Facebook and Heroku • Hacker News Board

Re: Facebook and Heroku

#61

Post by zealoushacker » Fri, Sep 16, 2011, 3:40 AM UTC

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 should amend what I said below with a disclaimer: as long as Amazon AWS doesn't go down, and as long as heroku maintains its progress on ensuring the uptime of their cloud solution... :)

Re: Facebook and Heroku

#62

Post by zealoushacker » Fri, Sep 16, 2011, 3:45 AM UTC

freeformz wrote: post #45

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.

I'd say that the biggest issue and the only issue I have with heroku is that when you guys have done some releases, you would prevent apps that have been placed into maintenance mode during the release from being taken out of maintenance mode.

This becomes a problem when the maintainers of the app in question are not aware of your release schedule. The solution, it seems, would be to either a) do a better job of communicating downtime; b) do rolling deployments and failover so that apps may continue to function; c) a bit of both.

While our app is not important enough for the above to bother us a great deal, we do have paying customers. As soon as one of them comes knocking telling us that we screwed up, and in reality it wasn't fully our fault, we will be a bit more adamant about the above suggestions :)

For the time being, great job!

Re: Facebook and Heroku

#63

Post by fdr » Fri, Sep 16, 2011, 4:06 AM UTC

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.

Unfortunately there is no official approach. The problem of partitioning and inconsistency to get more scalability is still evolving quite a bit.

I think things could be better, but it's not crystal clear what the right trade-off is for many people

Re: Facebook and Heroku

#64

Post by nevinera » Fri, Sep 16, 2011, 4:46 AM UTC

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.

The asset pipeline is completely optional. If you just put css and javascript files in the public directory, you can use them just like before.

Re: Facebook and Heroku

#65

Post by tomkr » Fri, Sep 16, 2011, 7:56 AM UTC

jorde wrote: post #8

As a Python developer I was delighted to see Python in the list of supported languages. After cloning the repo you can notice it's just a standard Flask site with Jijna2 templates and helpers for accessing Facebook's API. I can see this as a really easy way to start developing for Facebook and also Python.

I've been expecting Heroku to add Python for a while now. There's a few Python-specific "cloud" providers popping up, but Heroku has a lot of stuff going for it, like the add-ons. I'll be really excited when they add full support for Python.