14 ms·

Why I left Heroku, and notes on my new AWS setup

404 points by adrianh 13y ago

acomjean 13y ago
AWS is great. We use it a work and I spun up extra server capacity for a once a year open studios event. That being said as someone who's been in the Unix world for a while figuring out which AWS services to use is not obvious at all. It took me some time to figure out the alphabet soup of sevices and I was familiar from work. I ended up using "cloud formation" which builds you a server (LAMP or other) and optional database/loadbalances configuration. Its was that or selecting a LAMP ami (Amazon machine image). They have a lot of documentation but its hard to get an overview of what everything is (S3, elastic storage....) Plus configuring web server/ database servers for best performance can be non-trivial. I get better speeds from our organizations cheap "shared hosting", during low loads. I was pretty sure the one week of very high loads would have crushed the shared host, thus AWS was perfect.
scottvdp 13y ago
Really loved working on this with you, and I'm excited to see what you come up with now that you have a much better understanding of AWS. Congrats on the re-launch!
- lesterbuck 13y ago
  When engaging a super qualified expert like this, say in devops, what levels of interaction are available? For example, is is possible to get the one hour consult that points the way and mentions the land mines to avoid, with maybe some template files, or is it only the complete package where the expert does everything from soup to nuts? Is it cost effective for an early-stage venture to use the rockstar for something like this? Would someone like this only apply after product-market fit?
  - scottvdp 13y ago
    Well, it depends on the application. Most people think about scaling far too early, and the same applies to configuration management. I am a fan of shortcuts, early and often... worry about things when you have things to worry about. That being said, making some easy architecture choices early on can have an enormous effect on your sanity. It is probably worth it to bring someone in to hint you in the right direction after you have a prototype to show and have already started to make choices. This is basically where I helped Adrian. If your app is struggling under success, you are ideally in a better position financially than most startups are at the beginning. This is when you bring someone in for longer term engagements, or potentially when you hire someone to work on this full time. I think you are hitting on something that is really a need in the market right now. When you don't need a consultant, and you need 30-90 minutes of "how do I do this?" Q&A, it is hard to figure out who to talk to. From my perspective, it is hard to find those engagements. I do a sad majority of my time in the sales side of things. Recently, I spoke to some folks at 10xmanagement and Adrian pointed me to anyfu, both of which are approaching this problem but in slightly different manners. Lastly, you don't want the soup to nuts guy. This is your app, and if you aren't deeply involved with what is going on with it, you are putting yourself at a huge disadvantage post consulting engagement.
    - nasalgoat 13y ago
      I've often gone on Quora or Stack Exchange to answer questions about scaling or stack design, but the questions (and answers) are often very simplistic, or the questions are so specific that I'd need to spend hours answering. If there was a place I could go to get some cash for my time answering these questions, I'd certainly be more inclined to spend the time to do so thoroughly. Mentoring contractor start-up perhaps?
andrewgodwin 13y ago
Sad to see the recommendation to use MySQL - in my experience RDS hasn't been worth the effort - but I'm probably biased since I already invested the time in automating PostgreSQL replication setup.
- adrianh 13y ago
  Believe me, I am sad to stop using Postgres. What parts of RDS haven't been worth the effort? I didn't have to make much effort, beyond rewriting my Postgres triggers into MySQL syntax.
  - andrewgodwin 13y ago
    I've seen RDS have significant per-query overhead, and some very, very variable read times - in particular, some simple SELECTs randomly taking > 10s every so often.
    - falcolas 13y ago
      RDS is subject to the exact same intra-region latency issues that other AWS instances have. Perhaps worse in some cases, since their failover appears to be DRBD based.
    - the_economist 13y ago
      Is your ec2 instance in the exact same zone/region as your rds instance? An ec2 instance in us-east-1a will have extra latency dealing with an instance in any other zone, even us-east-1c.
      - RKearney 13y ago
        Stating us-east-1a means nothing, since your us-east-1a is someone else's us-east-1d. They're not the same across AWS accounts.
        spicyj 13y ago
bearwithclaws 13y ago
> The way we set up Soundslice is relatively simple. We made a custom AMI with our code/dependencies, then set up an Elastic Load Balancer with auto-scaling rules that instantiate app servers from that AMI based on load. Doesn't sound that simple to me (as a complete sysadmin noob). Somebody should write a book about this.
- adrianh 13y ago
  Hehe, yeah, that sentence doesn't sound particularly simple. :-) Check out the code snippets I linked to from that blog post. It's pretty easy, I promise -- the tricky thing is just figuring out the various APIs.
  - scottvdp 13y ago
    I apparently need to get back to that book.
    - toomuchtodo 13y ago
      You know those days when you think you know a bit, and stumble upon someone who knows vastly more than you? Today was one of those days. It appears we're both Devops guys in Chicago; can I buy you a beer sometime?
      - adrianh 13y ago
        Hey, I'd love to join! I'll buy the beers if you two guys just teach me all the sysadmin stuff you know. :-D
        scottvdp 13y ago
        I'd certainly be down. I love talking about this entire arena, specifically where it falls on its face.
      - tptacek 13y ago
        If free beer is the price of entry here, I'd love to pick your brains as well, since we're about to run into this exact same problem. (I'm in Chicago as well)
yesimahuman 13y ago
On my end I get a complete crash once a week when running with one dyno. The official response for support I got was to upgrade to two dynos. Apart from the PostgreSQL hosting, I'm not really happy with Heroku. Add to the random deploy breakage I've experienced mid-launch (not to mention it's slow as hell), I'm going to move back to my own servers.
- greghinch 13y ago
  Heroku docs do say (and I'm afraid the link to it is escaping me) that if you run only 1 dyno, it will shut down after something like 6 hours of inactivity. So if no one hits your site for 6 hours, the next time someone does it has to boot the dyno up again, which can take enough time for the request to time out. Not saying this is a great policy, just explaining in case you weren't sure. When you go to 2 dynos they keep things up for you presumably because now you're a paying customer.
  - calgaryeng 13y ago
    I think it is much less than 6 hours. Like 30 mins or so.
  - ceejayoz 13y ago
    This can be mitigated by having cron hit your site every few hours. There are some free cron services like https://www.setcronjob.com/ https://www.setcronjob.com/ that do this.
    - Fuzzwah 13y ago
      Welcome to the cloud, where you need to rely on a third party service to keep your other third party service online. Of course, what happens when setcronjob.com goes down.... well you then use pingdom to check that it is up...... down the rabbit hole we go!
      - goldfeld 13y ago
        Welcome to the web, where you get an easy hosting service like Heroku without paying a dime and then complain about how you need to put some effort to hack the system so you can continue to pay nothing.
thejosh 13y ago
What's the cost difference between Heroku and AWS for you?
- adrianh 13y ago
  Ah, I should have mentioned this in the post. The price is going to end up being basically the same. I could have done it even cheaper, but I'm paying extra for multi-AZ stuff (i.e., making the database and load balancer available in multiple availability zones, for failover protection).
  - masklinn 13y ago
    You should edit this in at the end. edit: though you'd have to factor in the cost of bugging Scott when you're not his friend.
  - earless1 13y ago
    Be careful about the multi-AZ promise. One of the reasons we don't use RDS is because there is no multi-region failover/replication capability.
waterside81 13y ago
Switched from Rackspace to AWS - couldn't be happier. I think AMZN is really far ahead of the competition and their pricing seems to be as good if not better for many use cases.
boothead 13y ago
If you think puppet/chef is too much complexity you might find saltstack worth some attention. I haven't used it in real anger yet, but I've really liked what I've seen so far. I see they've even got instructions specific to aws now too [1] Also worth mentioning cloud formation as well [2]. That might make the pain of chef/puppet more of a worthwhile investment! [1] https://salt-cloud.readthedocs.org/en/latest/topics/aws.html https://salt-cloud.readthedocs.org/en/latest/topics/aws.html [2] http://aws.amazon.com/cloudformation/ http://aws.amazon.com/cloudformation/
- sigmavirus24 13y ago
  Also there are some useful example states on GitHub: https://github.com/esacteksab/salt-states https://github.com/esacteksab/salt-states
  - uggedal 13y ago
    My salt states are public[1] and include among other things setup for nginx/redis/postgresql/uwsgi which powers a few Django and Flask sites. [1]: https://github.com/uggedal/states https://github.com/uggedal/states
- tomsthumb 13y ago
  Ansible is another alternative that is relatively simple.
  - gazarsgo 13y ago
    I've been using Ansible for a couple weeks now and it is awesome how simple it is compared to Chef/Puppet (IMO)
- druiid 13y ago
  I really want to use Salt for something one of these days given I work with Python quite a bit... but basically at this point my investment with Puppet is relatively significant, so I'm not sure if the pain of switching would be worth it. I'm sure eventually I'll find a use for it though! I like what I've seen before.
koa 13y ago
Can you share approximately how long the process took you? Thinking of going down that road with 2 small basic heroku rails apps 1 web, 1 worker, 1 small postgres DB. very little traffic. Both apps already at ~$170/month on Heroku. These are paid SaaS B2B apps, but they generate so little traffic but the way heroku partitions their services or addons, this really should cost like $30-40/month on a regular "hosting environment" I know almost nothing from a unix sysadmin perspective, but would invest the time if it is feasible.
- adrianh 13y ago
  It took about four full days of work, spread out over a couple of weeks. It would have taken me much longer had I not been helped by Scott (my friend mentioned in the post). I don't know the details of your app, but $170/month sounds high for that server arrangement. If you set up a few auto-scaling Amazon micro instances, it would give you more capacity and be cheaper. Of course, the tradeoff is that you'd need to either learn how to do it or hire somebody. :-/ Good luck!
  - koa 13y ago
    2 apps, same profile SSL $20 postgres basic $9 1 free web dyno $0 1 additional worker $36 Scheduler addon usage: $5 $70 for each app(Its actually ~$140.00) (approximately 100-200 business customers might use the apps daily) And of course, bad billing practices where they dont stop charging you for addons you have stopped/remove and send invoices 1 month late so by the time you notice, another round of billing as occurred incorrectly. Have resulted in me paying $350 and $251) in the past 2 months. Exact quote from Heroku customer support email, after overcharge of ~$300 in past 2 months "I'm sorry that the delay in receiving your invoices caused the charges to continue for longer than you would have liked, however please keep in mind that we offer your Current Usage details[ on your account page]" Yeah, not happy with heroku at all. Even though i can better use my time generating additional sales for the apps, Im so pissed, I plan to burn time move and cancel ASAP...
- willholloway 13y ago
  You could host your apps easily with a $5 a month digital ocean VPS.
mjackson 13y ago
From the OP: > I changed the app to use cookie-based sessions, so that session data is stored in signed cookies rather than in memcache. This way, the web app servers don't need to share any state (other than the database). Plus it's faster for end users because the app doesn't have to hit memcache for session data. The switch to using cookies for storing session data instead of memcache has tradeoffs. Sure, you no longer need to ask memcache for the session data. But you are also shipping a significantly larger cookie back and forth on every request. If you're storing a lot of data in your session, this could actually slow things down in the long run. [1] [1]: http://yuiblog.com/blog/2007/03/01/performance-research-part-3/ http://yuiblog.com/blog/2007/03/01/performance-research-part...
- adrianh 13y ago
  Definitely a great point. Fortunately my session cookies are teeny.
gingerlime 13y ago
This sounds pretty great. I haven't used Heroku, but have used Rackspace, AWS and Linode. What worries me the most with AWS, is that there's virtually no support. I guess you can pay and get decent support, but on the low-end of the scale, it's pretty thin or non-existent. Now, I don't hear of so many issues with AWS that warrant contacting support about, and I don't face any issues myself, but just the thought of something going strange and having nobody to talk to makes me nervous. In contrast, Linode does not have so many cool features, but their support is there and very responsive.
- ceejayoz 13y ago
  You can just bump up to AWS's $50 paid support as-needed for one month, if you need to. They've been very responsive to us with the three cases we've opened - roughly an hour to resolution each time.
  - gingerlime 13y ago
    Thanks. That makes more sense, and I guess a reasonable price if you consider you don't need this every month. According to https://aws.amazon.com/premiumsupport/ https://aws.amazon.com/premiumsupport/ - the developer support is within local business hours though... I still wish this could have been factored into your hourly AWS costs rather than as a monthly fee. Say, pay extra 10% for every EC2 instance-hour or something and get it included (without the $100 minimum as in the business support that is).
    - ceejayoz 13y ago
      It wouldn't be sustainable. The folks trying to build the next Amazon.com on a t1.micro would be paying a buck a month and expecting the same level of support Netflix gets.
      - gingerlime 13y ago
        Yep, you're right. I guess support is one of those aspects that can't be measured per Gb, so there must be some kind of an entry cost. I do wonder how Linode manages to keep this manageable for them though.
pseut 13y ago
The notes are nice, but this seems like a highly relevant detail: "I'm lucky to be friends with Scott VanDenPlas, who was director of dev ops for the Obama reelection tech team"
- Fuzzwah 13y ago
  At least a bit of the knowledge has now been shared via this article.
arunoda 13y ago
AWS OpsWorks is another reason to move to AWS. It is not good as Heroku yet! But is it evolving...
- tibbon 13y ago
  I had a great conversation the other day with one of the OpsWorks product managers. Been using Opsworks for a new client and so far I'm loving it over Rubber/Capistrano. Rubber was ok, but Opsworks wraps up the entire process just enough (but leaves enough control)
maxmcd 13y ago
Two quick Heroku recommendations that wouldn't fix all (any?) of these issues, but would at least make them more palatable. 1. Change your default heroku error pages. From this: http://s3.amazonaws.com/heroku_pages/error.html http://s3.amazonaws.com/heroku_pages/error.html and this: http://s3.amazonaws.com/heroku_pages/maintenance.html http://s3.amazonaws.com/heroku_pages/maintenance.html to something else (in the app settings tab). 2. Keep a staging instance up and running with a cloned database so that you can avoid random heroku-created errors in production.
camus 13y ago
very interesting , thanks !
nutmeg 13y ago
When exactly do you bake a new AMI? On every Soundslice deploy?
- adrianh 13y ago
  No, definitely not on every deploy! For a deploy, I just do a "git pull" on all of the production boxes and restart the web server. Baking a new AMI only happens when there are new underlying dependencies, like a new package from apt-get or a new Python module from pip. In other words, it's rare. Hope that helps!
  - slig 13y ago
    Is there any reason for not letting pip update things automagically from your `prod_requirements.txt` using a simple fabric `fab update_pip` when necessary?
    - adrianh 13y ago
      Yes, in fact that's what I do! The issue is I need to account for any new servers that might spin up later (hence updating the AMI). I could also change the AMI's "user data" to run pip when the instance loads, but I'm not 100% confident it will always run without errors. I feel better doing it manually and baking it into the AMI. Personal taste.
- jokull 13y ago
  For the record, we have a very similar production environment and we bake on every deploy. We have some tricks to make it as fast as possible though. A deployment takes 2-3 minutes with code changes and more with requirements changes. We then place it in the ELB server pool and pull out old machines if everything behaves correctly. Looking into autoscaling now.
memset 13y ago
This really resonates with me. I have been having identical issues with Dotcloud, a Heroku competitor. There's nothing worse than wondering if deploying your stupid one-character typo fix will hang or leave the app in an incomplete state. I myself am working on setting up salt stack for deployments. I like that all of it is in python, and after a couple of days I've begun to make progress. I am migrating things slowly: first cron jobs, then internal tools, and at some point, our website. The only thing that really needs "scale" is our frontend, and I don't yet know how I'll manage that, but you know, I guess it is time to learn!
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- scottvdp 13y ago
  Huge fan of salt stack, and I may push Adrian in that direction. The changes we made here were minimal in the way he deploys, and with so many architecture changes behind the scenes, we decided less is more on that front.
  - bsaul 13y ago
    any link on the advantage of using saltstack for aws instead of AMIs ?
    - scott_w 13y ago
      Salt is more easily repeatable across heterogeneous environments. For example, we're using Salt to manage our development, testing, staging and production environments. We couldn't do this with AMIs, since the environments are quite different. It makes updating quite easy, as you don't need to create a new AMI, just push your update to your release branch, then run state.highstate from your Master. If you configuration changes, you update the master and then you can push that change across all (or just one) of your environments.
- tlrobinson 13y ago
  Does having an identical staging environment help, or are these deploy errors transient/non-deterministic?
pjungwir 13y ago
The OP says he opted not to use Chef/Puppet and went with baked AMIs instead. In my experience, Chef simply takes too long to build a machine. I use it to ensure a repeatable, self-documented machine setup, but then if I'm on AWS I snapshot an AMI for quick scaling. This also lets you more easily use Amazon auto-scaling tools like Cloud Formation, which bring up new machines based on an AMI. But having the Chef script is still great for knowing what's on your box and having "source code" to change it. One thing I'm curious about re the OP's process: he says he is using Fabric for deploys. Does that mean every time he deploys new code he has to snapshot a new AMI? In that case, why use Fabric at all? I'd be worried about auto-deloying AMIs with outdated code. Since EC2 instances are "disposable," one approach is to never "update" an instance, but instead you release new code by simply launching fresh instances with the latest code, then destroying the old ones.
- scottvdp 13y ago
  The baked AMI comes up and pulls, so it doesn't need to be baked each time. If you take the route you just mentioned, I highly recommend using Netflix's Asgard (https://github.com/Netflix/asgard https://github.com/Netflix/asgard) and check out their recently released Aminator (https://github.com/Netflix/aminator https://github.com/Netflix/aminator). Asgard specifically makes AMI based deploys outrageously easy.
- imperialWicket 13y ago
  My preference is to make a base ami that's configured with puppet and a couple core user/keys. I make this instance automatically hit our puppetmaster and use things like security_groups and user data to figure out what type of node it is. One of the things that puppet installs is a script to generate a new ami from the built instance, this script optionally deletes the puppet package. Now you have an easy way to build your ami from the ground up, you only need to worry about core OS package enhancements on the base ami, and you can use your created AMI with autoscaling behind an ELB. For VERY rapid changes - direct git access is optional (even on startup for current code pulls), but I tend to side with the Netflix guys and focus on an AMI as the minimum unit of deployment. Check out asgard to make this easier (senseless self plug: I built an asgard ami this weekend - http://imperialwicket.com/netflix-asgard-ubuntu-1204-lts-ami-release-11101 http://imperialwicket.com/netflix-asgard-ubuntu-1204-lts-ami...).
killion 13y ago
I get a 500 when I go to the site. It seems like a bad omen for an article about your hosting setup.
- psychometry 13y ago
  It's timing out for me. This has certainly never happened to me with Heroku.
- adrianh 13y ago
  Which site? My blog? The blog is still on Heroku, and it sounds like it was overloaded for a while there. I just upped the number of dynos, so it should be fine. I don't have any indication that soundslice.com (which is the site I'm hosting on AWS) was returning any 500s, but if it was, please let me know.
  - japhyr 13y ago
    I am curious how many dynos you end up using under traffic for a blog site. Care to share? Also, how many dynos did it take to handle the load on soundslice, when it was on the front page of reddit?
    - adrianh 13y ago
      I don't have a definitive answer for the blog, to be honest. I just add four more dynos (to bring it up to five total) and it seems to be fine. I figure it's only for a few hours, so I can be sloppy about it without needing to worry about huge costs. Wish I could be more scientific about it! As for the number of dynos when Soundslice was on the Reddit homepage, I think was using 10 at that point, but, again, it was a totally non-scientific thing. 10 did the job, but fewer dynos might have been just as fine.
      - japhyr 13y ago
        Thank you for responding. That's exactly what I was looking for, a ballpark figure for what can get you through a peak in traffic.
TheMagicHorsey 13y ago
How come nobody thinks about Google's App Engine (and/or Compute Engine) in these situations? Is it really that unbaked?
- angkec 13y ago
  It's too expensive and has dangerous vendor lockin. I myself was burnt 2 years ago and vowed never to return to that platform. Now we use combined Heroku and AWS services. However I do miss GAE though, its deployment is smooth, their auto scaling up is great. It's just that I don't want to be locked in any more. That being said, we still use GAE as a platform for fast prototypes, as a cron service to keep our Heroku instances up + firing up an EC2 instance every night to run a script for 5 minutes. So we only use GAE when there's minimal risk of being locked in.
- adrianh 13y ago
  OP here. I actually used to use App Engine for Soundslice, about a year before Soundslice launched publicly. It was cool in principle, but it's severely limited to the point where I just couldn't run my app on it. Plus there was wildly varying performance with the database layer. I'm sure it's gotten better since then (this was circa late 2011), but I'd think long and hard about using App Engine for anything nontrivial.
- grosskur 13y ago
  Compute Engine looks promising. It used to require a subscription to Gold support ($400/month) before you could create any VMs, but they removed this restriction last week. It still has very limited quotas, though: Maximum of 8 instances or 8 total CPUs. You can request a quota increase through a web form, but I did this a week ago and haven't heard back yet. Also, it's still in a "limited preview" period, which means your entire zone can go down for weeks for scheduled maintenance, which is pretty inconvenient: https://developers.google.com/compute/docs/faq#maintenance https://developers.google.com/compute/docs/faq#maintenance
abimaelmartell 13y ago
well, that escalated quickly
deno 13y ago
Yet another post about scalability/architecture that goes down under load. There should be some rule for that. http://i.imgur.com/UEHzaOL.png http://i.imgur.com/UEHzaOL.png EDIT: Back online, the site migrated to AWS is not the blog.
- rschmitty 13y ago
  It also looks like the Heroku app error page to me
- topherjaynes 13y ago
  Heroku App Error page. Clever way to show why he left Heroku? I'm sure my constant refreshing isn't helping.
- targusman 13y ago
  Isn't this guy one of the two best Django people around? Maybe heroku shut him down?
- adrianh 13y ago
  Heh -- my blog is still hosted on Heroku, and I forgot to up the dynos. Which I suppose is a nice (and ironic) argument for doing the AWS auto-scaling stuff! The site I was writing about, soundslice.com, has not seen any blips.
  - psychometry 13y ago
    There's no need to increase dynos yourself. Just use the [Adept Scale](https://www.adeptscale.com/ https://www.adeptscale.com/) add-on.
DrNoob 13y ago
I have always wanted to learn how to build stacks on AWS and use them with my apps. Does anyone know of any good resources out there for this, definitely for a noob like myself? Perhaps a codeacademy-like site or user-friendly book?
jcastro 13y ago
We're working on solving these sorts of devops problems in Ubuntu with Juju: https://juju.ubuntu.com/ https://juju.ubuntu.com/ As an alternative approach would be that a Juju charm (script) would handle the initial deployment of a stock Ubuntu AMI and the customization in one step (or with puppet/chef) and then allow you to add new instances based on scale (though currently not automatic). When you have changes to your service you update the charm and just `juju upgrade-charm`. This would consolidate step 1, 5, and the "ongoing" into one tool and you'd get a cloud-agnostic deployment (openstack cloud or bare-metal).
- 23david 13y ago
  FWIW, I tested juju a few months ago and found it to be buggy and unreliable. Sometimes the instances would connect together correctly, and sometimes they would fail inexplicably. Didn't seem ready for any kind of production use to replace config mgmt tools.
  - mpdehaan2 13y ago
    If you are looking for another general purpose orchestrator, I'd suggest taking a look at Ansible - http://ansible.cc/ http://ansible.cc/ Disclaimer: I am the primary author.
    - 23david 13y ago
      I never thought of Ansible for orchestration particularly, but that sounds interesting! The current orchestration support in saltstack is somewhat limited, so it would be neat to check out. Are people using Ansible to replace or manage fabric scripts? I'd like to figure out some way to limit the spread of one-off fabric scripts (reminds me too much of bash script proliferation) and it'd be great to get everything under one roof.
    - StavrosK 13y ago
      I have tried ansible and love it. I invested the time (a few hours) to get a script working for my stack, and now I have a 70ish line script that will provision a server or VM (with a shared code directory in the VM), from clean installation to the codebase up and running in its production state, in one command. New project? I just copy the script, change a few variables (names and packages it needs), and I get deployment for free.
mark_l_watson 13y ago
I used to be a big fan of Heroku for a few customer's projects and for small stuff (mostly free hosting) of my own. At least for my own projects, I decided that for the monthly cost of a large VPS (I use RimuHosting) I can run 5 web apps written in Clojure (I mention the language because this is an efficient run time setup, once the JVMs warm up). I am giving up temporary scalability for a lot more bang for the buck. I also like dealing with smaller companies because you get great personal service.
- rlander 13y ago
  Mark, thanks for sharing. Do you use an app server like immutant or does each app run on a separate JVM instance?
pramodliv1 13y ago
I saw your video (http://37signals.com/svn/posts/3446-adrian-holovaty-talks-soundslice-at-37signals http://37signals.com/svn/posts/3446-adrian-holovaty-talks-so...) on the 37signals blog where you mentioned that the server stuff was boring. Now it just got interesting!
- adrianh 13y ago
  Ha, I guess you're right! I must say it's become more interesting than I expected.
ksajadi 13y ago
you can use Cloud 66 to deploy your apps from Heroku right to your own servers with little hassle and no need to do much sys admin work.
tlrobinson 13y ago
I love Heroku: git deployment, the "dyno" abstraction, Procfiles, buildpacks, putting configuration in environment variables (all the 12 Factor App stuff: http://www.12factor.net/ http://www.12factor.net/). Is there an open source implementation of Heroku (close to 100% compatible, not just similar ideas) that runs on your own cloud?
- druiid 13y ago
  Clone of Heroku? None I'm aware of. A bring-your-own PaaS? Many. I work with Cloudify myself: http://www.cloudifysource.org/ http://www.cloudifysource.org/ Nice things: It integrates with Chef/Puppet, allows built-in auto-scaling so it's cloud independent... has recipes for many applications and services ready to go: https://github.com/CloudifySource/cloudify-recipes https://github.com/CloudifySource/cloudify-recipes Drawbacks in my mind are that it's based off of Groovy which may or may not be helpful to some people. The other thing is that it doesn't have a direct method to do source/application deployment so you kind of have to roll your own via 'Custom Commands'+Groovy.
  - natis 13y ago
    You can also launch many of the popular frameworks such as MongoDB, Play Frameowrks etc online: http://www.cloudifysource.org/cloudifyRecipeCatalog.html http://www.cloudifysource.org/cloudifyRecipeCatalog.html
- grosskur 13y ago
  See OpenRuko: https://github.com/openruko https://github.com/openruko I haven't used it myself, but it seems to be a Heroku clone written in Node.js. There's also CloudFoundry, which used to be quite different but is now adding support for Heroku-style buildpacks in V2: http://docs.cloudfoundry.com/ http://docs.cloudfoundry.com/
zdrummond 13y ago
Just my 2 cents... the problems described here seem to fall into the category of "things didn't work 100% of the time". I have some bad news for you; nothing I have ever used worked 100% of the time. Doubly so on AWS. Just off the top of my head; just in the last week we have seen 5% of AWS instance act so badly that we had to recycle them, and that is just the easy to diagnose problems. Don't get me started on the IOPS marketing BS that Amazon sells. It's just the reality of a lot of moving parts and complex systems. From the sound of it, the OP had very little _actual_ downtime, and had to make some end-runs a couple times. Shrug, just life in a high-scale world IMHO. The goal should not be to bounce around providers until you find the Garden of Eden. The real goal should be to accept failure and build to tolerate it. Now maybe it is easier to build fault-tolerance if you are closer to the metal... BUT I would bet that Heroku has much better experience and tooling to detect and resist faults then rolling your own.
juanvallejos 13y ago
THIS IS A MESSAGE OF SPANISH intellegence AGENCIES IN VENEZUELA. aINTELIGENCIA, INTELLIGENCE AGAINST THEM SOMETHING TO BELIEVE THAT NO OTHER aCONOZCAN to OPERATIONS. to -------------------------------------------------- ---------------------------- to http://www.liberenlosya.com/foros/?mingleforumaction=viewforum&f=1.0 http://www.liberenlosya.com/foros/?mingleforumaction=viewfor... to Good morning gentlemen, through this medium, I am writing to you in order to notify them: a to my recordings SHOWING IN THE NEWS OF MARIO SILVA aa ARE A MONTAGE OF INTELLIGENCE AGAINST OTHER SURVEYS to STATISTICS SHOWING WHERE IS Capriles Ensim to FAR IN THAT NUMBER OF VOTES NICOLAS MADURO.a to GIVE THEM SOMETIMES AGENCIES SUCH gravaciones TO THINK THAT ARE REALES.a to TO HIDE SATELLITE TECHNOLOGY TYPE WITH INFORMATION DERIVED to THE INHABITANTS OF THE PAIS.a to send it to CAPRILES RADONSKI.a to -------------------------------------------------- ----------------------- TECHNOLOGIES ARE SHOWING PEOPLE THAT COME IN A MONITOR IN AGENCIES INTELLIGENCE. -------------------------------------------------- ---------------- IN THIS FORUM IS AS AGENTS AND KOREAN CHINESE JAPANESE ASIAN TREAT THESE to EVENTS AND INFORMATION TO BE SHOWN IN MEDIA, WE GIVE A SHEET THE PRACTICE TO LOOK to REAL.a IN CHINESE SATELLITE'S PAGES WITH THAT THESE ARE CRIMENES.a GET VISUAL MOTION INFORMATION AND HEARING OF PERSONAS.a see the string so that my recordings are not of MARIO.a YOU SEE A MATURE NICOLAS SEEN THAT did not sleep, BY THE NEWS THAT SHOWED aa CHECKED THE FORUM IN BUTTON FOROS.aaaa WWW.LIBERENLOSYA.COM -------------------------------------------------- --------------------------------- aaaaaaa
juanvallejos 13y ago
THIS IS A MESSAGE OF SPANISH intellegence AGENCIES IN VENEZUELA. aINTELIGENCIA, INTELLIGENCE AGAINST THEM SOMETHING TO BELIEVE THAT NO OTHER aCONOZCAN to OPERATIONS. to -------------------------------------------------- ---------------------------- to http://www.liberenlosya.com/foros/?mingleforumaction=viewforum&f=1.0 http://www.liberenlosya.com/foros/?mingleforumaction=viewfor... to Good morning gentlemen, through this medium, I am writing to you in order to notify them: a to my recordings SHOWING IN THE NEWS OF MARIO SILVA aa ARE A MONTAGE OF INTELLIGENCE AGAINST OTHER SURVEYS to STATISTICS SHOWING WHERE IS Capriles Ensim to FAR IN THAT NUMBER OF VOTES NICOLAS MADURO.a to GIVE THEM SOMETIMES AGENCIES SUCH gravaciones TO THINK THAT ARE REALES.a to TO HIDE SATELLITE TECHNOLOGY TYPE WITH INFORMATION DERIVED to THE INHABITANTS OF THE PAIS.a to send it to CAPRILES RADONSKI.a to -------------------------------------------------- ----------------------- TECHNOLOGIES ARE SHOWING PEOPLE THAT COME IN A MONITOR IN AGENCIES INTELLIGENCE. -------------------------------------------------- ---------------- IN THIS FORUM IS AS AGENTS AND KOREAN CHINESE JAPANESE ASIAN TREAT THESE to EVENTS AND INFORMATION TO BE SHOWN IN MEDIA, WE GIVE A SHEET THE PRACTICE TO LOOK to REAL.a IN CHINESE SATELLITE'S PAGES WITH THAT THESE ARE CRIMENES.a GET VISUAL MOTION INFORMATION AND HEARING OF PERSONAS.a see the string so that my recordings are not of MARIO.a YOU SEE A MATURE NICOLAS SEEN THAT did not sleep, BY THE NEWS THAT SHOWED aa CHECKED THE FORUM IN BUTTON FOROS.aaaa WWW.LIBERENLOSYA.COM -------------------------------------------------- --------------------------------- aaaaaaa
juanvallejos 13y ago
THIS IS A MESSAGE OF SPANISH intellegence AGENCIES IN VENEZUELA. aINTELIGENCIA, INTELLIGENCE AGAINST THEM SOMETHING TO BELIEVE THAT NO OTHER aCONOZCAN to OPERATIONS. to -------------------------------------------------- ---------------------------- to http://www.liberenlosya.com/foros/?mingleforumaction=viewforum&f=1.0 http://www.liberenlosya.com/foros/?mingleforumaction=viewfor... to Good morning gentlemen, through this medium, I am writing to you in order to notify them: a to my recordings SHOWING IN THE NEWS OF MARIO SILVA aa ARE A MONTAGE OF INTELLIGENCE AGAINST OTHER SURVEYS to STATISTICS SHOWING WHERE IS Capriles Ensim to FAR IN THAT NUMBER OF VOTES NICOLAS MADURO.a to GIVE THEM SOMETIMES AGENCIES SUCH gravaciones TO THINK THAT ARE REALES.a to TO HIDE SATELLITE TECHNOLOGY TYPE WITH INFORMATION DERIVED to THE INHABITANTS OF THE PAIS.a to send it to CAPRILES RADONSKI.a to -------------------------------------------------- ----------------------- TECHNOLOGIES ARE SHOWING PEOPLE THAT COME IN A MONITOR IN AGENCIES INTELLIGENCE. -------------------------------------------------- ---------------- IN THIS FORUM IS AS AGENTS AND KOREAN CHINESE JAPANESE ASIAN TREAT THESE to EVENTS AND INFORMATION TO BE SHOWN IN MEDIA, WE GIVE A SHEET THE PRACTICE TO LOOK to REAL.a IN CHINESE SATELLITE'S PAGES WITH THAT THESE ARE CRIMENES.a GET VISUAL MOTION INFORMATION AND HEARING OF PERSONAS.a see the string so that my recordings are not of MARIO.a YOU SEE A MATURE NICOLAS SEEN THAT did not sleep, BY THE NEWS THAT SHOWED aa CHECKED THE FORUM IN BUTTON FOROS.aaaa WWW.LIBERENLOSYA.COM -------------------------------------------------- --------------------------------- aaaaaaa
juanvallejos 13y ago
THIS IS A MESSAGE OF SPANISH intellegence AGENCIES IN VENEZUELA. aINTELIGENCIA, INTELLIGENCE AGAINST THEM SOMETHING TO BELIEVE THAT NO OTHER aCONOZCAN to OPERATIONS. to -------------------------------------------------- ---------------------------- to http://www.liberenlosya.com/foros/?mingleforumaction=viewforum&f=1.0 http://www.liberenlosya.com/foros/?mingleforumaction=viewfor... to Good morning gentlemen, through this medium, I am writing to you in order to notify them: a to my recordings SHOWING IN THE NEWS OF MARIO SILVA aa ARE A MONTAGE OF INTELLIGENCE AGAINST OTHER SURVEYS to STATISTICS SHOWING WHERE IS Capriles Ensim to FAR IN THAT NUMBER OF VOTES NICOLAS MADURO.a to GIVE THEM SOMETIMES AGENCIES SUCH gravaciones TO THINK THAT ARE REALES.a to TO HIDE SATELLITE TECHNOLOGY TYPE WITH INFORMATION DERIVED to THE INHABITANTS OF THE PAIS.a to send it to CAPRILES RADONSKI.a to -------------------------------------------------- ----------------------- TECHNOLOGIES ARE SHOWING PEOPLE THAT COME IN A MONITOR IN AGENCIES INTELLIGENCE. -------------------------------------------------- ---------------- IN THIS FORUM IS AS AGENTS AND KOREAN CHINESE JAPANESE ASIAN TREAT THESE to EVENTS AND INFORMATION TO BE SHOWN IN MEDIA, WE GIVE A SHEET THE PRACTICE TO LOOK to REAL.a IN CHINESE SATELLITE'S PAGES WITH THAT THESE ARE CRIMENES.a GET VISUAL MOTION INFORMATION AND HEARING OF PERSONAS.a see the string so that my recordings are not of MARIO.a YOU SEE A MATURE NICOLAS SEEN THAT did not sleep, BY THE NEWS THAT SHOWED aa CHECKED THE FORUM IN BUTTON FOROS.aaaa WWW.LIBERENLOSYA.COM -------------------------------------------------- --------------------------------- aaaaaaa
juanvallejos 13y ago
THIS IS A MESSAGE OF SPANISH intellegence AGENCIES IN VENEZUELA. aINTELIGENCIA, INTELLIGENCE AGAINST THEM SOMETHING TO BELIEVE THAT NO OTHER aCONOZCAN to OPERATIONS. to -------------------------------------------------- ---------------------------- to http://www.liberenlosya.com/foros/?mingleforumaction=viewforum&f=1.0 http://www.liberenlosya.com/foros/?mingleforumaction=viewfor... to Good morning gentlemen, through this medium, I am writing to you in order to notify them: a to my recordings SHOWING IN THE NEWS OF MARIO SILVA aa ARE A MONTAGE OF INTELLIGENCE AGAINST OTHER SURVEYS to STATISTICS SHOWING WHERE IS Capriles Ensim to FAR IN THAT NUMBER OF VOTES NICOLAS MADURO.a to GIVE THEM SOMETIMES AGENCIES SUCH gravaciones TO THINK THAT ARE REALES.a to TO HIDE SATELLITE TECHNOLOGY TYPE WITH INFORMATION DERIVED to THE INHABITANTS OF THE PAIS.a to send it to CAPRILES RADONSKI.a to -------------------------------------------------- ----------------------- TECHNOLOGIES ARE SHOWING PEOPLE THAT COME IN A MONITOR IN AGENCIES INTELLIGENCE. -------------------------------------------------- ---------------- IN THIS FORUM IS AS AGENTS AND KOREAN CHINESE JAPANESE ASIAN TREAT THESE to EVENTS AND INFORMATION TO BE SHOWN IN MEDIA, WE GIVE A SHEET THE PRACTICE TO LOOK to REAL.a IN CHINESE SATELLITE'S PAGES WITH THAT THESE ARE CRIMENES.a GET VISUAL MOTION INFORMATION AND HEARING OF PERSONAS.a see the string so that my recordings are not of MARIO.a YOU SEE A MATURE NICOLAS SEEN THAT did not sleep, BY THE NEWS THAT SHOWED aa CHECKED THE FORUM IN BUTTON FOROS.aaaa WWW.LIBERENLOSYA.COM -------------------------------------------------- --------------------------------- aaaaaaa
juanvallejos 13y ago
THIS IS A MESSAGE OF SPANISH intellegence AGENCIES IN VENEZUELA. aINTELIGENCIA, INTELLIGENCE AGAINST THEM SOMETHING TO BELIEVE THAT NO OTHER aCONOZCAN to OPERATIONS. to -------------------------------------------------- ---------------------------- to http://www.liberenlosya.com/foros/?mingleforumaction=viewforum&f=1.0 http://www.liberenlosya.com/foros/?mingleforumaction=viewfor... to Good morning gentlemen, through this medium, I am writing to you in order to notify them: a to my recordings SHOWING IN THE NEWS OF MARIO SILVA aa ARE A MONTAGE OF INTELLIGENCE AGAINST OTHER SURVEYS to STATISTICS SHOWING WHERE IS Capriles Ensim to FAR IN THAT NUMBER OF VOTES NICOLAS MADURO.a to GIVE THEM SOMETIMES AGENCIES SUCH gravaciones TO THINK THAT ARE REALES.a to TO HIDE SATELLITE TECHNOLOGY TYPE WITH INFORMATION DERIVED to THE INHABITANTS OF THE PAIS.a to send it to CAPRILES RADONSKI.a to -------------------------------------------------- ----------------------- TECHNOLOGIES ARE SHOWING PEOPLE THAT COME IN A MONITOR IN AGENCIES INTELLIGENCE. -------------------------------------------------- ---------------- IN THIS FORUM IS AS AGENTS AND KOREAN CHINESE JAPANESE ASIAN TREAT THESE to EVENTS AND INFORMATION TO BE SHOWN IN MEDIA, WE GIVE A SHEET THE PRACTICE TO LOOK to REAL.a IN CHINESE SATELLITE'S PAGES WITH THAT THESE ARE CRIMENES.a GET VISUAL MOTION INFORMATION AND HEARING OF PERSONAS.a see the string so that my recordings are not of MARIO.a YOU SEE A MATURE NICOLAS SEEN THAT did not sleep, BY THE NEWS THAT SHOWED aa CHECKED THE FORUM IN BUTTON FOROS.aaaa WWW.LIBERENLOSYA.COM -------------------------------------------------- --------------------------------- aaaaaaa
juanvallejos 13y ago
THIS IS A MESSAGE OF SPANISH intellegence AGENCIES IN VENEZUELA. aINTELIGENCIA, INTELLIGENCE AGAINST THEM SOMETHING TO BELIEVE THAT NO OTHER aCONOZCAN to OPERATIONS. to -------------------------------------------------- ---------------------------- to http://www.liberenlosya.com/foros/?mingleforumaction=viewforum&f=1.0 http://www.liberenlosya.com/foros/?mingleforumaction=viewfor... to Good morning gentlemen, through this medium, I am writing to you in order to notify them: a to my recordings SHOWING IN THE NEWS OF MARIO SILVA aa ARE A MONTAGE OF INTELLIGENCE AGAINST OTHER SURVEYS to STATISTICS SHOWING WHERE IS Capriles Ensim to FAR IN THAT NUMBER OF VOTES NICOLAS MADURO.a to GIVE THEM SOMETIMES AGENCIES SUCH gravaciones TO THINK THAT ARE REALES.a to TO HIDE SATELLITE TECHNOLOGY TYPE WITH INFORMATION DERIVED to THE INHABITANTS OF THE PAIS.a to send it to CAPRILES RADONSKI.a to -------------------------------------------------- ----------------------- TECHNOLOGIES ARE SHOWING PEOPLE THAT COME IN A MONITOR IN AGENCIES INTELLIGENCE. -------------------------------------------------- ---------------- IN THIS FORUM IS AS AGENTS AND KOREAN CHINESE JAPANESE ASIAN TREAT THESE to EVENTS AND INFORMATION TO BE SHOWN IN MEDIA, WE GIVE A SHEET THE PRACTICE TO LOOK to REAL.a IN CHINESE SATELLITE'S PAGES WITH THAT THESE ARE CRIMENES.a GET VISUAL MOTION INFORMATION AND HEARING OF PERSONAS.a see the string so that my recordings are not of MARIO.a YOU SEE A MATURE NICOLAS SEEN THAT did not sleep, BY THE NEWS THAT SHOWED aa CHECKED THE FORUM IN BUTTON FOROS.aaaa WWW.LIBERENLOSYA.COM -------------------------------------------------- --------------------------------- aaaaaaa
juanvallejos 13y ago
THIS IS A MESSAGE OF SPANISH intellegence AGENCIES IN VENEZUELA. aINTELIGENCIA, INTELLIGENCE AGAINST THEM SOMETHING TO BELIEVE THAT NO OTHER aCONOZCAN to OPERATIONS. to -------------------------------------------------- ---------------------------- to http://www.liberenlosya.com/foros/?mingleforumaction=viewforum&f=1.0 http://www.liberenlosya.com/foros/?mingleforumaction=viewfor... to Good morning gentlemen, through this medium, I am writing to you in order to notify them: a to my recordings SHOWING IN THE NEWS OF MARIO SILVA aa ARE A MONTAGE OF INTELLIGENCE AGAINST OTHER SURVEYS to STATISTICS SHOWING WHERE IS Capriles Ensim to FAR IN THAT NUMBER OF VOTES NICOLAS MADURO.a to GIVE THEM SOMETIMES AGENCIES SUCH gravaciones TO THINK THAT ARE REALES.a to TO HIDE SATELLITE TECHNOLOGY TYPE WITH INFORMATION DERIVED to THE INHABITANTS OF THE PAIS.a to send it to CAPRILES RADONSKI.a to -------------------------------------------------- ----------------------- TECHNOLOGIES ARE SHOWING PEOPLE THAT COME IN A MONITOR IN AGENCIES INTELLIGENCE. -------------------------------------------------- ---------------- IN THIS FORUM IS AS AGENTS AND KOREAN CHINESE JAPANESE ASIAN TREAT THESE to EVENTS AND INFORMATION TO BE SHOWN IN MEDIA, WE GIVE A SHEET THE PRACTICE TO LOOK to REAL.a IN CHINESE SATELLITE'S PAGES WITH THAT THESE ARE CRIMENES.a GET VISUAL MOTION INFORMATION AND HEARING OF PERSONAS.a see the string so that my recordings are not of MARIO.a YOU SEE A MATURE NICOLAS SEEN THAT did not sleep, BY THE NEWS THAT SHOWED aa CHECKED THE FORUM IN BUTTON FOROS.aaaa WWW.LIBERENLOSYA.COM -------------------------------------------------- --------------------------------- aaaaaaa
pbiggar 13y ago
My company does automatic setup too (https://circleci.com https://circleci.com). However, we went in a different direction than Heroku, and allow people to nail down the exact version of their platform they want to use (for example, our users use over 30 different Ruby versions). We haven't needed the same flexibility for DBs and libraries, but I imagine that will come.
macspoofing 13y ago
I haven't seen a very good reason to go with Heroku over AWS in any relevant scenario. It seems like you're paying more for less.
rvanniekerk 13y ago
Not sure how I feel about these "Being a sys-admin is hard, I'd rather not do it" type posts. This is literally THE CORE OF YOUR COMPANY, your site not working is inexcusable! I think this is going to be an emerging problem for many startups these days. Patterns of completely unstable products because "ops is hard LOL" followed by a desperate attempt to hire actual sysadmins for their company and excuse after excuse of how "awesome we are for growing so quickly!".
- moreentropy 13y ago
  This. If you don't want to and/or are unable to properly operate your systems, please stay on Heroko, AppEngine etc., otherwise this is a disaster waiting to happen.
kmasters 13y ago
AWS, is simply amazing infrastructure automation. Learning how to use it, even if your not a sysadmin, is going to be a part of your job as an engineer at some point in the future. How many times has your boss or your organization said "we want xyz", but we cant hire admins and we have no hardware? Every time someone hits that brick wall, AWS is right there. Although I rarely use the retail side of Amazon.com, I think AWS is a stroke of genius whose full impact wont be felt for a few more years.
contingencies 13y ago
Is anyone aware of an up to date comparison of the various orchestration systems? I have rolled my own which, being totally biased, I do believe is more full featured than most of those mentioned in this thread, as well as more redeployable/generic. (100% pluggable platforms, built to integrate tightly with build services and developer environments, etc.). Limited internal testing at this stage (1000s of VMs instantiated, across three cloud providers (one internal), only two distinct OS deployment environments targeted thus far). However, it'd be great to have an overview of this area... it's certainly exciting. I am beginning to feel like the DevOps batton has been passed from large companies with massive infrastructure requirements back to the community over this last year, as more developers are becoming aware of the pitfalls of single provider cloud solutions and the rough edges and missing features of existing multi-cloud deployment APIs. We can probably expect great things in this area over the next 12 months.
anuraj 13y ago
For discerned users who are ready to spend effort, AWS is definitely the way to go. No restrictions, fire up your virtual machine, setup everything as you like and optimize as you need - you have the control button.
stox 13y ago
Just wait until AWS East goes down. Not if, just when. But Heroku is in AWS East, too. I am so happy to have gotten out of AWS.
Myrmornis 13y ago
This doesn't put me off heroku very much. Seems a pretty meager list of complaints.
throwaway503 13y ago
Auto scaling rules eh? Wait till you get DDoSed...

404 points by adrianh 13y ago

AWS is great. We use it a work and I spun up extra server capacity for a once a year open studios event. That being said as someone who's been in the Unix world for a while figuring out which AWS services to use is not obvious at all. It took me some time to figure out the alphabet soup of sevices and I was familiar from work. I ended up using "cloud formation" which builds you a server (LAMP or other) and optional database/loadbalances configuration. Its was that or selecting a LAMP ami (Amazon machine image). They have a lot of documentation but its hard to get an overview of what everything is (S3, elastic storage....) Plus configuring web server/ database servers for best performance can be non-trivial. I get better speeds from our organizations cheap "shared hosting", during low loads. I was pretty sure the one week of very high loads would have crushed the shared host, thus AWS was perfect.

scottvdp 13y ago

Really loved working on this with you, and I'm excited to see what you come up with now that you have a much better understanding of AWS. Congrats on the re-launch!

lesterbuck 13y ago
When engaging a super qualified expert like this, say in devops, what levels of interaction are available? For example, is is possible to get the one hour consult that points the way and mentions the land mines to avoid, with maybe some template files, or is it only the complete package where the expert does everything from soup to nuts? Is it cost effective for an early-stage venture to use the rockstar for something like this? Would someone like this only apply after product-market fit?
- scottvdp 13y ago
  Well, it depends on the application. Most people think about scaling far too early, and the same applies to configuration management. I am a fan of shortcuts, early and often... worry about things when you have things to worry about. That being said, making some easy architecture choices early on can have an enormous effect on your sanity. It is probably worth it to bring someone in to hint you in the right direction after you have a prototype to show and have already started to make choices. This is basically where I helped Adrian. If your app is struggling under success, you are ideally in a better position financially than most startups are at the beginning. This is when you bring someone in for longer term engagements, or potentially when you hire someone to work on this full time. I think you are hitting on something that is really a need in the market right now. When you don't need a consultant, and you need 30-90 minutes of "how do I do this?" Q&A, it is hard to figure out who to talk to. From my perspective, it is hard to find those engagements. I do a sad majority of my time in the sales side of things. Recently, I spoke to some folks at 10xmanagement and Adrian pointed me to anyfu, both of which are approaching this problem but in slightly different manners. Lastly, you don't want the soup to nuts guy. This is your app, and if you aren't deeply involved with what is going on with it, you are putting yourself at a huge disadvantage post consulting engagement.
  - nasalgoat 13y ago
    I've often gone on Quora or Stack Exchange to answer questions about scaling or stack design, but the questions (and answers) are often very simplistic, or the questions are so specific that I'd need to spend hours answering. If there was a place I could go to get some cash for my time answering these questions, I'd certainly be more inclined to spend the time to do so thoroughly. Mentoring contractor start-up perhaps?

andrewgodwin 13y ago

Sad to see the recommendation to use MySQL - in my experience RDS hasn't been worth the effort - but I'm probably biased since I already invested the time in automating PostgreSQL replication setup.

adrianh 13y ago
Believe me, I am sad to stop using Postgres. What parts of RDS haven't been worth the effort? I didn't have to make much effort, beyond rewriting my Postgres triggers into MySQL syntax.
- andrewgodwin 13y ago
  I've seen RDS have significant per-query overhead, and some very, very variable read times - in particular, some simple SELECTs randomly taking > 10s every so often.
  - falcolas 13y ago
    RDS is subject to the exact same intra-region latency issues that other AWS instances have. Perhaps worse in some cases, since their failover appears to be DRBD based.
  - the_economist 13y ago
    Is your ec2 instance in the exact same zone/region as your rds instance? An ec2 instance in us-east-1a will have extra latency dealing with an instance in any other zone, even us-east-1c.
    - RKearney 13y ago
      Stating us-east-1a means nothing, since your us-east-1a is someone else's us-east-1d. They're not the same across AWS accounts.
      - spicyj 13y ago

bearwithclaws 13y ago

> The way we set up Soundslice is relatively simple. We made a custom AMI with our code/dependencies, then set up an Elastic Load Balancer with auto-scaling rules that instantiate app servers from that AMI based on load. Doesn't sound that simple to me (as a complete sysadmin noob). Somebody should write a book about this.

adrianh 13y ago
Hehe, yeah, that sentence doesn't sound particularly simple. :-) Check out the code snippets I linked to from that blog post. It's pretty easy, I promise -- the tricky thing is just figuring out the various APIs.
- scottvdp 13y ago
  I apparently need to get back to that book.
  - toomuchtodo 13y ago
    You know those days when you think you know a bit, and stumble upon someone who knows vastly more than you? Today was one of those days. It appears we're both Devops guys in Chicago; can I buy you a beer sometime?
    - adrianh 13y ago
      Hey, I'd love to join! I'll buy the beers if you two guys just teach me all the sysadmin stuff you know. :-D
      - scottvdp 13y ago
        I'd certainly be down. I love talking about this entire arena, specifically where it falls on its face.
    - tptacek 13y ago
      If free beer is the price of entry here, I'd love to pick your brains as well, since we're about to run into this exact same problem. (I'm in Chicago as well)

yesimahuman 13y ago

On my end I get a complete crash once a week when running with one dyno. The official response for support I got was to upgrade to two dynos. Apart from the PostgreSQL hosting, I'm not really happy with Heroku. Add to the random deploy breakage I've experienced mid-launch (not to mention it's slow as hell), I'm going to move back to my own servers.

greghinch 13y ago
Heroku docs do say (and I'm afraid the link to it is escaping me) that if you run only 1 dyno, it will shut down after something like 6 hours of inactivity. So if no one hits your site for 6 hours, the next time someone does it has to boot the dyno up again, which can take enough time for the request to time out. Not saying this is a great policy, just explaining in case you weren't sure. When you go to 2 dynos they keep things up for you presumably because now you're a paying customer.
- calgaryeng 13y ago
  I think it is much less than 6 hours. Like 30 mins or so.
- ceejayoz 13y ago
  This can be mitigated by having cron hit your site every few hours. There are some free cron services like https://www.setcronjob.com/ https://www.setcronjob.com/ that do this.
  - Fuzzwah 13y ago
    Welcome to the cloud, where you need to rely on a third party service to keep your other third party service online. Of course, what happens when setcronjob.com goes down.... well you then use pingdom to check that it is up...... down the rabbit hole we go!
    - goldfeld 13y ago
      Welcome to the web, where you get an easy hosting service like Heroku without paying a dime and then complain about how you need to put some effort to hack the system so you can continue to pay nothing.

thejosh 13y ago

What's the cost difference between Heroku and AWS for you?

adrianh 13y ago
Ah, I should have mentioned this in the post. The price is going to end up being basically the same. I could have done it even cheaper, but I'm paying extra for multi-AZ stuff (i.e., making the database and load balancer available in multiple availability zones, for failover protection).
- masklinn 13y ago
  You should edit this in at the end. edit: though you'd have to factor in the cost of bugging Scott when you're not his friend.
- earless1 13y ago
  Be careful about the multi-AZ promise. One of the reasons we don't use RDS is because there is no multi-region failover/replication capability.

waterside81 13y ago

Switched from Rackspace to AWS - couldn't be happier. I think AMZN is really far ahead of the competition and their pricing seems to be as good if not better for many use cases.

boothead 13y ago

If you think puppet/chef is too much complexity you might find saltstack worth some attention. I haven't used it in real anger yet, but I've really liked what I've seen so far. I see they've even got instructions specific to aws now too [1] Also worth mentioning cloud formation as well [2]. That might make the pain of chef/puppet more of a worthwhile investment! [1] https://salt-cloud.readthedocs.org/en/latest/topics/aws.html https://salt-cloud.readthedocs.org/en/latest/topics/aws.html [2] http://aws.amazon.com/cloudformation/ http://aws.amazon.com/cloudformation/

sigmavirus24 13y ago
Also there are some useful example states on GitHub: https://github.com/esacteksab/salt-states https://github.com/esacteksab/salt-states
- uggedal 13y ago
  My salt states are public[1] and include among other things setup for nginx/redis/postgresql/uwsgi which powers a few Django and Flask sites. [1]: https://github.com/uggedal/states https://github.com/uggedal/states
tomsthumb 13y ago
Ansible is another alternative that is relatively simple.
- gazarsgo 13y ago
  I've been using Ansible for a couple weeks now and it is awesome how simple it is compared to Chef/Puppet (IMO)
druiid 13y ago
I really want to use Salt for something one of these days given I work with Python quite a bit... but basically at this point my investment with Puppet is relatively significant, so I'm not sure if the pain of switching would be worth it. I'm sure eventually I'll find a use for it though! I like what I've seen before.

koa 13y ago

Can you share approximately how long the process took you? Thinking of going down that road with 2 small basic heroku rails apps 1 web, 1 worker, 1 small postgres DB. very little traffic. Both apps already at ~$170/month on Heroku. These are paid SaaS B2B apps, but they generate so little traffic but the way heroku partitions their services or addons, this really should cost like $30-40/month on a regular "hosting environment" I know almost nothing from a unix sysadmin perspective, but would invest the time if it is feasible.

adrianh 13y ago
It took about four full days of work, spread out over a couple of weeks. It would have taken me much longer had I not been helped by Scott (my friend mentioned in the post). I don't know the details of your app, but $170/month sounds high for that server arrangement. If you set up a few auto-scaling Amazon micro instances, it would give you more capacity and be cheaper. Of course, the tradeoff is that you'd need to either learn how to do it or hire somebody. :-/ Good luck!
- koa 13y ago
  2 apps, same profile SSL $20 postgres basic $9 1 free web dyno $0 1 additional worker $36 Scheduler addon usage: $5 $70 for each app(Its actually ~$140.00) (approximately 100-200 business customers might use the apps daily) And of course, bad billing practices where they dont stop charging you for addons you have stopped/remove and send invoices 1 month late so by the time you notice, another round of billing as occurred incorrectly. Have resulted in me paying $350 and $251) in the past 2 months. Exact quote from Heroku customer support email, after overcharge of ~$300 in past 2 months "I'm sorry that the delay in receiving your invoices caused the charges to continue for longer than you would have liked, however please keep in mind that we offer your Current Usage details[ on your account page]" Yeah, not happy with heroku at all. Even though i can better use my time generating additional sales for the apps, Im so pissed, I plan to burn time move and cancel ASAP...
willholloway 13y ago
You could host your apps easily with a $5 a month digital ocean VPS.

mjackson 13y ago

From the OP: > I changed the app to use cookie-based sessions, so that session data is stored in signed cookies rather than in memcache. This way, the web app servers don't need to share any state (other than the database). Plus it's faster for end users because the app doesn't have to hit memcache for session data. The switch to using cookies for storing session data instead of memcache has tradeoffs. Sure, you no longer need to ask memcache for the session data. But you are also shipping a significantly larger cookie back and forth on every request. If you're storing a lot of data in your session, this could actually slow things down in the long run. [1] [1]: http://yuiblog.com/blog/2007/03/01/performance-research-part-3/ http://yuiblog.com/blog/2007/03/01/performance-research-part...

adrianh 13y ago
Definitely a great point. Fortunately my session cookies are teeny.

gingerlime 13y ago

This sounds pretty great. I haven't used Heroku, but have used Rackspace, AWS and Linode. What worries me the most with AWS, is that there's virtually no support. I guess you can pay and get decent support, but on the low-end of the scale, it's pretty thin or non-existent. Now, I don't hear of so many issues with AWS that warrant contacting support about, and I don't face any issues myself, but just the thought of something going strange and having nobody to talk to makes me nervous. In contrast, Linode does not have so many cool features, but their support is there and very responsive.

ceejayoz 13y ago
You can just bump up to AWS's $50 paid support as-needed for one month, if you need to. They've been very responsive to us with the three cases we've opened - roughly an hour to resolution each time.
- gingerlime 13y ago
  Thanks. That makes more sense, and I guess a reasonable price if you consider you don't need this every month. According to https://aws.amazon.com/premiumsupport/ https://aws.amazon.com/premiumsupport/ - the developer support is within local business hours though... I still wish this could have been factored into your hourly AWS costs rather than as a monthly fee. Say, pay extra 10% for every EC2 instance-hour or something and get it included (without the $100 minimum as in the business support that is).
  - ceejayoz 13y ago
    It wouldn't be sustainable. The folks trying to build the next Amazon.com on a t1.micro would be paying a buck a month and expecting the same level of support Netflix gets.
    - gingerlime 13y ago
      Yep, you're right. I guess support is one of those aspects that can't be measured per Gb, so there must be some kind of an entry cost. I do wonder how Linode manages to keep this manageable for them though.

pseut 13y ago

The notes are nice, but this seems like a highly relevant detail: "I'm lucky to be friends with Scott VanDenPlas, who was director of dev ops for the Obama reelection tech team"

Fuzzwah 13y ago
At least a bit of the knowledge has now been shared via this article.

arunoda 13y ago

AWS OpsWorks is another reason to move to AWS. It is not good as Heroku yet! But is it evolving...

tibbon 13y ago
I had a great conversation the other day with one of the OpsWorks product managers. Been using Opsworks for a new client and so far I'm loving it over Rubber/Capistrano. Rubber was ok, but Opsworks wraps up the entire process just enough (but leaves enough control)

maxmcd 13y ago

Two quick Heroku recommendations that wouldn't fix all (any?) of these issues, but would at least make them more palatable. 1. Change your default heroku error pages. From this: http://s3.amazonaws.com/heroku_pages/error.html http://s3.amazonaws.com/heroku_pages/error.html and this: http://s3.amazonaws.com/heroku_pages/maintenance.html http://s3.amazonaws.com/heroku_pages/maintenance.html to something else (in the app settings tab). 2. Keep a staging instance up and running with a cloned database so that you can avoid random heroku-created errors in production.

camus 13y ago

very interesting , thanks !

nutmeg 13y ago

When exactly do you bake a new AMI? On every Soundslice deploy?

adrianh 13y ago
No, definitely not on every deploy! For a deploy, I just do a "git pull" on all of the production boxes and restart the web server. Baking a new AMI only happens when there are new underlying dependencies, like a new package from apt-get or a new Python module from pip. In other words, it's rare. Hope that helps!
- slig 13y ago
  Is there any reason for not letting pip update things automagically from your `prod_requirements.txt` using a simple fabric `fab update_pip` when necessary?
  - adrianh 13y ago
    Yes, in fact that's what I do! The issue is I need to account for any new servers that might spin up later (hence updating the AMI). I could also change the AMI's "user data" to run pip when the instance loads, but I'm not 100% confident it will always run without errors. I feel better doing it manually and baking it into the AMI. Personal taste.
jokull 13y ago
For the record, we have a very similar production environment and we bake on every deploy. We have some tricks to make it as fast as possible though. A deployment takes 2-3 minutes with code changes and more with requirements changes. We then place it in the ELB server pool and pull out old machines if everything behaves correctly. Looking into autoscaling now.

memset 13y ago

This really resonates with me. I have been having identical issues with Dotcloud, a Heroku competitor. There's nothing worse than wondering if deploying your stupid one-character typo fix will hang or leave the app in an incomplete state. I myself am working on setting up salt stack for deployments. I like that all of it is in python, and after a couple of days I've begun to make progress. I am migrating things slowly: first cron jobs, then internal tools, and at some point, our website. The only thing that really needs "scale" is our frontend, and I don't yet know how I'll manage that, but you know, I guess it is time to learn!

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
scottvdp 13y ago
Huge fan of salt stack, and I may push Adrian in that direction. The changes we made here were minimal in the way he deploys, and with so many architecture changes behind the scenes, we decided less is more on that front.
- bsaul 13y ago
  any link on the advantage of using saltstack for aws instead of AMIs ?
  - scott_w 13y ago
    Salt is more easily repeatable across heterogeneous environments. For example, we're using Salt to manage our development, testing, staging and production environments. We couldn't do this with AMIs, since the environments are quite different. It makes updating quite easy, as you don't need to create a new AMI, just push your update to your release branch, then run state.highstate from your Master. If you configuration changes, you update the master and then you can push that change across all (or just one) of your environments.
tlrobinson 13y ago
Does having an identical staging environment help, or are these deploy errors transient/non-deterministic?

pjungwir 13y ago

The OP says he opted not to use Chef/Puppet and went with baked AMIs instead. In my experience, Chef simply takes too long to build a machine. I use it to ensure a repeatable, self-documented machine setup, but then if I'm on AWS I snapshot an AMI for quick scaling. This also lets you more easily use Amazon auto-scaling tools like Cloud Formation, which bring up new machines based on an AMI. But having the Chef script is still great for knowing what's on your box and having "source code" to change it. One thing I'm curious about re the OP's process: he says he is using Fabric for deploys. Does that mean every time he deploys new code he has to snapshot a new AMI? In that case, why use Fabric at all? I'd be worried about auto-deloying AMIs with outdated code. Since EC2 instances are "disposable," one approach is to never "update" an instance, but instead you release new code by simply launching fresh instances with the latest code, then destroying the old ones.

scottvdp 13y ago
The baked AMI comes up and pulls, so it doesn't need to be baked each time. If you take the route you just mentioned, I highly recommend using Netflix's Asgard (https://github.com/Netflix/asgard https://github.com/Netflix/asgard) and check out their recently released Aminator (https://github.com/Netflix/aminator https://github.com/Netflix/aminator). Asgard specifically makes AMI based deploys outrageously easy.
imperialWicket 13y ago
My preference is to make a base ami that's configured with puppet and a couple core user/keys. I make this instance automatically hit our puppetmaster and use things like security_groups and user data to figure out what type of node it is. One of the things that puppet installs is a script to generate a new ami from the built instance, this script optionally deletes the puppet package. Now you have an easy way to build your ami from the ground up, you only need to worry about core OS package enhancements on the base ami, and you can use your created AMI with autoscaling behind an ELB. For VERY rapid changes - direct git access is optional (even on startup for current code pulls), but I tend to side with the Netflix guys and focus on an AMI as the minimum unit of deployment. Check out asgard to make this easier (senseless self plug: I built an asgard ami this weekend - http://imperialwicket.com/netflix-asgard-ubuntu-1204-lts-ami-release-11101 http://imperialwicket.com/netflix-asgard-ubuntu-1204-lts-ami...).

killion 13y ago

I get a 500 when I go to the site. It seems like a bad omen for an article about your hosting setup.

psychometry 13y ago
It's timing out for me. This has certainly never happened to me with Heroku.
adrianh 13y ago
Which site? My blog? The blog is still on Heroku, and it sounds like it was overloaded for a while there. I just upped the number of dynos, so it should be fine. I don't have any indication that soundslice.com (which is the site I'm hosting on AWS) was returning any 500s, but if it was, please let me know.
- japhyr 13y ago
  I am curious how many dynos you end up using under traffic for a blog site. Care to share? Also, how many dynos did it take to handle the load on soundslice, when it was on the front page of reddit?
  - adrianh 13y ago
    I don't have a definitive answer for the blog, to be honest. I just add four more dynos (to bring it up to five total) and it seems to be fine. I figure it's only for a few hours, so I can be sloppy about it without needing to worry about huge costs. Wish I could be more scientific about it! As for the number of dynos when Soundslice was on the Reddit homepage, I think was using 10 at that point, but, again, it was a totally non-scientific thing. 10 did the job, but fewer dynos might have been just as fine.
    - japhyr 13y ago
      Thank you for responding. That's exactly what I was looking for, a ballpark figure for what can get you through a peak in traffic.

TheMagicHorsey 13y ago

How come nobody thinks about Google's App Engine (and/or Compute Engine) in these situations? Is it really that unbaked?

angkec 13y ago
It's too expensive and has dangerous vendor lockin. I myself was burnt 2 years ago and vowed never to return to that platform. Now we use combined Heroku and AWS services. However I do miss GAE though, its deployment is smooth, their auto scaling up is great. It's just that I don't want to be locked in any more. That being said, we still use GAE as a platform for fast prototypes, as a cron service to keep our Heroku instances up + firing up an EC2 instance every night to run a script for 5 minutes. So we only use GAE when there's minimal risk of being locked in.
adrianh 13y ago
OP here. I actually used to use App Engine for Soundslice, about a year before Soundslice launched publicly. It was cool in principle, but it's severely limited to the point where I just couldn't run my app on it. Plus there was wildly varying performance with the database layer. I'm sure it's gotten better since then (this was circa late 2011), but I'd think long and hard about using App Engine for anything nontrivial.
grosskur 13y ago
Compute Engine looks promising. It used to require a subscription to Gold support ($400/month) before you could create any VMs, but they removed this restriction last week. It still has very limited quotas, though: Maximum of 8 instances or 8 total CPUs. You can request a quota increase through a web form, but I did this a week ago and haven't heard back yet. Also, it's still in a "limited preview" period, which means your entire zone can go down for weeks for scheduled maintenance, which is pretty inconvenient: https://developers.google.com/compute/docs/faq#maintenance https://developers.google.com/compute/docs/faq#maintenance

abimaelmartell 13y ago

well, that escalated quickly

deno 13y ago

Yet another post about scalability/architecture that goes down under load. There should be some rule for that. http://i.imgur.com/UEHzaOL.png http://i.imgur.com/UEHzaOL.png EDIT: Back online, the site migrated to AWS is not the blog.

rschmitty 13y ago
It also looks like the Heroku app error page to me
topherjaynes 13y ago
Heroku App Error page. Clever way to show why he left Heroku? I'm sure my constant refreshing isn't helping.
targusman 13y ago
Isn't this guy one of the two best Django people around? Maybe heroku shut him down?
adrianh 13y ago
Heh -- my blog is still hosted on Heroku, and I forgot to up the dynos. Which I suppose is a nice (and ironic) argument for doing the AWS auto-scaling stuff! The site I was writing about, soundslice.com, has not seen any blips.
- psychometry 13y ago
  There's no need to increase dynos yourself. Just use the [Adept Scale](https://www.adeptscale.com/ https://www.adeptscale.com/) add-on.

DrNoob 13y ago

I have always wanted to learn how to build stacks on AWS and use them with my apps. Does anyone know of any good resources out there for this, definitely for a noob like myself? Perhaps a codeacademy-like site or user-friendly book?

jcastro 13y ago

We're working on solving these sorts of devops problems in Ubuntu with Juju: https://juju.ubuntu.com/ https://juju.ubuntu.com/ As an alternative approach would be that a Juju charm (script) would handle the initial deployment of a stock Ubuntu AMI and the customization in one step (or with puppet/chef) and then allow you to add new instances based on scale (though currently not automatic). When you have changes to your service you update the charm and just `juju upgrade-charm`. This would consolidate step 1, 5, and the "ongoing" into one tool and you'd get a cloud-agnostic deployment (openstack cloud or bare-metal).

23david 13y ago
FWIW, I tested juju a few months ago and found it to be buggy and unreliable. Sometimes the instances would connect together correctly, and sometimes they would fail inexplicably. Didn't seem ready for any kind of production use to replace config mgmt tools.
- mpdehaan2 13y ago
  If you are looking for another general purpose orchestrator, I'd suggest taking a look at Ansible - http://ansible.cc/ http://ansible.cc/ Disclaimer: I am the primary author.
  - 23david 13y ago
    I never thought of Ansible for orchestration particularly, but that sounds interesting! The current orchestration support in saltstack is somewhat limited, so it would be neat to check out. Are people using Ansible to replace or manage fabric scripts? I'd like to figure out some way to limit the spread of one-off fabric scripts (reminds me too much of bash script proliferation) and it'd be great to get everything under one roof.
  - StavrosK 13y ago
    I have tried ansible and love it. I invested the time (a few hours) to get a script working for my stack, and now I have a 70ish line script that will provision a server or VM (with a shared code directory in the VM), from clean installation to the codebase up and running in its production state, in one command. New project? I just copy the script, change a few variables (names and packages it needs), and I get deployment for free.

mark_l_watson 13y ago

I used to be a big fan of Heroku for a few customer's projects and for small stuff (mostly free hosting) of my own. At least for my own projects, I decided that for the monthly cost of a large VPS (I use RimuHosting) I can run 5 web apps written in Clojure (I mention the language because this is an efficient run time setup, once the JVMs warm up). I am giving up temporary scalability for a lot more bang for the buck. I also like dealing with smaller companies because you get great personal service.

rlander 13y ago
Mark, thanks for sharing. Do you use an app server like immutant or does each app run on a separate JVM instance?

pramodliv1 13y ago

I saw your video (http://37signals.com/svn/posts/3446-adrian-holovaty-talks-soundslice-at-37signals http://37signals.com/svn/posts/3446-adrian-holovaty-talks-so...) on the 37signals blog where you mentioned that the server stuff was boring. Now it just got interesting!

adrianh 13y ago
Ha, I guess you're right! I must say it's become more interesting than I expected.

ksajadi 13y ago

you can use Cloud 66 to deploy your apps from Heroku right to your own servers with little hassle and no need to do much sys admin work.

tlrobinson 13y ago

I love Heroku: git deployment, the "dyno" abstraction, Procfiles, buildpacks, putting configuration in environment variables (all the 12 Factor App stuff: http://www.12factor.net/ http://www.12factor.net/). Is there an open source implementation of Heroku (close to 100% compatible, not just similar ideas) that runs on your own cloud?

druiid 13y ago
Clone of Heroku? None I'm aware of. A bring-your-own PaaS? Many. I work with Cloudify myself: http://www.cloudifysource.org/ http://www.cloudifysource.org/ Nice things: It integrates with Chef/Puppet, allows built-in auto-scaling so it's cloud independent... has recipes for many applications and services ready to go: https://github.com/CloudifySource/cloudify-recipes https://github.com/CloudifySource/cloudify-recipes Drawbacks in my mind are that it's based off of Groovy which may or may not be helpful to some people. The other thing is that it doesn't have a direct method to do source/application deployment so you kind of have to roll your own via 'Custom Commands'+Groovy.
- natis 13y ago
  You can also launch many of the popular frameworks such as MongoDB, Play Frameowrks etc online: http://www.cloudifysource.org/cloudifyRecipeCatalog.html http://www.cloudifysource.org/cloudifyRecipeCatalog.html
grosskur 13y ago
See OpenRuko: https://github.com/openruko https://github.com/openruko I haven't used it myself, but it seems to be a Heroku clone written in Node.js. There's also CloudFoundry, which used to be quite different but is now adding support for Heroku-style buildpacks in V2: http://docs.cloudfoundry.com/ http://docs.cloudfoundry.com/

zdrummond 13y ago

Just my 2 cents... the problems described here seem to fall into the category of "things didn't work 100% of the time". I have some bad news for you; nothing I have ever used worked 100% of the time. Doubly so on AWS. Just off the top of my head; just in the last week we have seen 5% of AWS instance act so badly that we had to recycle them, and that is just the easy to diagnose problems. Don't get me started on the IOPS marketing BS that Amazon sells. It's just the reality of a lot of moving parts and complex systems. From the sound of it, the OP had very little _actual_ downtime, and had to make some end-runs a couple times. Shrug, just life in a high-scale world IMHO. The goal should not be to bounce around providers until you find the Garden of Eden. The real goal should be to accept failure and build to tolerate it. Now maybe it is easier to build fault-tolerance if you are closer to the metal... BUT I would bet that Heroku has much better experience and tooling to detect and resist faults then rolling your own.

juanvallejos 13y ago

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juanvallejos 13y ago

pbiggar 13y ago

My company does automatic setup too (https://circleci.com https://circleci.com). However, we went in a different direction than Heroku, and allow people to nail down the exact version of their platform they want to use (for example, our users use over 30 different Ruby versions). We haven't needed the same flexibility for DBs and libraries, but I imagine that will come.

macspoofing 13y ago

I haven't seen a very good reason to go with Heroku over AWS in any relevant scenario. It seems like you're paying more for less.

rvanniekerk 13y ago

Not sure how I feel about these "Being a sys-admin is hard, I'd rather not do it" type posts. This is literally THE CORE OF YOUR COMPANY, your site not working is inexcusable! I think this is going to be an emerging problem for many startups these days. Patterns of completely unstable products because "ops is hard LOL" followed by a desperate attempt to hire actual sysadmins for their company and excuse after excuse of how "awesome we are for growing so quickly!".

moreentropy 13y ago
This. If you don't want to and/or are unable to properly operate your systems, please stay on Heroko, AppEngine etc., otherwise this is a disaster waiting to happen.

kmasters 13y ago

AWS, is simply amazing infrastructure automation. Learning how to use it, even if your not a sysadmin, is going to be a part of your job as an engineer at some point in the future. How many times has your boss or your organization said "we want xyz", but we cant hire admins and we have no hardware? Every time someone hits that brick wall, AWS is right there. Although I rarely use the retail side of Amazon.com, I think AWS is a stroke of genius whose full impact wont be felt for a few more years.

contingencies 13y ago

Is anyone aware of an up to date comparison of the various orchestration systems? I have rolled my own which, being totally biased, I do believe is more full featured than most of those mentioned in this thread, as well as more redeployable/generic. (100% pluggable platforms, built to integrate tightly with build services and developer environments, etc.). Limited internal testing at this stage (1000s of VMs instantiated, across three cloud providers (one internal), only two distinct OS deployment environments targeted thus far). However, it'd be great to have an overview of this area... it's certainly exciting. I am beginning to feel like the DevOps batton has been passed from large companies with massive infrastructure requirements back to the community over this last year, as more developers are becoming aware of the pitfalls of single provider cloud solutions and the rough edges and missing features of existing multi-cloud deployment APIs. We can probably expect great things in this area over the next 12 months.

anuraj 13y ago

For discerned users who are ready to spend effort, AWS is definitely the way to go. No restrictions, fire up your virtual machine, setup everything as you like and optimize as you need - you have the control button.

stox 13y ago

Just wait until AWS East goes down. Not if, just when. But Heroku is in AWS East, too. I am so happy to have gotten out of AWS.

Myrmornis 13y ago

This doesn't put me off heroku very much. Seems a pretty meager list of complaints.

throwaway503 13y ago

Auto scaling rules eh? Wait till you get DDoSed...