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Heroku has been running a second copy of my scheduler instance

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Re: Heroku has been running a second copy of my scheduler instance

#91

Heroku has been an absolute dumpster fire. Every time their name comes up I can't help but mention that they deleted my account for inactivity, but have still been charging my credit card. No easy way to cancel because... they deleted my account.

Not necessarily easy, but you can dispute it with your credit card company.

Re: Heroku has been running a second copy of my scheduler instance

#92

Kinda refreshing - within the ever growing genre of stories about Heroku's downfall into junk status - to find such an article with a higher level of detail and analysis of the origins of the problem. There's one thing that somewhat surprised me though: this line: > "In 2018 Heroku was pretty much the only option for a newbie like me to get started with web-development" Was it? Really? I mean, I'm not saying the auth…

Let's say you have never deployed anything to production before, and you've worked through a tutorial in Rails or Django or whatever and just built your first web app, and it's 2018, what are your options?

There's the zoo of AWS. Maybe there's something there you can use - Lightsail came out I think in 2016 - but good luck trying to find it out of all the plethora of weirdly named services. Again, total beginner here, and AWS can be daunting even to experienced developers.

You can go with Linode or Digital Ocean. You would need to set up a VM with all the dependencies and make it secure. Oh and you'll need a database - should that sit on another VM? What about backup and restore? What about deployment? Sure, you can use Ansible, but that's yet another learning curve.

Render launched in 2019. Fly.io came out 2020. As far as I remember, there wasn't a competitor that offered the sheer convenience for the hobbyist beginner on the level of Heroku.

Re: Heroku has been running a second copy of my scheduler instance

#93
post #92

Kinda refreshing - within the ever growing genre of stories about Heroku's downfall into junk status - to find such an article with a higher level of detail and analysis of the origins of the problem. There's one thing that somewhat surprised me though: this line: > "In 2018 Heroku was pretty much the only option for a newbie like me to get started with web-development" Was it? Really? I mean, I'm not saying the auth…

Let's say you have never deployed anything to production before, and you've worked through a tutorial in Rails or Django or whatever and just built your first web app, and it's 2018, what are your options? There's the zoo of AWS. Maybe there's something there you can use - Lightsail came out I think in 2016 - but good luck trying to find it out of all the plethora of weirdly named services. Again, total beginner here…

I used a digital ocean ubuntu droplet with haproxy and certbot back when I first started off. Used their Postgres service for the database and only opened port 443 and 80 to public traffic. Droplet backups for backups if the vm needed and deployments were a manual git pull.

Sure a little complicated but there are plenty of good tutorials out there.

I would say Heroku for a new dev is not actually ideal. It hides way too much of the inner workings and makes it harder to learn about web development. I think it's more appropriate for a startup which just wants a ci/cd pipeline and some redundancy without investing that much time into it.

Re: Heroku has been running a second copy of my scheduler instance

#94
post #92

Kinda refreshing - within the ever growing genre of stories about Heroku's downfall into junk status - to find such an article with a higher level of detail and analysis of the origins of the problem. There's one thing that somewhat surprised me though: this line: > "In 2018 Heroku was pretty much the only option for a newbie like me to get started with web-development" Was it? Really? I mean, I'm not saying the auth…

Let's say you have never deployed anything to production before, and you've worked through a tutorial in Rails or Django or whatever and just built your first web app, and it's 2018, what are your options? There's the zoo of AWS. Maybe there's something there you can use - Lightsail came out I think in 2016 - but good luck trying to find it out of all the plethora of weirdly named services. Again, total beginner here…

Ten years before that, I rented a cheap dedicated server and learned to use Webmin and Virtualmin. And it wasn't particularly complicated, Virtualmin gave you everything you needed with minimal configuration and you could find plenty of help online for the rest.

And it gave you a certain idea of how it worked, instead of operating on a black box.

Re: Heroku has been running a second copy of my scheduler instance

#95
post #87

Even though it won't help you now, instead of celery-once I highly recommend using the celery-redbeat scheduler which uses a distributed lock to ensure that only one scheduler instance is active. It's plug&play and compatible with all the traditional task scheduling methods which beat supports.

That doesn't help in this particular case when the zombie node is running old code that can't be modified.

Re: Heroku has been running a second copy of my scheduler instance

#96
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, rely on yet another vendor, or do as I suggested except without any semblance of reliabiliy.

But there is no vendor lock-in here, VPS providers are interchangeable.

Sure, and the vendors the author mentions are interchangeable, too. Just at a different layer of the stack.

Re: Heroku has been running a second copy of my scheduler instance

#97
post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's say you have never deployed anything to production before, and you've worked through a tutorial in Rails or Django or whatever and just built your first web app, and it's 2018, what are your options? There's the zoo of AWS. Maybe there's something there you can use - Lightsail came out I think in 2016 - but good luck trying to find it out of all the plethora of weirdly named services. Again, total beginner here…

I used a digital ocean ubuntu droplet with haproxy and certbot back when I first started off. Used their Postgres service for the database and only opened port 443 and 80 to public traffic. Droplet backups for backups if the vm needed and deployments were a manual git pull. Sure a little complicated but there are plenty of good tutorials out there. I would say Heroku for a new dev is not actually ideal. It hides way…

Digital Ocean's Postgres service launched in 2019.

I mean sure, you can learn all the other bits and pieces and I have no doubt learning them is valuable, but for a novice who just wanted to get something out there - beyond a static website - Heroku was hard to beat. Sure, it got expensive fast, and that's when you should learn how to manage hosting on your own. But at that point you had more of an idea what you needed and why.

Re: Heroku has been running a second copy of my scheduler instance

#98
post #8

Clearly the author still hasn't learned his lesson: his "no more vendor lock" solution is another vendor(s) - which is always able to vendor-lock him, again. It is truly mind blowing on how many people keep falling for one of the oldest trick in IT : vendor lock-in. === No more vendor lock In 2018 Heroku was pretty much the only option for a newbie like me to get started with web-development. The landscape is very di…

> Heroku was pretty much the only option for a newbie like me to get started with web-development How, exactly? What happened in 2018 that somehow made it impossible to just host a website?

Plenty of VPS options, with free tiers, in 2018.

Re: Heroku has been running a second copy of my scheduler instance

#100
post #92

Kinda refreshing - within the ever growing genre of stories about Heroku's downfall into junk status - to find such an article with a higher level of detail and analysis of the origins of the problem. There's one thing that somewhat surprised me though: this line: > "In 2018 Heroku was pretty much the only option for a newbie like me to get started with web-development" Was it? Really? I mean, I'm not saying the auth…

Let's say you have never deployed anything to production before, and you've worked through a tutorial in Rails or Django or whatever and just built your first web app, and it's 2018, what are your options? There's the zoo of AWS. Maybe there's something there you can use - Lightsail came out I think in 2016 - but good luck trying to find it out of all the plethora of weirdly named services. Again, total beginner here…

Why is "learn more about how to properly host something" never an option for people? And in 2018! Suck it up and learn how to secure a VM, folks, especially if you're turning tutorials into production services. Most of those issues don't just go away when someone builds yet another expensive abstraction on top of a server, I promise.
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