I was excited to be invited to participate as a delegate at AppDev Field Day 2 in Salt Lake City, running parallel to KubeCon + CloudNativeCon. Due to an unplanned bird collision, my flight was delayed, but I arrived in time to attend the Heroko presentation on day 1. I’d heard of Heroku way back in the day, and think I may have even tried their free tier back in their startup days before the Salesforce acquisition in 2011. But this was my first opportunity to learn about the company and its offerings first hand.

Heroku: Leave the DevOps to Us
Heroku’s value proposition to developers is that they can code and deploy their application without really needing to worry about all the infrastructure required to make it happen. Developers can focus on what they do best and trust that the team at Heroku will manage and maintain everything from containers to databases SSL certificates and more to keep the application running and scale it to meet demand. I can’t generalize about all developers because I don’t know them all, but almost all of the developers I’ve worked with across multiple organizations want to write code and push it to the environment on which their users will access it.
An Ops Pro Perspective
I’ve been on the operations side of things for nearly 28 years. So I was intrigued to learn more about Heroku and the cloud provider on which it runs. When I asked that question, the presenter said they run on AWS. Heroku abstracts away the complexity of AWS infrastructure and presents it to the customer as a Dyno, which they call the "building blocks that power any Heroku app."
I can hear my fellow sysadmins, even those of us who are called cloud architects these days, saying, “but couldn’t we just build that ourselves? Aren’t we paying a premium for this ‘as a service’ over and above whatever AWS would charge us for infrastructure?” I’m betting the answers to those questions are “maybe” and “probably” - but I gotta be blunt - both in my current role and given that my plate always has more being added to it, I’m not sure why I’d want to. I could build Windows Server VMs in Azure, setup IIS, and have our developers deploy apps to them as well, but I don’t. I manage App Services on App Service Plans and, more and more, I’m considering migrating to Azure Kubernetes Service. Whether I’m one of several architects in a large IT department or a single IT Pro working for a smaller company, I’d rather not have to deal with some of the lower level infrastructure if I don’t have to.
What’s Next for Heroku?
It seemed clear to me that, having pitched their platform primarily to developers since the beginning, Heroku is also tailoring their message to the operations side of the house. They’re clearly adopting open standards and, while the opinionated nature of their platform is a strength, they’ve done a lot of work to allow customers to integrate with other tools if one aspect or another of the Heroku platform isn’t a perfect fit.
Here are a couple of pics I snapped during the presentation. HTTP/2 ought to speed up websites running on Heroku, and speaking as someone who still deals with far too many manually provisioned SSL certificates, Heroku’s Automated Certficate Management feature supporting wildcard domains sounds fantastic. Let’s Encrypt made this possible for me on this blog back in 2018, and I still look forward to a day when I never have to worry about certificates again.

Many of the apps my organization builds and maintains are written in .NET, so having support for it come to Heroku was a nice surprise. We have a bit of some of their other supported languages sprinkled around as well.

My first Tech Field Day
Not gonna lie - it was a bit intimidating sitting there with folks I’d previously only seen on the TFD streams. The experience was fantastic, though, and I enjoyed learning more about Heroku and offering feedback to them. I’ll be keeping an eye on them and look forward to hearing about any new annoucements they may have in the pipeline.
Rachael wanted to go to Ruby Falls for Mother’s Day, so go to Ruby Falls we did. We decided to take our 2023 Chevy Bolt EUV on its first road trip outside of town, figuring the roughly 100 miles to Chattanooga from our home in Knoxville would allow us to test DC Fast Charging on the way home whether we really needed it or not.
The night before we left, I adjusted the charging settings on the Bolt from its normal 80% to 100%. I’ve read mixed opinions about whether limiting regular charging to 80% is necessary, or a good idea, but since we bought the Bolt with the expectation that it would primarily be our “around town” vehicle, with our 2022 Honda Accord Hybrid for long trips, charging to 80% is more than enough to handle our 2-3x / week commute of 50 miles.
We’ve been driving pretty efficiently during the Spring months, and that’s helped our average miles per kWh rise to 4.3. Since we also drive primarily in town, with a mix of 60% highway and 40% main and side roads, I wasn’t surprised to see the Bolt’s Guess-o-Meter suggest we could drive more than 300 miles on this full charge. Chevy lists the range as 247 miles, and I’d say we typically beat that, especially since we’ve never needed to go more than 65 mph.

My wife does nearly all the driving when we’re together, so on the way to Chattanooga I setup an account with Electrify America. I used A Better Route Planner on my iPhone to plan our route, and it was suggesting we stop on the way back at a Wal-Mart and use DC Fast Charging to get back to 78% in order to meet my configured goal of arriving home with 40% state of charge. That’s likely a bit too conservative, but until we have access to the Tesla SuperCharger network, conservatively is how I intend to plan our trips.
I also looked up Ruby Falls in PlugShare and it told me there were two Blink Level 2 chargers in the parking lot. I’ve seen Blink chargers all over in other cities and states, including a city in Alabama where we visit family, so I signed up for a Blink account as well. I noted that the price for Blink charging at that location would be $0.02 per 30 seconds for a member or $0.04 per 30 seconds for a guest, so if we charged for 90 minutes, it would cost $3.60. When we arrived at Ruby Falls, we parked at at the charger rated for 8.3 kW instead of the one rated for 6.x. One mildly annoying thing is that I had to “charge up” my Blink account with a minimum deposit of $20, kinda like a toll beacon, and allow the charger to pull from it. I’m sure Blink prefers to have money sitting in customer accounts, and as a bit of foreshadowing, this likely saved them a second credit card charge from me later in the day.
When we left the Bolt, it was sitting at 61% charge and considering we’d driven the entire way on the interstate at 68 mph, the car estimated we had another 171 miles left. I figured that was pretty good considering some of that driving was up a mountain.

Here are the details of our first charge of the day. We’d headed back to the car to leave our jackets and photos we’d purchased in the car and as we approached the vehicle, I was notified our Bolt had hit 85% charge. Blink also notified me it was time to move, or that I’d be charged to stay there. The parking lot was full other than the charging stations and we’d decided to let our son do the zip line and rock climbing, so I changed the charging settings on the Bolt to allow it to go to 100% and started a new session.

After the zip line and rock climbing, we returned to our vehicle. The first thing we noticed was this large ICE truck parked in the other Blink charging spot. Not cool, especially since there is a sign saying those spots are for EV charging.

Our second charging session brought the Bolt’s battery to 100%. Notice the drop in estimated range to 291 from 319 at home that morning. I don’t put a lock of stock in the Bolt’s abiity to estimate range, which is kinda sad because our Honda Accord Hybrid does a pretty good job of it. Still, it isn’t like we run either vehicle down to E before “refueling” - be it with electrons or gas.

Here are the details of the second shorter charging session from Blink. For a combined 27.6 kWh, that brought our total amount for going from 61% to 100% to $8.76, or 32c per kWh. That’s the cost of around 2.5 gallons of gas, and about what our hybrid would cost to drive to make that leg of the trip. So for “slow” Level 2 charging, it looks like I paid about what I’d pay to drive my hybrid. Where the savings really come in are on the first leg of the trip, as we pay roughly 11c per kWh to charge at home. To be fair, if I’d been willing to give it a shot, I’m sure we could’ve made the trip back home without charging, but I wanted to try out Blink and given that EV chargers aren’t as ubiquitous as gas stations, I’m not quite ready to run that close to the wire. I’m curious to see what DC Fast Charging costs, but I assume it will be more expensive than 32c per kWh.

After a side trip out of the way for lunch in Chattanooga, a truly terrible meal at Sticky Fingers, and another side trip to get some ice cream at one of our favorite spots in Loudon, Tic-Toc, we made it home. Total distance driven was 203 miles and we used just a tad more battery capacity come back as going down, which makes sense as it was warmer and we ran the AC the whole way.

All in all, I enjoyed our first road trip in our EV. Next time, I plan to take it to Nashville or Huntsville to visit family and experiment with DC Fast Charging.
And to wrap things up, here’s a pic of us in front of the falls inside the cave at Ruby Falls.
