Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

holovaty.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 231 posts

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

#71

Post by falcolas »

andrewgodwin wrote: post #32
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.

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.

RDS is subject to the exact same intra-region latency issues that other AWS instances have. Perhaps worse in some cases, since their failover appears to be DRBD based.

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

#72

Post by d4mi3n »

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.

I would LOVE to see a detailed breakdown on how an experienced sysadmin would set something like this up. I've cobbled together systems before, but I've found that doing so in a robust way is difficult.

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

#73

Post by koa »

adrianh wrote: post #35
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 e…

2 apps, same profile SSL $20 postgres basic $9 1 free web dyno $0 1 additional worker $36 Scheduler addon usage: $5

$70 for each app(Its actually ~$140.00) (approximately 100-200 business customers might use the apps daily)

And of course, bad billing practices where they dont stop charging you for addons you have stopped/remove and send invoices 1 month late so by the time you notice, another round of billing as occurred incorrectly. Have resulted in me paying $350 and $251) in the past 2 months.

Exact quote from Heroku customer support email, after overcharge of ~$300 in past 2 months

"I'm sorry that the delay in receiving your invoices caused the charges to continue for longer than you would have liked, however please keep in mind that we offer your Current Usage details[ on your account page]"

Yeah, not happy with heroku at all. Even though i can better use my time generating additional sales for the apps, Im so pissed, I plan to burn time move and cancel ASAP...

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

#74

Post by gingerlime »

ceejayoz wrote: post #29
gingerlime wrote: post #24

This sounds pretty great. I haven't used Heroku, but have used Rackspace, AWS and Linode. What worries me the most with AWS, is that there's virtually no support. I guess you can pay and get decent support, but on the low-end of the scale, it's pretty thin or non-existent. Now, I don't hear of so many issues with AWS that warrant contacting support about, and I don't face any issues myself, but just the thought of so…

You can just bump up to AWS's $50 paid support as-needed for one month, if you need to. They've been very responsive to us with the three cases we've opened - roughly an hour to resolution each time.

Thanks. That makes more sense, and I guess a reasonable price if you consider you don't need this every month.

According to https://aws.amazon.com/premiumsupport/ - the developer support is within local business hours though...

I still wish this could have been factored into your hourly AWS costs rather than as a monthly fee. Say, pay extra 10% for every EC2 instance-hour or something and get it included (without the $100 minimum as in the business support that is).

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

#75

Post by theg2 »

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.

I wouldn't say there is much effort required at all with RDS. We use it without issue and while there are some annoying issues with limited access to the environment, it's been pretty solid for us.

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

#76

Post by riffraff »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #17
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.

RDS is pretty expensive for what you get. You can't restore to a running instance from snapshots, you get very little control over the environment, and you can't replicate between geographic regions (only availability zones). I know you said you're a two man shop, but in this case it may make more sense to leverage other IaaS DB services instead of RDS.

I am not sure what you mean by "You can't restore to a running instance from snapshots" cause, well, I've done it a few times.

Could you expand a bit maybe?

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

#77

Post by ColdestOfStones »

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.

YES!

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

#78

Post by scottvdp »

lesterbuck wrote: post #61
scottvdp wrote: post #2

Really loved working on this with you, and I'm excited to see what you come up with now that you have a much better understanding of AWS. Congrats on the re-launch!

When engaging a super qualified expert like this, say in devops, what levels of interaction are available? For example, is is possible to get the one hour consult that points the way and mentions the land mines to avoid, with maybe some template files, or is it only the complete package where the expert does everything from soup to nuts? Is it cost effective for an early-stage venture to use the rockstar for somethin…

Well, it depends on the application. Most people think about scaling far too early, and the same applies to configuration management. I am a fan of shortcuts, early and often... worry about things when you have things to worry about.

That being said, making some easy architecture choices early on can have an enormous effect on your sanity. It is probably worth it to bring someone in to hint you in the right direction after you have a prototype to show and have already started to make choices. This is basically where I helped Adrian.

If your app is struggling under success, you are ideally in a better position financially than most startups are at the beginning. This is when you bring someone in for longer term engagements, or potentially when you hire someone to work on this full time.

I think you are hitting on something that is really a need in the market right now. When you don't need a consultant, and you need 30-90 minutes of "how do I do this?" Q&A, it is hard to figure out who to talk to.

From my perspective, it is hard to find those engagements. I do a sad majority of my time in the sales side of things. Recently, I spoke to some folks at 10xmanagement and Adrian pointed me to anyfu, both of which are approaching this problem but in slightly different manners.

Lastly, you don't want the soup to nuts guy. This is your app, and if you aren't deeply involved with what is going on with it, you are putting yourself at a huge disadvantage post consulting engagement.

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

#79

Post by gazarsgo »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #17
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.

RDS is pretty expensive for what you get. You can't restore to a running instance from snapshots, you get very little control over the environment, and you can't replicate between geographic regions (only availability zones). I know you said you're a two man shop, but in this case it may make more sense to leverage other IaaS DB services instead of RDS.

"you get very little control over the environment" also seems spurious. You get parameter groups to control just about everything you can from a standalone mysql instance. logs or things that load from disk (LOAD DATA ...) are the only things you can't touch, but a small price to pay for automated backups, failover and scaling (both up AND down...)
Post reply on HN