Heroku Architecture (Ruby in the cloud) | Hacker News Reader

Heroku Architecture (Ruby in the cloud)

heroku.com

73 pointsropiku27 comments

I've been really excited for this for about a year now, and have been having a great time playing with the pure Git workflow. If you look at this problem in one direction (only does Ruby, won't kill the AppEngine), you're probably missing the point.

We were about to bring our apps to Engine Yard's Solo EC2 management system, and Heroku's essentially deprecated similar offerings from a bunch of companies all over the place.

I'm sure adding new technologies and languages will bring more people over in the future, but for now it seems like this platform could end up being a great reflection of the current state of the Ruby, with our preference for all things distributed and collaborative like cloud hosting and Git source control.

That looks really interesting...but what's with all the ruby-only stuff? I haven't seen enough of a reason to move from python to ruby, and they both seem like appropriate technologies for something like this.

I think the Ruby-only shtick is that they want to do one thing and do it well. There's enough of a Ruby community that they can serve that niche and do it well.

There's nothing so exceptional about what they're doing that it couldn't be done in Python with what is available (the exceptional part is that they execute well and are highly reliable). Basically, the benefit of Heroku is that they can keep extra hardware on hand for spikes and there's a decent assumption that, say, your site spikes to 300% of normal once a week, but that not all sites will be spiking at the same time. Therefore, you get more efficient utilization of resources.

But you could do this yourself - it would just mean that you would need to buy all the capacity to handle spikes while Heroku works off the assumption that part of that spike capacity can be shared since not all sites will spike at once.

> decent assumption that, say, your site spikes to 300% of normal once a week, but that not all sites will be spiking at the same time.

This reminds me of something.... what is it... oh yeah, the economy. It's probably a better assumption than some of the junk that went on to tank the economy, but I'd still be interested in learning more about spike distributions. Amazon probably has some good data.

I have played with heroku in the past(what is now herokugarden.com) and I have to say I have been keeping an eye on this. It seems they have abandoned the whole web-editor idea and focused solely on the ruby\rails hosting-in-the-cloud aspects. Good way to go IMHO. The web-based editor was cool and all, but most people still wouldn't use it and just upload their apps or use git.

I just registered for a beta-invite, so here goes!

The ruby/rails hosting-in-the-cloud is a much bigger "value-add" than editing in the browser. I've been using them for a while and really like the way they're headed.

Yes, they're Ruby/Rails-centric, but don't see why they have to stay there once they've established a real foothold in that market.

Does anyone know how much this is going to cost? Is it a premiumm on top of Ec2 or something like that?

At the moment, it's free. I've got a number of apps running, and I've got nothing but praise for Heroku.

From what I remember, their plan was to bill based on usage, so if you have a quiet month, you get a small(ish) bill. Things get busy; you pay more.

I'm impressed, and that doesn't happen so often.

The ruby and database lock-in need to go away - then you have a winner, hands down.

This is actually my only recommendation to you guys: Don't limit yourselves to being the AppEngine for rails. Open up a bit and you'll wipe the floor with RightScale & friends, too.

From this architectural overview it looks like they're ready for it. Presumably a "dyno" could run anything that speaks http.

That would be fantastic. It would be so cool if you could launch a python, or even java dyno. I think most webapps could be structured to fit into this architecture, with the caveat of using ruby specific management tools such as rake.

I highly doubt they'll want to or be able to spend much time getting other "dyno"'s working until they've got a solid customer base with RoR. No reason to spread themselves too thin until they can demonstrate they can serve their customers well with what they already have.

That said, I do hope they eventually will.

I love that it's on ec2. This allows me to do things like setup a lucene/solr EC2 instance and talk to it from my heroku app with minimal latency.

This is good stuff.

I like it!, they are going to be huge!, if they add Python + Django and maybe PHP they'd be the most awesome service.

Routing mesh? Dyno grid? Compiled slugs? A Dyno has SEVEN layers? Grey font on grey background?

Man I feel old.

Don't care about their style, its a very nice service, I wish somebody do it for Django+Python (or maybe a improvement to Google Appengine)

OR you could just go the old way and buy hosting and use something that scales well.

Care to elaborate on "use something that scales well"? It seems that's exactly what heroku is offering, no?

For example, say you create a simple php website which has a single database. That could be a problem when it comes to scaling.

Choosing something other than a database, and something other than php may make far more sense than something that 'helps php database apps scale'.

So, you're suggesting that joe sixpack should rather build his own heroku?

No, just that there are other ways to solve scaling that can be as simple as changing framework/language/db/architecture etc

As I said though, more likely I'm just getting old...

that can be as simple as changing framework/language/db/architecture

Well, sometimes it's as simple as that. But usually it is not.

Sorry, but you're not making so much sense here...

Could it be you're just getting old? ;)

Bad example, as "simple PHP websites with a single database" often are pretty easy to adapt to simple PHP websites with multiple databases, and those scale quite well. Better than "PHP websites without databases", and probably better than Django too.

Scaling's really in the architecture, not the technology used. You're pretty well off as long as you don't do dumb things like store data in files on the webserver or use a singleton/global database connection.

Looks awesome. Great website too. I'm having too much fun with the Dyno Grid page: http://heroku.com/how/dyno_grid

i'm one of the lucky few hosting a few sites (not live yet) on the heroku platform and i can say that it's the best deployment experience i've ever had (prior to heroku i hosted my old startup on engineyard). literally all you need to do is a git push and your app is live in the cloud. i will speak more about scaling when i have an app that needs it, but for now the ease of deployment has got me hooked.

Are there any high-volume apps using this yet?

that page is borderline unreadable.

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