Ugh! this is just a puff from heroku. Yes, I'm sure it's a great tech, but we have no idea of whether it is accurate or not. This piece has no analysis, no comparisons, and certainly no independence or objectivity.
How Art.sy survived a NYTimes.com homepage launch with Heroku + MongoHQ
21–30 of 39 posts
Re: How Art.sy survived a NYTimes.com homepage launch with Heroku + MongoHQ
#22I'd love to deploy on Heroku, but it's so dramatically more expensive than aws. For a startup, is it really worth that additional cost?
I think it's totally worth it. Right now it still costs us less than a developer to run on Heroku and not that long ago we were 3 of those devs. I think having our front-ends on EC2 along with setting up memcached/mongo/nginx/etc ourselves is a much higher upfront cost. Then there're traffic spikes. Pretty hard to deploy to bare metal or EC2 instantly without building your own Heroku-like system.
Well this just shows how little you know about deployments.
Using something like Hudson/Jenkins can make deployments simple borderline trivial and EC2 supports ElasticBeanstalk which makes deployments a breeze.
Re: How Art.sy survived a NYTimes.com homepage launch with Heroku + MongoHQ
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
Heroku is really just AWS with convenience, isn't it? I'm not sure what else they do - but I guess that "convenience" is worth it for some.
Is it possible to launch using just a single dyno and heavy caching/optimization?
Heroku employee here, don't abuse the free. It's there for a design/prototyping/staging and as long as people don't abuse it will stay that way.
Re: How Art.sy survived a NYTimes.com homepage launch with Heroku + MongoHQ
#24I'd love to deploy on Heroku, but it's so dramatically more expensive than aws. For a startup, is it really worth that additional cost?
Heroku is really just AWS with convenience, isn't it? I'm not sure what else they do - but I guess that "convenience" is worth it for some.
Really? Do you work on your own car? Is it because you think you aren't smart enough to do it or because you think that spending your time on other efforts is a more valuable configuration?
AWS is the electric company. Heroku tends to be the circuitry, outlets and light switches for your house. You may take it for granted because it looks so simple, but it's the simplicity that makes it great.
As PaaS providers begin to mature and turn attention to more worthy challenges (like geo-agnostic deployments, easier scaling, for example), then their value is only going to increase.
Re: How Art.sy survived a NYTimes.com homepage launch with Heroku + MongoHQ
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
Heroku is really just AWS with convenience, isn't it? I'm not sure what else they do - but I guess that "convenience" is worth it for some.
Really? Do you work on your own car? Is it because you think you aren't smart enough to do it or because you think that spending your time on other efforts is a more valuable configuration? AWS is the electric company. Heroku tends to be the circuitry, outlets and light switches for your house. You may take it for granted because it looks so simple, but it's the simplicity that makes it great. As PaaS providers begin…
Right, I was not disrespecting Heroku in any way - I truly do not know what product they sell. That being said, great analogy.
Re: How Art.sy survived a NYTimes.com homepage launch with Heroku + MongoHQ
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think it's totally worth it. Right now it still costs us less than a developer to run on Heroku and not that long ago we were 3 of those devs. I think having our front-ends on EC2 along with setting up memcached/mongo/nginx/etc ourselves is a much higher upfront cost. Then there're traffic spikes. Pretty hard to deploy to bare metal or EC2 instantly without building your own Heroku-like system.
Well this just shows how little you know about deployments. Using something like Hudson/Jenkins can make deployments simple borderline trivial and EC2 supports ElasticBeanstalk which makes deployments a breeze.
> Well this just shows how little you know about deployments.
Exactly.
Which is that much more I know about shipping working products which make my clients money.
Re: How Art.sy survived a NYTimes.com homepage launch with Heroku + MongoHQ
#27No offense to the Art.sy team, but this is just Heroku marketing copy. It lacks the detail we typically see on these sorts of high scalability "how we did it" posts. Non-trivial applications scale non-trivially, and when someone comes along claiming they have solved the scalability problem with the push of a button I am instantly skeptical. I would really like to see more details about their architecture, especially…
I wrote a blog post on our overall tech stack here: http://artsy.github.com/blog/2012/10/10/artsy-technology-sta... Our MongoHQ integration is very straightforward - MongoHQ provides us with a replica set and we configure it as any other MongoDB database. Feel free to ask any specific questions.
> we use SendGrid and MailChimp to send e-mail.
Why do you use both SendGrid and MailChimp for email?
Can you talk about the different use cases that require using the different email services?
Re: How Art.sy survived a NYTimes.com homepage launch with Heroku + MongoHQ
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wrote a blog post on our overall tech stack here: http://artsy.github.com/blog/2012/10/10/artsy-technology-sta... Our MongoHQ integration is very straightforward - MongoHQ provides us with a replica set and we configure it as any other MongoDB database. Feel free to ask any specific questions.
> we use SendGrid and MailChimp to send e-mail. Why do you use both SendGrid and MailChimp for email? Can you talk about the different use cases that require using the different email services?
I don't know about how they do it, but I use both currently.
SendGrid for one-off emails (ie. a user signs up for an account, their welcome email).
MailChimp for email marketing (we send newsletters via them).
MailChimp has since released Mandrill that caters to the one-off emails, but we were already with SendGrid by then.
Re: How Art.sy survived a NYTimes.com homepage launch with Heroku + MongoHQ
#29I'd read this with a grain of salt. I remember looking at art.sy via the NYTimes link and thinking the site was terribly slow. I still find it moderately slow. I am not sure they really need mixpanel, google analytics, and kissmetrics, on every click and the api calls should take less than the 1-4 seconds I am seeing.
dblock from Art.sy here. The analytics comment is totally fair - we spent a lot of time looking at all kinds of stats as we keep experimenting and it needs to be trimmed down to 1 (or none :)). Our average API response is 380ms. It's about 20x too long as far as I am concerned. It's not Heroku's fault to be fair, there's a mix of Ruby code, database queries and some not so easy to optimize math in some cases. It's de…
my first (cold cache) load of the homepage took about 7-8 seconds to be usable but the rest feels fluid.
don't be discouraged, after the initial load it performs better than most sites that look this nice.
Re: How Art.sy survived a NYTimes.com homepage launch with Heroku + MongoHQ
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
> we use SendGrid and MailChimp to send e-mail. Why do you use both SendGrid and MailChimp for email? Can you talk about the different use cases that require using the different email services?
I don't know about how they do it, but I use both currently. SendGrid for one-off emails (ie. a user signs up for an account, their welcome email). MailChimp for email marketing (we send newsletters via them). MailChimp has since released Mandrill that caters to the one-off emails, but we were already with SendGrid by then.
I see. What make SendGrid better for one-off emails and MailChimp better for email marketing?