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"This is largely a solved problem, at least if you choose the right framework." I've never used Rails or Heroku, so I have a question - how many companies can

by edanm 16y ago

"This is largely a solved problem, at least if you choose the right framework." I've never used Rails or Heroku, so I have a question - how many companies can depend on deploying to Heroku? Is it really flexible enough? I have only used Python + Django. A few solutions are starting to crop up for Heroku-like easy deployment. But I have some special needs that I don't think will be covered well by these services (for example, I have to do Comet, which means setting up an extra server to do Comet, etc.) My gut has always told me that Heroku is fine for deploying your application initially, but that most companies will quickly outgrow it and have to resort to manual deployment solutions. By the way, in my case, I started off with deploying on DreamHost, which is almost brain-dead simple. Then I moved to WebFaction, which gave me more flexibility but I had to do some extra stuff for deployment. Then at some point, when I started making more serious apps, I moved to using VPSs and encountered exactly the nightmare the OP is talking about. I suddenly had to learn how to deploy from scratch, which involved learning to install and configure various programs, and get them working together. It was... not fun.

ekidd 16y ago
I've never used Rails or Heroku, so I have a question - how many companies can depend on deploying to Heroku? Is it really flexible enough? As long as you don't write to the file system, and you don't need non-web, non-worker, non-cron server processes, you're probably OK on Heroku. You also have to be willing to trust Amazon and Salesforce, which isn't too big a stretch in many industries. Their WebSocket support is still in beta, and it's not clear whether it supports Comet on non-WebSocket browsers: http://addons.heroku.com/pusher http://addons.heroku.com/pusher On the other hand, if you need to respond to ZeroMQ messages, or if you need to poll S3 every 5 seconds, Heroku's just not going to work for you. In that case, you can either toss everything onto a server running Phusion Passenger, or set up a real deployment infrastructure with Chef (or Puppet). This can take up to 2 days for a sufficiently messy project, assuming you want to fully automate everything, and I agree that's it's not fun. (Edit: Chef provides pre-packaged deployment instructions for Apache, Unicorn, Rails, ha_proxy, a database, etc. This takes a couple of days to work through the tutorials and set everything up. The setup is a bit of a drag, but it's sweet once everything is working.)
- edanm 16y ago
  "This can take up to 2 days for a sufficiently messy project, assuming you want to fully automate everything, and I agree that's it's not fun." It can take much longer for someone who has never built a server at all. Learning to install and configure Apache + mod_wsgi (in the proper modes) etc. is the hard part. Doing it the second time is much easier.

by edanm 16y ago

ekidd 16y ago

I've never used Rails or Heroku, so I have a question - how many companies can depend on deploying to Heroku? Is it really flexible enough? As long as you don't write to the file system, and you don't need non-web, non-worker, non-cron server processes, you're probably OK on Heroku. You also have to be willing to trust Amazon and Salesforce, which isn't too big a stretch in many industries. Their WebSocket support is still in beta, and it's not clear whether it supports Comet on non-WebSocket browsers: http://addons.heroku.com/pusher http://addons.heroku.com/pusher On the other hand, if you need to respond to ZeroMQ messages, or if you need to poll S3 every 5 seconds, Heroku's just not going to work for you. In that case, you can either toss everything onto a server running Phusion Passenger, or set up a real deployment infrastructure with Chef (or Puppet). This can take up to 2 days for a sufficiently messy project, assuming you want to fully automate everything, and I agree that's it's not fun. (Edit: Chef provides pre-packaged deployment instructions for Apache, Unicorn, Rails, ha_proxy, a database, etc. This takes a couple of days to work through the tutorials and set everything up. The setup is a bit of a drag, but it's sweet once everything is working.)

edanm 16y ago
"This can take up to 2 days for a sufficiently messy project, assuming you want to fully automate everything, and I agree that's it's not fun." It can take much longer for someone who has never built a server at all. Learning to install and configure Apache + mod_wsgi (in the proper modes) etc. is the hard part. Doing it the second time is much easier.