomeness that Heroku is continuing to truck along post-acquisition.

We're now looking into +/-'s of moving from RAX Cloud Servers to Heroku.

I'm currently developing django app on a ec2 instance. What's the advantage of heroku over just plain ec2?
Ease of use — especially for prototyping ideas. It's easy to push a git repo to heroku and have it fire up your site — but if you've already got a fabric script to do the same thing with EC2, then that might be the better approach for you.
This is pretty much what I've been waiting for to finally migrate my project to Heroku. I know you've been able to unofficially run Python/Django on the stack for a while now, but a lack official support (even in beta form) was all that had been keeping me from taking the leap.
Python minimizes magic and maintains backwards-compatibility? LOL.

(I'm a programmer who recent dived into python - it's awesome and it's easily my favourite language to use now - but those statements are fallacies).

Compared to Ruby on Rails, there's less magic going on.
Does anyone know if the stack will only support WSGI or could I also run a Tornado instance on the cedar stack? I know when I tried dotcloud several months ago it only supported WSGI.
You always have to work with the information available at the time, and personal tolerances for risk, but Heroku has become a case study in selling too early.
Can Haskell be next?
Great news! But why is the example for Flask?
Flask is very lightweight and simple to get up and running. We also have a guide within the devcenter to get up and running with Django: http://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/django
Maybe because it takes less code to write a "hello world" with Flask than with Django.
found that interesting as well, given that the release is around python+django, but it makes sense for the sake of quickly doing a demo with minimal requirements.

[edit] does adding Flask in requirements.txt automatically handle the easy_install portion?

Django has been able to run on Heroku for a while now. This topic keeps coming up over and over again and it is very old news. There are a lot of major flaws in running Django on Heroku right now too simply because of how their system works.
Hi, care to list some of the flaws?
Could you elaborate on why?
id like to know too, and what would you prefer instead?