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

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

#31

Post by Fuzzwah »

ceejayoz wrote: post #13
greghinch wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This can be mitigated by having cron hit your site every few hours. There are some free cron services like https://www.setcronjob.com/ that do this.

Welcome to the cloud, where you need to rely on a third party service to keep your other third party service online. Of course, what happens when setcronjob.com goes down.... well you then use pingdom to check that it is up...... down the rabbit hole we go!

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

#32

Post by andrewgodwin »

adrianh wrote: post #8
andrewgodwin wrote: post #3

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.

I've seen RDS have significant per-query overhead, and some very, very variable read times - in particular, some simple SELECTs randomly taking > 10s every so often.

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

#33

Post by Fuzzwah »

pseut wrote: post #30

The notes are nice, but this seems like a highly relevant detail: "I'm lucky to be friends with Scott VanDenPlas, who was director of dev ops for the Obama reelection tech team"

At least a bit of the knowledge has now been shared via this article.

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

#34

Post by acomjean »

AWS is great. We use it a work and I spun up extra server capacity for a once a year open studios event.

That being said as someone who's been in the Unix world for a while figuring out which AWS services to use is not obvious at all. It took me some time to figure out the alphabet soup of sevices and I was familiar from work. I ended up using "cloud formation" which builds you a server (LAMP or other) and optional database/loadbalances configuration. Its was that or selecting a LAMP ami (Amazon machine image). They have a lot of documentation but its hard to get an overview of what everything is (S3, elastic storage....) Plus configuring web server/ database servers for best performance can be non-trivial.

I get better speeds from our organizations cheap "shared hosting", during low loads. I was pretty sure the one week of very high loads would have crushed the shared host, thus AWS was perfect.

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

#35

Post by adrianh »

koa wrote: post #21

Can you share approximately how long the process took you? Thinking of going down that road with 2 small basic heroku rails apps 1 web, 1 worker, 1 small postgres DB. very little traffic. Both apps already at ~$170/month on Heroku. These are paid SaaS B2B apps, but they generate so little traffic but the way heroku partitions their services or addons, this really should cost like $30-40/month on a regular "hosting en…

It took about four full days of work, spread out over a couple of weeks. It would have taken me much longer had I not been helped by Scott (my friend mentioned in the post).

I don't know the details of your app, but $170/month sounds high for that server arrangement. If you set up a few auto-scaling Amazon micro instances, it would give you more capacity and be cheaper. Of course, the tradeoff is that you'd need to either learn how to do it or hire somebody. :-/ Good luck!

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

#36

Post by jmgrosen »

chrislloyd wrote: post #9
adrianh wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I'm not the OP, but the thing that's always scared me off from those types of services is that I think there would be high latency, where in a DB you really need low latency. Is that not true?

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

#37

Post by willholloway »

koa wrote: post #21

Can you share approximately how long the process took you? Thinking of going down that road with 2 small basic heroku rails apps 1 web, 1 worker, 1 small postgres DB. very little traffic. Both apps already at ~$170/month on Heroku. These are paid SaaS B2B apps, but they generate so little traffic but the way heroku partitions their services or addons, this really should cost like $30-40/month on a regular "hosting en…

You could host your apps easily with a $5 a month digital ocean VPS.

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

#38

Post by gs7 »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #14
bearwithclaws wrote: post #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.

Would you be interested in a blog post about it? I'm a sysadmin/devops with 12 years in, and build stuff like this on a daily basis. I wouldn't mind sharing how the sausage is made.

Very interested as well!

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

#39

Post by adrianh »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #26
scottvdp wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I apparently need to get back to that book.

You know those days when you think you know a bit, and stumble upon someone who knows vastly more than you? Today was one of those days. It appears we're both Devops guys in Chicago; can I buy you a beer sometime?

Hey, I'd love to join! I'll buy the beers if you two guys just teach me all the sysadmin stuff you know. :-D

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

#40

Post by steveklabnik »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #14
bearwithclaws wrote: post #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.

Would you be interested in a blog post about it? I'm a sysadmin/devops with 12 years in, and build stuff like this on a daily basis. I wouldn't mind sharing how the sausage is made.

Last week, I literally spun down an EC2 instance and signed up for Digital Ocean because I couldn't figure out how the hell to make stuff work on EC2, but have lots of VPS experience. As a dev and not a sysadmin, it's much easier to go with what you know... but I want to learn.
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