Bit of a shameless plug, but we just announced official support yesterday on Heroku (https://blog.heroku.com/archives/2015/7/7/go_support_now_off...), graduating from our community supported buildpack. We allow you to pick pretty freely which databases and other services you want to you use from our add-ons. We also have a free tier.
Finally if you do give it a try would love to hear any feedback you have.
Personally, I don't put stuff on Heroku because it's costly and inefficient.
Let's say I have a bunch of pet projects and applications I want to run (blog, IRC bouncer, some kind of photo management). They take negligible CPU most of the time and ~128MB RAM each.
If I throw these on Heroku, I have to pay $7/each for 3 separate dynos, for a total of $21. Alternatively I can pay nothing but deal with my stuff being down 25% of the time.
If I throw them on Vultr or DigitalOcean, I pay $5 for a 512MB (768MB on Vultr) box and they all run happily ever after.
Heroku forces me to buy 4x the resources I actually need, which is a huge waste. It'd be nice to share my pool of resources so that if I use 384MB of RAM, I pay for 384MB of RAM or at least only pay for 512MB.
I know it's very unlikely you care about users like me and that's totally fine, I know things like this aren't particularly lucrative. Just thought I'd mention it since you asked about feedback.
Heroku isn't selling blank VMs, though. It's a value-added service -- you don't have to configure servers, build docker images, manage logging, wire up routes, inject service dependencies ... it goes on and on.
PaaSes are expensive if your time is free.
I work for a company which donates enormous engineering resources to an opensource Heroku competitor (Cloud Foundry). As a note, Cloud Foundry lets you specify exactly how much RAM you want to use. You can try it on Pivotal Web Services[0] (hosted by my employers) or BlueMix.
Buildpacks are definitely worth understanding to get the most out of Heroku, but not having official support is a negative. Also, I can't recall what it was but I did check into the community buildpack and it seemed like more effort than it's worth.
That said, I didn't take a very close look so maybe it was easier than I anticipated!
Another shameless plug -- Go has been an officially supported buildpack on Cloud Foundry for more than a year, based on the same buildpack which Heroku have now adopted as official.
You can try it on Pivotal Web Services or BlueMix.
Disclaimer: I was seconded to the Cloud Foundry buildpacks team for ~7 months.
I reckon that "Hey, we just launched a similar product that might deal with some of your problems, have a look!" is a totally legitimate and constructive bit of information to provide.
Your suggested response would provide very little value to the post being responded to. I would elaborate further, but I don't want to derail this thread further. You should just google it.
I think that it is a jerk thing to do if your service is exactly the same as the one in the thread, however in this case the first poster has identified some annoying problems with Google's system, so pointing out your own system which (I assume), doesn't have these problems is constructive advice (In my opinion).
I never said it wasn't useful information to have. Just that it was a classless thing to do. Let your customers speak for you, or blow your own horn in your own announcement thread.
God I hate marketers. Crapping on social norms and basic manners for a quick buck every day of the week.
The guy is not a marketer, hes a product guy at Heroku. He has over 15k karma and a member of HN for ~6 years. This is far from "some spammer decided to hijack a thread about a competitors product".
I really don't get what you're talking about here. It's constructive for anyone that is looking for a free tier of Go hosting, which we know is at least one person.
Yes, I hate over the top marketing as much as anyone, but this isn't that.
I guess it's just me then. The way I see it, this is like the guy who proposes in front of everyone at a wedding. It's not your day, don't come and try and steal the limelight.
Heroku guy should have just pulled the other marketer trick... get a stooge to post a thread asking "Can someone compare GAE and Heroku". This way he could promote his product without looking like a jerk.
In someone else's product announcement thread, STFU about your product. If it's good enough, your customers will mention it. Basic manners really.
As you can see, I've gone way overboard on this. This will be my last post. I'm just pissed because EVERY hn announcement thread is like this. Someone does something and announces it, and you'll see "oh I did it first... and mine is better and cheaper, ignore his".
You ask "I really don't get what you're talking about here."
Well heroku guy knows what I'm talking about... that's why he prefaced his self-promotion with "shameless plug" like all the others that do.
Except saying "shameless plug" doesn't make it any less shameful.
Most people coming to view this are interested in Go hosting support. The fact that Heroku just added this support (with a free tier) is pretty awesome and I don't think I would have found out about it without the "shameless plug." I bet you would have gotten upset at any of the "customers" if they would have posted about Heroku in this thread. I think it's very different than your wedding example.
Raising awareness of relevant products/services in a space with very few products/services is a good thing, I reckon. I don't think it matters that he's from Heroku or what his role there is, as long as the comment is relevant. Heroku is one of the closest competitors to App Engine. This is relevant, as both relate to Go support. It's also not as though he went through every comment thread here mentioning it; it was just one comment.
I think you'd be right if he did it in some kind of obnoxious way, but he didn't.
Finally if you do give it a try would love to hear any feedback you have.