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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

#171

Post by AlisdairO »

pjungwir wrote: post #41
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.

A month or so ago I thought about starting a hosted Postgres service on top of EC2, since lots of people seem to want "RDS for Postgres." I think if you specialized you could beat Heroku's offering, but ultimately I decided there was too much risk of Amazon simply adding Postgres themselves. But if anyone is more daring than me, perhaps there is an opportunity here.

I believe EnterpriseDB already offer something like this: http://www.enterprisedb.com/

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

#172

Post by grosskur »

TheMagicHorsey wrote: post #69

How come nobody thinks about Google's App Engine (and/or Compute Engine) in these situations? Is it really that unbaked?

Compute Engine looks promising. It used to require a subscription to Gold support ($400/month) before you could create any VMs, but they removed this restriction last week.

It still has very limited quotas, though: Maximum of 8 instances or 8 total CPUs. You can request a quota increase through a web form, but I did this a week ago and haven't heard back yet.

Also, it's still in a "limited preview" period, which means your entire zone can go down for weeks for scheduled maintenance, which is pretty inconvenient:

https://developers.google.com/compute/docs/faq#maintenance

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

#173

Post by minimax »

tptacek wrote: post #125
toomuchtodo wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

Where do all you Chicago hackers hang out? I'm new to the city and I never see anything like a Chicago HN meetup posted here.

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

#174

Post by curiouslearn »

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.

Definitely interested. The less you assume about your readers the more helpful it will be to me.

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

#175

Post by threeseed »

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…

   In contrast, Linode ...  but their support is there and very responsive.
People keep saying this but it simple isn't true. It is only responsive when everything is working fine and you have some OS/app level issue.

But watch what happens when their Fremont DC goes down. You will submit a ticket and not hear back for hours (if at all) all whilst your site is down. You're then forced to jump on IRC and listen to gossip about what is happening.

Linode's support is as good as their security. Smoke and mirrors.

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

#176

Post by roarktoohey »

tptacek wrote: post #125
toomuchtodo wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

I would love to come, just to listen and learn.

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

#177

Post by jcampbell1 »

lelandbatey wrote: post #166
jcampbell1 wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What's the difference between EC2 and a VPS for you? For me it that restarting an EC2 instance deletes all the local storage. I have had good success just getting a big ass VPS, and running the database locally, and pushing text backups to S3. It is trivial to manage, and in the real world, downtime is more likely to be caused by configuration wonkiness than hardware failures. You also have to have a huge amount of…

If you where having all your data deleted when you restarted your EC2 server, then something was VERY wrong. I'm not an expert, but I've used EC2 a little bit and I think I hit that exact problem. The thing is that for whatever reason, data wasn't being written to the EBS (the virtual hard disks for use with EC2 instances) and was instead being written to the "ephemeral storage", a really big local data store that ev…

EBS is a slow turd. Running a database on EBS is running a database on network attached storage. I know tons of people do this, but I have no idea why. Provisioned IOPS will work, but it is expensive.

Local storage on a $5 Digital Ocean plan will do 2000 IOPS, where as that would cost $200/month with Amazon Provisioned IOPS. I know it is not an apples to apples comparison, but it is worth thinking about. Running a database on a local SSD is a good option for many people, and it is not an option that Amazon offers.

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

#178

Post by dragonwriter »

ceejayoz wrote: post #151
steveklabnik wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A raw EC2 instance is identical to your average VPS offering. See, you say that, but then you later say > What were your security group settings? I dunno, man, I just want a server. Every other VPS provider works, and I can set up my own iptables etc. I'm not saying EC2 is _bad_, as I'm sure things being extra mega locked down by default is good overall. But I don't think it's fair to say that EC2 is the same as a…

The solution to your problem was one Googling for "AWS ping" away, and I've had more significant setup differences between two VPS providers than having to configure the AWS firewall to allow pings. EC2 fits every definition of VPS I've ever seen.

The big difference between traditional VPS and IaaS services like EC2 (or Google Compute Engine, etc.) is that the latter has dynamic scaling (and a pricing model built around the assumption that you will use dynamic scaling) as a core feature; for traditional VPS-style work on an IaaS, you are likely to end up paying a premium for flexibility you aren't using (and possibly dealing with some attendant management complexity from the same source), but, other than that, IaaS should be a complete substitute for VPS.

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

#179

Post by chaz »

raylu wrote: post #119
druiid wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's actually, honestly, a bad way to do it. It's fine to pre-load an instance with source and application/package dependencies. At this point though, you really should be backing those up with it being deployed by Puppet/Chef. Essentially you pre-run a puppet manifest and have it do all the first-run processing and then store THAT as the AMI/instance. This way you have an instance that only needs a few seconds to…

Puppet/Chef is overkill for a site running a config this simple.

After building a half dozen one-off sites, each with a simple, single-server config, I found that going sitting down and learning Chef was helpful for jumpstarting the next project. All of the basic needs are the same: nginx, unicorn, postgresql, etc, and I was tired of reading through my jumble of system configuration notes. Yes, I could have baked AMIs and created new AMIs, but not everything was Amazon-based.

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

#180

Post by mh- »

pjungwir wrote: post #41
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.

A month or so ago I thought about starting a hosted Postgres service on top of EC2, since lots of people seem to want "RDS for Postgres." I think if you specialized you could beat Heroku's offering, but ultimately I decided there was too much risk of Amazon simply adding Postgres themselves. But if anyone is more daring than me, perhaps there is an opportunity here.

I saw this in the AWS marketplace (aws.amazon.com/marketplace) - http://www.enterprisedb.com/cloud-database/amazon

no experience or affiliation, though.

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