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Facebook and Heroku

blog.heroku.com

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Re: Facebook and Heroku

#41

Post by aculver »

imbriaco wrote: post #34
aculver wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Did you try contacting support? Looking at that log line, I can tell you that it looks like your app took too long to respond to the request (service=30000ms) and our routing mesh timed it out (status=503, Error H12 (Request timeout). If there's anything we can help with, definitely get in touch. Our support team is top notch.

You're right, the support team is very friendly and supportive. But my resolution times for recent issues have been 24-hour turnarounds, even when we were feeling some level of pain and labeled it "high". In this instance, which was definitely an "urgent", I just didn't have any confidence the issue would be resolved in time. Thankfully when we've had issues like this (mostly with development/staging environments) it's always easy enough to just spin up another app. But that doesn't make me very comfortable having my production stuff there.

Re: Facebook and Heroku

#42

Post by choffstein »

I am constantly impressed with Heroku's ability to identify market needs, create partnerships, and deliver product. I would love to see an article or book about their company and its evolution.

Re: Facebook and Heroku

#43

Post by briandoll »

alexandros wrote: post #26

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…

I personally rarely ever log into Facebook, so perhaps if you're closeness to the platform is from arms length too, I can see where you might be missing the news.

Let's use photos as an example to demonstrate the power and size of Facebook. This infographic shows the scale of photos stored in the Library of Congress, Flickr, and Facebook: http://s3.amazonaws.com/fromus/blog_posts/largest_photo_libr...

I work at New Relic, so I see a lot of companies (startups and otherwise) that have apps deployed on Facebook. The traffic they get is _insane_ and I don't see any indication that it's slowing down.

Games are an obvious category where Facebook dominates, but they are quickly becoming an obvious destination for new apps to launch, given the access to their social graph and the viral nature of the apps in general.

This isn't about hosting. This is about creating a living Facebook app in 5 seconds.

Re: Facebook and Heroku

#44

Post by sondh »

tlack wrote: post #37
alexandros wrote: post #26

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…

Totally agree. I don't think too many Facebook app vendors are worrying about scaling. If Facebook wants to get more developers to embrace their dying platform (when was the last time you heard about an exciting new FB app?), they'll need to silence the voices screaming from every corner of the Internet about their lame documentation and support. Buy as usual, instead they do a song and dance announcing a new initiat…

I don't really get the idea of the app but anyway, TechCrunch Disrupt winner is Shaker.

Re: Facebook and Heroku

#45

Post by freeformz »

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…

I'd love to know which Heroku db service(s) (shared or dedicated) you used and what the problems were, so we can fix them.

Re: Facebook and Heroku

#46

Post by freeformz »

tearsofarapper wrote: post #23
bgentry wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If you have any ticket links or more information about your problems please let us know, inexplicably slow should never happen, especially with a dedicated db.

Re: Facebook and Heroku

#47

Post by chaz »

alexandros wrote: post #26

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…

It's not about the hosting. It's about speed to first code commit.

When you're setting up your first Facebook app, there's a bunch of docs to read, you need to create keys/IDs, figure out the URLs you need to populate, understand how FB Connect works, etc. As someone who tinkers with FB apps and not actually launched one, it took me most of a day to setup a fresh EC2 instance and get everything configured. However, it took me only 10 minutes to get my first "Hello world" app launched, without having ever used Heroku before. That's the big step forward here -- a turnkey skeleton app that eliminates the initial frustration.

For big app developers, this is of no value. It's for tinkerers like the rest of us to get to baseline faster, and is designed for us to get sold on Heroku and get our feet wet with FB app development.

Re: Facebook and Heroku

#48

Post by sbauch »

Why sinatra and not rails? I've been trying to teach myself ruby (on rails) for an app idea that I have, and this was great news as I'd been having trouble getting off the ground with rails and the koala gem. But for someone new to programming like myself, it seems like there is a ton more learning materials out there for the rails framework than sinatra.

So in a way this seems to me like a very easy way to get a simple app up and running, but I lose all the help that's out there that's specific to the rails framework. Am I being naive in thinking that the little that I've learned about the rails framework won't apply to sinatra?

Re: Facebook and Heroku

#49

Post by dasil003 »

sbauch wrote: post #48

Why sinatra and not rails? I've been trying to teach myself ruby (on rails) for an app idea that I have, and this was great news as I'd been having trouble getting off the ground with rails and the koala gem. But for someone new to programming like myself, it seems like there is a ton more learning materials out there for the rails framework than sinatra. So in a way this seems to me like a very easy way to get a sim…

Because Rails is overkill and tuned for large websites. Most Facebook apps are pretty tiny, so it makes sense to start with a lighter-weight framework.

Re: Facebook and Heroku

#50

Post by [deleted] »

sondh wrote: post #44
tlack wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Totally agree. I don't think too many Facebook app vendors are worrying about scaling. If Facebook wants to get more developers to embrace their dying platform (when was the last time you heard about an exciting new FB app?), they'll need to silence the voices screaming from every corner of the Internet about their lame documentation and support. Buy as usual, instead they do a song and dance announcing a new initiat…

I don't really get the idea of the app but anyway, TechCrunch Disrupt winner is Shaker.

[deleted]
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