My company does automatic setup too (https://circleci.com). However, we went in a different direction than Heroku, and allow people to nail down the exact version of their platform they want to use (for example, our users use over 30 different Ruby versions). We haven't needed the same flexibility for DBs and libraries, but I imagine that will come.
Why I left Heroku, and notes on my new AWS setup
181–190 of 231 posts
Re: Why I left Heroku, and notes on my new AWS setup
#182This 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…
Does having an identical staging environment help, or are these deploy errors transient/non-deterministic?
The latter, unfortunately. (I wish I had more details - but for one reason or another, it never seems to work, be it a bug in the deployment system or a host which is down.)
Dreams of an identical staging environment were somewhat shattered when the "free tier" plans went away. Plus, sometimes a new version will be deployed to 2 servers, and the 3rd one will be hanging on an update. These kinds of things are difficult to plan for and test, since intentionally messing up a deployment is rather difficult with PaaS.
Re: Why I left Heroku, and notes on my new AWS setup
#183Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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.
Re: Why I left Heroku, and notes on my new AWS setup
#184On my end I get a complete crash once a week when running with one dyno. The official response for support I got was to upgrade to two dynos. Apart from the PostgreSQL hosting, I'm not really happy with Heroku. Add to the random deploy breakage I've experienced mid-launch (not to mention it's slow as hell), I'm going to move back to my own servers.
So I take it you don't pay for the service? No offense but if I'm in management at Heroku I say to you "I'm very sorry to hear about that. We'll take your concerns into consideration [as soon as you have something to offer us in return]."
Re: Why I left Heroku, and notes on my new AWS setup
#185On my end I get a complete crash once a week when running with one dyno. The official response for support I got was to upgrade to two dynos. Apart from the PostgreSQL hosting, I'm not really happy with Heroku. Add to the random deploy breakage I've experienced mid-launch (not to mention it's slow as hell), I'm going to move back to my own servers.
So I take it you don't pay for the service? No offense but if I'm in management at Heroku I say to you "I'm very sorry to hear about that. We'll take your concerns into consideration [as soon as you have something to offer us in return]."
See my replies below. I currently spend $70/mo on Postgres and SSL support. I would up my dyno's but I don't see the point since one handles it just fine (minus the crashing).
Re: Why I left Heroku, and notes on my new AWS setup
#186Earlier quoted context omitted.
I pitched a book to No Starch and a few others, and they all said there wasn't enough demand...
I know Packt was looking for a Chef author a few months ago. I declined to work with them, but I'm working on an outline for a Chef/DevOps book to self-publish.
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.
Re: Why I left Heroku, and notes on my new AWS setup
#187When exactly do you bake a new AMI? On every Soundslice deploy?
For the record, we have a very similar production environment and we bake on every deploy. We have some tricks to make it as fast as possible though. A deployment takes 2-3 minutes with code changes and more with requirements changes. We then place it in the ELB server pool and pull out old machines if everything behaves correctly. Looking into autoscaling now.
Re: Why I left Heroku, and notes on my new AWS setup
#188I haven't seen a very good reason to go with Heroku over AWS in any relevant scenario. It seems like you're paying more for less.
Re: Why I left Heroku, and notes on my new AWS setup
#189Earlier quoted context omitted.
I know Packt was looking for a Chef author a few months ago. I declined to work with them, but I'm working on an outline for a Chef/DevOps book to self-publish.
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.
Re: Why I left Heroku, and notes on my new AWS setup
#190Earlier 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.
Overkill for now. But it's best to learn the tools you will need while things are still simple. You know how things should get set up and can ensure that what you're telling Puppet/Chef to do achieves that.
If you wait until you've got a more complex configuration, you're fighting both the tool syntax and system setup requirements. Not to mention the clock that's ticking and telling you that you needed to be all up and running yesterday.