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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

#121

Post by yesimahuman »

goldfeld wrote: post #54
Fuzzwah wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

Welcome to the web, where you get an easy hosting service like Heroku without paying a dime and then complain about how you need to put some effort to hack the system so you can continue to pay nothing.

Just to be clear: I am paying $70/mo for SSL and Postgres, so it's not that I'm paying nothing. However, based on the minimal server requirements for my app (most users are using our client-side Javascript tools), one dyno "should" be enough.

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

#122

Post by 23david »

jcastro wrote: post #104

We're working on solving these sorts of devops problems in Ubuntu with Juju: https://juju.ubuntu.com/ As an alternative approach would be that a Juju charm (script) would handle the initial deployment of a stock Ubuntu AMI and the customization in one step (or with puppet/chef) and then allow you to add new instances based on scale (though currently not automatic). When you have changes to your service you update the…

FWIW, I tested juju a few months ago and found it to be buggy and unreliable. Sometimes the instances would connect together correctly, and sometimes they would fail inexplicably. Didn't seem ready for any kind of production use to replace config mgmt tools.

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

#123

Post by mark_l_watson »

I used to be a big fan of Heroku for a few customer's projects and for small stuff (mostly free hosting) of my own. At least for my own projects, I decided that for the monthly cost of a large VPS (I use RimuHosting) I can run 5 web apps written in Clojure (I mention the language because this is an efficient run time setup, once the JVMs warm up). I am giving up temporary scalability for a lot more bang for the buck. I also like dealing with smaller companies because you get great personal service.

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

#124

Post by gingerlime »

ceejayoz wrote: post #110
gingerlime wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It wouldn't be sustainable. The folks trying to build the next Amazon.com on a t1.micro would be paying a buck a month and expecting the same level of support Netflix gets.

Yep, you're right. I guess support is one of those aspects that can't be measured per Gb, so there must be some kind of an entry cost. I do wonder how Linode manages to keep this manageable for them though.

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

#125

Post by tptacek »

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?

If free beer is the price of entry here, I'd love to pick your brains as well, since we're about to run into this exact same problem. (I'm in Chicago as well)

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

#126

Post by greghinch »

yesimahuman wrote: post #47
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…

My app is pretty highly trafficked, there isn't a 6 hour window of inactivity anywhere from my logs. What about it running out of RAM?

I've not seen that issue, I suppose it's possible, without knowing more about your app it's hard to say. I only know of the 1 dyno thing, that's what people most commonly run into when they are trying to run a free app.

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

#128

Post by eduardordm »

steveklabnik wrote: post #100
skinnymuch wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the difference between EC2 and a VPS for you? Do your VPSs already have things installed or a GUI? I've used EC2 before as a single server, never scaling. The main difference was installing things that are usually pre-installed (like on Ubuntu's official desktop image). Is that it or is it more about the scaling? And thanks for the reference to Digital Ocean. Never heard of them before. Seems great, might try…

I have no idea, just things don't work on EC2. > Do your VPSs already have things installed or a GUI? Nope. I prefer straight-up Arch linux. ssh in and go from there. To add some concrete-ness to the mix, I was installing ejabberd. When it came time to ping the server... no response. I did the exact same steps on my Digital Ocean VPS and everything went fine. I had done whatever commands EC2 expects to open the right…

Ha! I knew I wasn't the only one.

I'm a large user of AWS but, in general, I never feel like I'm in a true VPS. My last experience:

Out of the sudden one of our EC2 instances could not connect to another, causing our HA solution to spun dozens of instances and eventually crash too. It was clear to me that the dest machine was behind some firewall, we went to the security group, the machine was supposed to accept any connection, from any port, any host. The instance itself had no active firewall.

Out of desperation I added the very own security group to itself. It worked for a few hours, then stopped again, I removed, it came back to work and still working (8+ months now)

This is only one of various mysterious events I've seen happening on AWS.

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

#130

Post by spicyj »

RKearney wrote: post #105
the_economist wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is your ec2 instance in the exact same zone/region as your rds instance? An ec2 instance in us-east-1a will have extra latency dealing with an instance in any other zone, even us-east-1c.

Stating us-east-1a means nothing, since your us-east-1a is someone else's us-east-1d. They're not the same across AWS accounts.

Right, but 1a is never the same as 1c.
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