Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Facebook and Heroku

blog.heroku.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 65 posts

Re: Facebook and Heroku

#21

Post by malyk »

bgentry wrote: post #14
davcro wrote: post #13

Amazing. Way back in 2007 I taught myself how to code by making small Facebook apps. I started out by editing live PHP files on a shared server from A Small Orange ($3.33 a month!). After a few months I a few apps with traffic around 30k DAU. A Small Orange would automatically shutdown the apps every couple hours. I'd email them and complain about their shoddy hosting service. They'd always respond instantly apologiz…

Out of curiosity, what makes you think our data services aren't reliable or scalable?

Probably that the cheap plans are on shared DBs and it's very expensive to use dedicated DBs and the dedicated boxes appear to be single instances of Postgres.

I'm not complaining, but what is the official Heroku approach to things like DB sharding, etc.

Re: Facebook and Heroku

#22

Post by brlewis »

stevenbedrick wrote: post #18
briandoll wrote: post #2

This is pure win. The screencast on this post shows that with one click you get a deployed app (in the language you choose) that ships with an app template that uses the Facebook APIs to get you started. We're witnessing a Facebook app that creates real living Facebook apps. Heroku continues to impress with insanely easy onboarding of folks new to deploying web apps, and building features the way things should work.…

The fact that the boilerplate app includes working examples of using the various Facebook APIs is the icing on the cake, as far as I'm concerned. I wrote a couple of apps back in the relatively early days of the API, and I remember being very frustrated by the state of the documentation and the lack of useful examples[1], and something like this would have saved me an absurd amount of time. 1: It's been a few years s…

The graph API did improve the situation a lot, but when I worked with it last December (creating albums, posting photos) I did encounter a gap or two in the documentation. OAuth2 is definitely simpler than the old home-grown authentication system, which I never used because it looks insecure: They sign a string formed by concatenating name/value pairs without a delimiter between pairs.

Re: Facebook and Heroku

#23

Post by tearsofarapper »

bgentry wrote: post #14
davcro wrote: post #13

Amazing. Way back in 2007 I taught myself how to code by making small Facebook apps. I started out by editing live PHP files on a shared server from A Small Orange ($3.33 a month!). After a few months I a few apps with traffic around 30k DAU. A Small Orange would automatically shutdown the apps every couple hours. I'd email them and complain about their shoddy hosting service. They'd always respond instantly apologiz…

Out of curiosity, what makes you think our data services aren't reliable or scalable?

My experience has been that the shared dbs are more performant than Ronin.

I have had a couple instances get inexplicably slow and needed to relaunch.

We're also looking into off loading our database needs elsewhere.

Re: Facebook and Heroku

#24

Post by devillej »

stevenbedrick wrote: post #18
briandoll wrote: post #2

This is pure win. The screencast on this post shows that with one click you get a deployed app (in the language you choose) that ships with an app template that uses the Facebook APIs to get you started. We're witnessing a Facebook app that creates real living Facebook apps. Heroku continues to impress with insanely easy onboarding of folks new to deploying web apps, and building features the way things should work.…

The fact that the boilerplate app includes working examples of using the various Facebook APIs is the icing on the cake, as far as I'm concerned. I wrote a couple of apps back in the relatively early days of the API, and I remember being very frustrated by the state of the documentation and the lack of useful examples[1], and something like this would have saved me an absurd amount of time. 1: It's been a few years s…

It hasn't. You have to have a lot of knowhow to get these things working reliably. I'm extremely impressed with this effort.

Re: Facebook and Heroku

#25

Post by LeafStorm »

nomatteus wrote: post #15

Anyone see a list of what framework is being used for each language? I created a Ruby app, and it's using Sinatra. Edit: here's links to all the app templates, for anyone interested: Python: https://github.com/heroku/facebook-template-python Ruby: https://github.com/heroku/facebook-template-ruby Node.js: https://github.com/heroku/facebook-template-nodejs PHP: https://github.com/heroku/facebook-template-php

Python: Flask (http://flask.pocoo.org/)

Ruby: Sinatra (http://www.sinatrarb.com/)

Node: Express (http://expressjs.com/)

PHP: No framework

Re: Facebook and Heroku

#26

Post by alexandros »

Ok, I'll be the mean one. While I am happy for heroky and everything, I am not sure why this move matters. Was hosting what was holding back the facebook app ecosystem? I was under the impression that the only successes there were Zynga and.. i'm sure there's others? Modernising hosting and support is great, but I thought it was the inconsistent policies and favouritism, and maybe the nature of the medium that killed that scene, not lack of hosting support.

Re: Facebook and Heroku

#28

Post by cmelbye »

malyk wrote: post #21
bgentry wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Out of curiosity, what makes you think our data services aren't reliable or scalable?

Probably that the cheap plans are on shared DBs and it's very expensive to use dedicated DBs and the dedicated boxes appear to be single instances of Postgres. I'm not complaining, but what is the official Heroku approach to things like DB sharding, etc.

They actually have a very impressive dedicated database service: https://postgres.heroku.com/

It supports scaling vertically by throwing in more cache, faster CPU, etc. Once you outgrow that, it supports horizontal scaling by replicating to read-only slaves.

Re: Facebook and Heroku

#29

Post by aculver »

bgentry wrote: post #14
davcro wrote: post #13

Amazing. Way back in 2007 I taught myself how to code by making small Facebook apps. I started out by editing live PHP files on a shared server from A Small Orange ($3.33 a month!). After a few months I a few apps with traffic around 30k DAU. A Small Orange would automatically shutdown the apps every couple hours. I'd email them and complain about their shoddy hosting service. They'd always respond instantly apologiz…

Out of curiosity, what makes you think our data services aren't reliable or scalable?

I'll jump in here, since you asked. Bad timing. About 2 hours ago we started getting these completely abstract errors 15 minutes before we were due to present to some VC folks:

2011-09-15T18:34:33+00:00 heroku[router]: Error H12 (Request timeout) -> GET [redacted]-staging.heroku.com/ dyno=web.1 queue= wait= service=30000ms status=503 bytes=0

I have absolutely no indication what part of our stack is having trouble. After much freaking out, we spun up an entirely new app and demoed with the seed data. This weird sort of stuff has been happening to us at an alarming rate over the last 3 months or so. Not being able to deploy, having to put in a ticket, and waiting 24 hours for a someone in support to fix it is another example.

Please don't take this the wrong way: I love you guys as people. I pushed for Heroku adoption at our shop. I absolutely love the concept of Heroku. Until a few months I felt like you guys were doing it way better than anyone else. (Left EngineYard to migrate everything to Heroku.) But these past few months have been really scary. There is a growing consensus at the office that we'll end up migrating away from Heroku to a platform where we can actually understand what's going on and be responsible for what's going on under the hood. After I began using Heroku, I never thought I'd want to go back to that again.

EDIT: Provided a more clear example that is less obviously suspect of a timeout.

Re: Facebook and Heroku

#30

Post by malyk »

aculver wrote: post #29
bgentry wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Out of curiosity, what makes you think our data services aren't reliable or scalable?

I'll jump in here, since you asked. Bad timing. About 2 hours ago we started getting these completely abstract errors 15 minutes before we were due to present to some VC folks: 2011-09-15T18:34:33+00:00 heroku[router]: Error H12 (Request timeout) -> GET [redacted]-staging.heroku.com/ dyno=web.1 queue= wait= service=30000ms status=503 bytes=0 I have absolutely no indication what part of our stack is having trouble. Af…

Are you on the shared hosting DB plan? Are you using more than 1 dyno?

We are running 4 dynos, 2 workers, and the Ronin DB plan and we haven't had any problems other than a 10 minute downtime due to a bad deploy by Heroku.

Post reply on HN