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Facebook and Heroku

blog.heroku.com

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Re: Facebook and Heroku

#51

Post by noahth »

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…

There are others, depending in part on your definition of success. Playfish & Playdom, for example. Non-game success stories are less common (afaik) but there are still some rising stars there, too - biggest example I can think of off-hand is RootMusic.

Re: Facebook and Heroku

#52

Post by cmelbye »

malyk wrote: post #33
cmelbye wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm aware as we are running on heroku here, but it gets expensive quick and your options are more limited than if you roll your own. Then again, that goes for the whole platform.

I don't see how that has anything to do with the statement that I was referring to: "[their database services] don't seem reliable or scalable."

Re: Facebook and Heroku

#53

Post by compay »

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…

There are probably lots of reasons, but I'd imagine one of them is that a simple Sinatra app consumes less resources than a simple Rails 3.1 app, and if Heroku is going to be adding tens of thousands of them, the savings probably adds up.

Re: Facebook and Heroku

#54

Post by bgentry »

compay wrote: post #53
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…

There are probably lots of reasons, but I'd imagine one of them is that a simple Sinatra app consumes less resources than a simple Rails 3.1 app, and if Heroku is going to be adding tens of thousands of them, the savings probably adds up.

Each dyno (isolated running process) is given the same type of container to run in and the difference in data storage is trivial (a couple megs of gems).

In this case it's more about making it simple to get started. Rails has a fairly large learning curve, and the asset pipeline in 3.1 has only made it worse.

Re: Facebook and Heroku

#55

Post by compay »

bgentry wrote: post #54
compay wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are probably lots of reasons, but I'd imagine one of them is that a simple Sinatra app consumes less resources than a simple Rails 3.1 app, and if Heroku is going to be adding tens of thousands of them, the savings probably adds up.

Each dyno (isolated running process) is given the same type of container to run in and the difference in data storage is trivial (a couple megs of gems). In this case it's more about making it simple to get started. Rails has a fairly large learning curve, and the asset pipeline in 3.1 has only made it worse.

Cool, thanks for the inside scoop!

Re: Facebook and Heroku

#60

Post by zealoushacker »

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…

This is excellent! We are on a heroku stack at bizeebee.com now, and if we had to write a facebook app now, there's no question that we'd use this. I had written some apps right after fb platform was released and had to go through hoops to set up my own dev/production environments, manage configurations, deployments, source control etc.

Heroku had taken care of all of that for non-fb apps, and now with tight fb integration, I might just write a few quick fb apps again!

Thanks for the good work, fb and heroku!

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