Why I left Heroku, and notes on my new AWS setup • Hacker News Board

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

#191

Post by marcins » Mon, May 20, 2013, 10:34 PM UTC

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.

Check out Amazon's Elastic Beanstalk - it handles the provisioning/deployment side of things - setup your environment with "eb start", update your app with just a "git aws.push".

Quite configurable via scripts too (install additional packages, etc). Under the hood it's basically the same - Elastic Load Balancer and EC2 instances.

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

#192

Post by pjungwir » Mon, May 20, 2013, 10:57 PM UTC

mh- wrote: post #180

pjungwir wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I saw that, but I could do better. :-) Heroku's Postgres-only option is the product to beat. It makes it really easy and has some great replication features. But a dedicated company could offer more.

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

#193

Post by mh- » Mon, May 20, 2013, 11:15 PM UTC

pjungwir wrote: post #192

mh- wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I saw this in the AWS marketplace (aws.amazon.com/marketplace) - http://www.enterprisedb.com/cloud-database/amazon no experience or affiliation, though.

I saw that, but I could do better. :-) Heroku's Postgres-only option is the product to beat. It makes it really easy and has some great replication features. But a dedicated company could offer more.

I hadn't seen it prior reading/replying to your comment, but I thought it looked comparable to RDS as I skimmed http://www.enterprisedb.com/products-services-training/produ...

I've not used Heroku's Postgres stuff, so no idea what it offers beyond that

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

#194

Post by mbaukes » Mon, May 20, 2013, 11:42 PM UTC

tlrobinson wrote: post #138

raylu wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

What do you recommend for simple configurations where you still want the repeatability/documentation/versioning tools like Chef/Puppet provide? Shell scripts?

scriptrock.com - FD: I'm one of the founders, we think of it as a executable documentation tool.

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

#195

Post by shimms » Tue, May 21, 2013, 12:22 AM UTC

tlrobinson wrote: post #138

raylu wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

What do you recommend for simple configurations where you still want the repeatability/documentation/versioning tools like Chef/Puppet provide? Shell scripts?

babushka - http://babushka.me/

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

#196

Post by petergeoghegan » Tue, May 21, 2013, 12:29 AM UTC

pjungwir wrote: post #189

sciurus wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm surprised I didn't know that; they've invited me to write a book on nearly every other technology I listed on my linkedin profile. :-/ That's why I don't buy books from Packt unless I can find good reviews of it written by members of the community around the software the book is about.

PostgreSQL 9.0 High Performance is a Packt book with excellent content, but it has multiple typos and grammar errors on every page. I'm sad to see such an outstanding book marred by bad editing.

I'm a friend and former colleague of the author, and having read the book from cover to cover I don't think it's true that it has lots of typos. I think you might be confusing it with another title.

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

#197

Post by rvanniekerk » Tue, May 21, 2013, 1:15 AM UTC

Not sure how I feel about these "Being a sys-admin is hard, I'd rather not do it" type posts. This is literally THE CORE OF YOUR COMPANY, your site not working is inexcusable!

I think this is going to be an emerging problem for many startups these days. Patterns of completely unstable products because "ops is hard LOL" followed by a desperate attempt to hire actual sysadmins for their company and excuse after excuse of how "awesome we are for growing so quickly!".

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

#198

Post by kmasters » Tue, May 21, 2013, 1:50 AM UTC

AWS, is simply amazing infrastructure automation. Learning how to use it, even if your not a sysadmin, is going to be a part of your job as an engineer at some point in the future.

How many times has your boss or your organization said "we want xyz", but we cant hire admins and we have no hardware?

Every time someone hits that brick wall, AWS is right there. Although I rarely use the retail side of Amazon.com, I think AWS is a stroke of genius whose full impact wont be felt for a few more years.

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

#199

Post by minimax » Tue, May 21, 2013, 1:58 AM UTC

tptacek wrote: post #183

minimax wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If you find out, let me know. I can tell you where the infosec / security researcher types are, but not where the startup people are. Maybe we should just invent something new.

Sounds great. where do I sign up? :-)

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

#200

Post by kclay » Tue, May 21, 2013, 2:33 AM UTC

marcins wrote: post #191

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.

Check out Amazon's Elastic Beanstalk - it handles the provisioning/deployment side of things - setup your environment with "eb start", update your app with just a "git aws.push". Quite configurable via scripts too (install additional packages, etc). Under the hood it's basically the same - Elastic Load Balancer and EC2 instances.

I gave AEB a try with django about 3 months ago and let me say it was a major headache. Some times it would work other times the load balancer would fail other times it would just laugh in your face( there were many more but you get the point). I wasted weeks trying to get our app running, when it came down to only 3days before our demo run I made some bash and fabric scripts and all was running on multiple instances in about 1hr. Took a snapshot of our state and used that Ami for auto scaling. I myself won't be trying AEB again anytime soon.