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

holovaty.com

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

#4
> 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.

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

#5
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.

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

#6

> 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.

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.

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

#7

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.

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.

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

#8

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.

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.

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

#9
post #8

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.

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.

Did you consider using Heroku Postgres?
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