Add php support pretty please
Why would one need this for PHP? Isn't PHP already pretty much upload and go?
Rails is as upload and go as php with apache or nginx + mod_rails.
Thank You Heroku, or "How To Eliminate Sysadminning"
11–20 of 66 posts
Re: Thank You Heroku, or "How To Eliminate Sysadminning"
#12Is there something like heroku for django apps? :)
Is GAE not that?
No. There are a number of some pretty serious restrictions. I would _love_ something like Heroku for WSGI applications. Ian Bicking is working on something similar, not as high level with his Silver Lining project. http://bitbucket.org/ianb/silverlining/
Re: Thank You Heroku, or "How To Eliminate Sysadminning"
#13Not related to the content of the article, but does anyone else get annoyed with sites that put some sort of onclick/mousedown handler on their links, presumably to track outbound clicks or something related?
This overrides the middle-click behavior of my browser to open the link in a new tab. I'm trying to open your outbound link in a new tab so I can continue to read your content AND later read the page being linked to; the analytics being surreptiously added to every link overrides and prevents this.
Re: Thank You Heroku, or "How To Eliminate Sysadminning"
#14Add php support pretty please
Why would one need this for PHP? Isn't PHP already pretty much upload and go?
You would want it for the same reason you would want it for any other language.
"upload and go" is a convenience feature of Heroku, not it's reason for existence. It does make it easier to deploy Ruby apps but, again, it's not the reason it exists.
Re: Thank You Heroku, or "How To Eliminate Sysadminning"
#15Heroku is great, no doubt about that. My only issue is the 'guilt factor': almost all of my use of Heroku has been for free (my cookingspace.com web site that I use to monitor my diet because I take blood thinners; test deploying prototypes; used it to write 3 articles about Heroku for DevX). I have had poor results getting customers to use Heroku. I tried twice, and both times the extra cost over running your own EC…
Costs that are represented in obvious dollar amounts with alternatives that have lower obvious dollar amounts tend to go over poorly with clients. The nebulous cost of more developer and admin time is something they can carefully ignore in their cost calculations.
I agree. Also, I suspect that if a deployed app is rarely accessed, then there is some spin up time to load a slug. Both customers noticed this effect that the first page load usually seemed slow to them. Same thing on AppEngine (a 'loading request' can take a while).
Bottom line is that people dream that their web app will attract millions of users, and they want to plan for outstanding success. While I am sure that Heroku must have customers with large user bases, the sweet spot seems to be for moderately sized web portals that you sometimes need to scale up on demand.
Re: Thank You Heroku, or "How To Eliminate Sysadminning"
#16I tried installing spree the other day, a rails shopping app, and I gave up after entering gem dependency hell and the no local file policy. Went faster on my own server with nginx+passenger.
Exact same experience yesterday. Weird.
Re: Thank You Heroku, or "How To Eliminate Sysadminning"
#17Heroku never goes down, and it eliminates the need to pay a sysadmin (or the time value of sysadminning yourself). Those are two bold, scary statements.
You're definitely correct about the first statement. It should be revised to "Heroku has a strong history of very little downtime." Regarding the second though, I truly believe that the cost + time savings are tremendous from using their platform vs administering your own early on in a startup product lifecycle.
In a perfect world heroku would be the ideal "pay later" option. I.e. you start out with them and once you outgrow their platform you simply hire the sysadmin then, and make him transplant the beautifully clean rails app onto your own infrastructure.
Except... reality is harsh and ugly.
You want the guy with the sysadmin foo on your team from as early as possible. Because if your thinking goes along the lines you just described then clearly you don't have him yet, nor someone who told you what slippery slope you're about to tie yourself to.
If you have the admin guy then he will find you a cost effective platform to start out with quite effortlessly. Which might be heroku in some cases, but is usually just a bunch of rented or virtual servers that he sets up over a weekend. In the latter case it might actually cost a few bucks more initially than the "heroku free plan" - but he'll explain to you in kind words why he thinks it's worth that in the midterm. And he'll probably be right.
If you don't have him, then heroku can't save you. Heroku will run your stuff for a while just until things get interesting and worthwhile load starts to build. That's the point where the sum of your mistakes brings it to its knees. Due to basic mistakes usually. Related to simple things like file descriptor limits, stuff about TCP connections, or a basic understanding of how disk i/o works and how to craft the SQL to make it not hurt so much.
At that point all you can hope for is that you're already profitable enough to afford not only that guy you skipped on initially, but rather his bigger, hairy brother, which is the only kind generally willing [and able] to take on "search & rescue" gigs. For an adequate sum.
At this point your friendly "pay-later" route has turned into a nasty "pay 10-20x now" roadblock. In an "Insert coin to continue" sort of way.
This is not about what heroku can or can not do. This is about what kind of skills you need on the team for a web-startup. Don't skip on the admin. Or rather, don't skip on at least one guy who has been doing the admin thing on a real live app for a bit and also during some not-so-good times.
Re: Thank You Heroku, or "How To Eliminate Sysadminning"
#18I'm seriously considering Heroku, for my test/learning projects, and am willing to pay a little. Blossom and Koi are good for me.
But one thing that is making me think about VPS instead of Heroku is the ability to run multiple apps from one VPS unless I really need the power.
Does Koi allow you to run multiple Rails apps/websites per Koi, or is it 1 per Koi?
Re: Thank You Heroku, or "How To Eliminate Sysadminning"
#19Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're definitely correct about the first statement. It should be revised to "Heroku has a strong history of very little downtime." Regarding the second though, I truly believe that the cost + time savings are tremendous from using their platform vs administering your own early on in a startup product lifecycle.
In a perfect world heroku would be the ideal "pay later" option. I.e. you start out with them and once you outgrow their platform you simply hire the sysadmin then , and make him transplant the beautifully clean rails app onto your own infrastructure. Except... reality is harsh and ugly. You want the guy with the sysadmin foo on your team from as early as possible. Because if your thinking goes along the lines you ju…
That's the point where the sum of your mistakes brings it to its knees. Due to basic mistakes usually. Related to simple things like file descriptor limits, stuff about TCP connections, or a basic understanding of how disk i/o works and how to craft the SQL to make it not hurt so much.
What if you are not a making these mistakes, how is Heroku (or another service like it) going to bring you to a harsh and ugly reality?
It seems Heroku is fine if I don't want to monitor my own sever all the time and deal with the maintenance that goes along with that.
Re: Thank You Heroku, or "How To Eliminate Sysadminning"
#20A bit off topic, but JumpPost (the site launched on Heroku that this article refers to) looks an awful lot like you ripped RentHop's design. You guys thinking about changing that anytime soon?
http://www.renthop.com/list
http://jumppost.com/apartments