[jasonmccay]

This may be true, but it also makes the common assumption that your time (or the time of your team) is somehow worth $0 dollars. But, I imagine that you would be the first to say that your time is worth much more than $0 dollars.

Put another way, hardware stores sell paint and paint supplies all day. Buying those and painting a room yourself is certainly cheaper, but it assumes you have the extra time to paint and don't mind you being the laborer. Hiring a painter costs more, but saves you a ton of time, energy, and elevates the level of expertise you are bringing to the job.

Getting started is one thing. The ease of how you maintain and grow is another.

[klochner]

No, my assumption was that previously we had:

(Heroku Cost) <=> (EC2 Cost) + (EC2 DevOps Cost)

Now we have:

(Heroku Cost) <=> (EC2 Cost) + (EC2 Devops using Docker)

Where (EC2 Devops using Docker) < (EC2 Devops)

So the value proposition has shifted. It's not a "Heroku Killer", but it does dilute their value prop, as my prior post mentioned.

[ukd1]

This. No one ever factors in Ops time when I hear them complaining about Heroku.

[nirvdrum]

I'm not sure ops time is even the one to worry about. Most things I've learned I've learned the hard way. So a server going berserk isn't fun, but it's not like I just wasted either time or money on it. I learned something. I better understand my execution environment.

Downtime, on the other hand, is just lost revenue opportunity.

[jon-wood]

I certainly do, and I can tell you the amount of time I've spent managing servers over the past year has cost us less than running our entire production stack on Heroku would have done. So has the odd bit of downtime we've encountered because I've not got the same level of experience as Heroku's ops team.

[AYBABTME]

I don't know, Docker + CoreOS is pretty dead simple.