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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

#201

Post by contingencies »

Is anyone aware of an up to date comparison of the various orchestration systems?

I have rolled my own which, being totally biased, I do believe is more full featured than most of those mentioned in this thread, as well as more redeployable/generic. (100% pluggable platforms, built to integrate tightly with build services and developer environments, etc.). Limited internal testing at this stage (1000s of VMs instantiated, across three cloud providers (one internal), only two distinct OS deployment environments targeted thus far).

However, it'd be great to have an overview of this area... it's certainly exciting. I am beginning to feel like the DevOps batton has been passed from large companies with massive infrastructure requirements back to the community over this last year, as more developers are becoming aware of the pitfalls of single provider cloud solutions and the rough edges and missing features of existing multi-cloud deployment APIs. We can probably expect great things in this area over the next 12 months.

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

#202

Post by PixelPusher »

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.

We came across this issue as well, we'd been wasting too much time setting up Postgres. RDS seemed liked a good choice, except that MySQL is just that much worse than Postgres. We had just used things like concurrent indexes.

We ended up going with Heroku's hosted Postgres solution. It costs the exact same we were spending w/ two High CPU instances w/ provisioned IOPS volumes. Now we get fully managed, same price, and all the features of Postgres.

We still host our full application on AWS, the only thing is that we have a managed database. While Postgres makes it easy to setup replication and what not, AWS hardware just sucks. It takes time to properly tune it.

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

#203

Post by panabee »

adrianh wrote: post #6
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.

Hehe, yeah, that sentence doesn't sound particularly simple. :-) Check out the code snippets I linked to from that blog post. It's pretty easy, I promise -- the tricky thing is just figuring out the various APIs.

Thanks for the post. Would you mind sharing how much you were paying Heroku per month (on average and peak usage)? Thanks again!

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

#204

Post by shykes »

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?

You could build containers using Docker (http://docker.io) and Dockerfiles. Here's an example: https://github.com/steeve/docker-opencv

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

#205

Post by tptacek »

minimax wrote: post #199
tptacek wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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? :-)

Mail me? We should just arrange the next HN meetup ourselves. We can probably pick a better venue than the last one I went to here. :)

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

#206

Post by dmishe »

PixelPusher wrote: post #202
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.

We came across this issue as well, we'd been wasting too much time setting up Postgres. RDS seemed liked a good choice, except that MySQL is just that much worse than Postgres. We had just used things like concurrent indexes. We ended up going with Heroku's hosted Postgres solution. It costs the exact same we were spending w/ two High CPU instances w/ provisioned IOPS volumes. Now we get fully managed, same price, an…

What tier of postgres do you use? How's performance?

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

#208

Post by anuraj »

coolsunglasses wrote: post #106
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.

It's not simple, AMIs are a pretty bad idea and not something you should rely on due to the statefulness and vendor lock-in unless you can reproduce it in disparate deployment environments from scripts.

The AMIs can be imported and work on Eucalyptus private cloud. So there is no lock down: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eucalyptus_%28computing%29

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

#209

Post by Spiritus »

memset wrote: post #57

This really resonates with me. I have been having identical issues with Dotcloud, a Heroku competitor. There's nothing worse than wondering if deploying your stupid one-character typo fix will hang or leave the app in an incomplete state. I myself am working on setting up salt stack for deployments. I like that all of it is in python, and after a couple of days I've begun to make progress. I am migrating things slowl…

Shame, I was looking into Dotcloud just the other day and liked the more control they gave you, especially the custom nginx conf. And that they hosted static files for you instead of relying on third party services (i.e. S3).

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

#210

Post by qflux »

jcampbell1 wrote: post #177
lelandbatey wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 da…

Actually there absolutely is an instance type for this. It's the high storage io instance. Not cheap, but if you want local SSD it is definitely on the menu
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