New Heroku Dynos Get 2.5GB RAM

https://devcenter.heroku.com/changelog-items/696

by mrsflibble • 11 years ago

30 58 11 years ago

devcenter.heroku.com

nieksand• 11 years ago

Neat! That's five hundred MB more than my cellphone.

jtchang• 11 years ago

Is there anyone using Heroku that wishes they didn't start out using it? A lot of my friends in hacker schools end up using Heroku which I think is great but later on don't understand how to really deploy an application outside of Heroku's platform.

Had pricing ever been an issue for any of you?

liquidise• 11 years ago

Your question is framed at someone who "learned" deployments via heroku. I will answer it from a different perspective. I recently started at a company who began their staging and production hosting on heroku. I would have a very hard time recommending it to anyone.

In addition to uncompetitive pricing, the "add-on" architecture is itself expensive and inflexible. Redis feels artificially limited, and the scheduler's timing options are, i kid you not: Daily, Hourly, Every 10 minutes.

To people who know linux hosting: avoid heroku. To people who don't know linux hosting: spend some time gaining a serviceable linux hosting skillset.

jday• 11 years ago

don't use heroku's scheduler - it's a best effort scheduler that doesn't guarantee it will even execute your jobs at the times you set.

the company i work for runs a rails app and we've ported almost everything over to running with the clock gem instead of with heroku's scheduler.

Donwangugi• 11 years ago

Any advise on some good tutorials? Heroku makes it easy for me to get going.

lylepstein• 11 years ago

Yeah. In my experience, Heroku starts being a drag at moderate scale:

1. You still have to worry about your systems, as Heroku has its own outages, not to mention the other pieces of your infrastructure like DBs, queues, etc.

2. Architecture flexibility goes way down, as vertical scaling isn't a real option on Heroku (and a surprising number of problems can be easily solved in the short term by just throwing big iron at them).

3. The premium you pay on the hardware you're using starts to add up, especially when you're in the realm of "let's solve this problem in the short term by throwing machines at it."

Of course, that's not to say you can't use a hybrid approach of, say AWS + Heroku to solve some of these, but it's a bigger hurdle to clear if you've outsourced all your systems work to Heroku from the beginning. You suddenly find yourself having to figure this stuff out at some level of scale, vs growing it organically and learning as you go.

cpursley2• 11 years ago

Yeah, this is what I'm doing. Using Heroku for their Postgres offering and AWS with convox.io (part of the current ycombinator batch) for deploying web services to AWS.

benologist• 11 years ago

Hosting is trending towards containers and a Heroku-like approach all over the place, it may not really matter if manually provisioning and maintaining servers stops being popular knowledge.

Pricing can be great if you're using a high-throughput language - I had a sustained 8 - 12k requests per second across 8 dynos years ago with nodejs.

zeeshanm3• 11 years ago

The truth is you can pretty much do everything with AWS EBS that you can do with Heroku. I wish I knew about EBS earlier. But I don't thik EBS existed when I first began using Heroku.

It was mainly for throwaway projects. But you never know your throwaway project may start getting traction. And before you realize you may end up owing hundreds of dollars to Heroku.

gkop• 11 years ago

Do mean Elastic Beanstalk? "EBS" is Elastic Block Storage, that doesn't make sense in this context.

jurre• 11 years ago

I'm wondering what people need this much RAM for? Wouldn't it make more sense to just spin up more dyno's with fewer instances of your app running on each dyno?

beat• 11 years ago

Depends on what you're doing. I've worked on systems where we had 72gb and 96gb of RAM, and we tuned them within an inch of their lives.

But hey, 512k is good enough for anyone, Bill Gates once said.

edit: If I was doing something memory-intensive or performance-intensive, I wouldn't be on Heroku anyway.

johnward3• 11 years ago

I'm not that familiar with dynos but I can see how people would need even more than 2.5gb for specific jobs. We push the limits of servers with 512gb of RAM regularly.

chkuendig• 11 years ago

I'd assume its for worker dynos with a process which cant easily scale horizontally.

Kiro• 11 years ago

I'm running a game server in node.js where the app's state is persistent so can't really so can't really spin up more dynos. The whole server lives in that particular instance.

PhantomGremlin• 11 years ago

If you want to know, in general, what Heroku is, don't bother with their web pages. It's marketing fluff.

The first paragraph in Wikipedia is a concise explanation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heroku

passiveincome3• 11 years ago

Am I correct that this represents a 10x cost over an IaaS provider like Digital Ocean? What features in the Heroku platform justify that? Not trolling, but looking for some brief and logical input that'll give me that 'aha' moment

detaro4• 11 years ago

Takes away quite a bit of administration work, which isn't exactly free either, especially if you don't have the expertise for it in your team.

Especially for smaller projects deploying them on heroku instead of worrying (and spending time on) about setup, deployment, patches, ... is an attractive option.

res0nat0r• 11 years ago

Dead simple stack deployment and automation. People are very willing to pay 10x the amount just to git init, git push and heroku add apps to their stack without worrying about anything else under the hood.

alexchamberlain• 11 years ago

Just try it I'd say. Professionally, I do no Web development and software often runs on big iron machines. I tried out Heroku to inspire me on where I want my deployment process to be, and I might use it for the odd hobby project at home.

eli• 11 years ago

Isn't Digital Ocean just a VPS provider? I'd encourage you to give Heroku a try (it's free to play with). It's pretty cool that with really minimal planning on your part you can "git push heroku" and have a working app.

I don't know if this is an "aha" moment for you -- it might depend on how much you enjoy provisioning servers yourself -- but when it works it's pretty cool.

I suspect there are people who are running apps "themselves" on heroku that would otherwise require them to pay a server administrator.

sethd• 11 years ago

Correct, AWS, Azure, etc would be considered IaaS providers not Digital Ocean.

passiveincome3• 11 years ago

That's the disconnect for me. There have to be prebuilt Amazon AMIs with push to deploy functionality for various stack flavors. I guess the simplicity and allure of Heroku's git integration makes it easy for developers to forego research on those. It still seems one hell of a price to pay especially when coupled with vendor lock-in (Disclaimer: I don't know if Heroku PaaS locks you in as much as say, GAE)

mark242• 11 years ago

That's fine for simple one-off apps that don't require serious infrastructure, but Heroku is just ridiculous with its pricing if you need any kind of complexity.

I can burn through 1GB of Redis cache really easily; on Heroku, that's $200 a month. On AWS a cache.t2.small instance is $16 a month. The same for SQL space, disk storage, etc., once you're past a certain point Heroku becomes just unbelievably expensive.

dikaiosune• 11 years ago

https://github.com/progrium/dokku

That gets you git push deployment, and runs just fine on DO. You're still responsible for hardening your VPSs, but DO has some fairly good guides for that too.

bdcravens3• 11 years ago

You can have the best of both worlds with Cloud66. (git-based deployment, but you pay a small fee - $19 first server, $9 additional) and it targets cloud provider of your choice, with instance sizes you choose. (no I'm not a Cloud66 employee, but happy with their service)

amorphid• 11 years ago

Basically it comes down to time. I used to run a small business that depended on a Rails app. It was much easier to let Heroku manage the headaches of sys admin type duties than to manage servers myself. Below a certain scale, the money cost of using a platform-as-a-service like Heroku is cheaper than the dollar cost of managing servers and/or having an ops person.

superuser2• 11 years ago

"git push origin master" is effectively 100% of your DevOps. Running a web application reliably and at scale on IaaS requires effort and skill; Heroku will make it so you effectively don't have to have those skills or spend that effort, for a fee. Cheaper than hiring a DevOps team.

Most large tech companies with an infrastructure/DevOps team are trying to create an "internal Heroku" - and, at best, coming pretty close.

matchu2• 11 years ago

Heroku's value-add is that you don't need a system administrator: if they support the services your app needs, then they automate system administration for you.

Digital Ocean will sell you a VPS (essentially a machine) and grant you root-level access to it. You can run whatever you want, and deploy and manage it however you want.

Heroku will sell you a dyno (essentially a worker process) and grant you access to a set of deployment and management tools. You push your application code up to Heroku, and it automatically sets up the front-facing web server, the database, the cache service, etc., according to the add-ons you've selected. If you need to scale up, just purchase more dynos.

For complex apps, Heroku might not meet your needs and you might want some VPSs instead. In terms of price, though, you'd need to include system administration man-hours when comparing.

67726e• 11 years ago

Not as feature rich as Heroku, but AWS' Elastic Beanstalk was so much easier for me to get my Java/Spring application up and running. I had endless headaches on Heroku. Elastic Beanstalk was simple upload a WAR and off to the races. Considering most folks probably wind up with AWS as a deployment target and EB is at no additional cost over the normal AWS costs, it's probably worth looking into right off the bat.

airza• 11 years ago

I wonder if the 2 cores presented are dedicated on DO?

It's all kind of opaque.

biot• 11 years ago

Digital Ocean, Linode, etc. are do-it-yourself platforms. If you have the time and knowledge to install, configure, secure, monitor, etc. etc. all the services that go into a typical application, then spending the time yourself will save you money.

On the flip side, if you have the money but lack time, knowledge, or desire to manage all that complexity just pay Heroku to do it for you... or any other PaaS for that matter.

I've never used Heroku, but long ago I reached a point where dealing with hardware, services, networking, server racks, etc. got really boring. Today, I expect computing resources to be little more than appliances where I can effectively say "Here's the code I want you to run. Make it happen." and not have to even think about firewalls, scalability, failover, backups, software conflicts/compatibility, security updates, and a hundred other things. If you're managing all that yourself, you're basically doing a job that a computer ought to be doing on your behalf based on a specification you've provided.

felicianotech• 11 years ago

Don't forget that with Docker, Vagrant, Salt, Puppet, StackScripts, etc you can turn DigitalOcean or Linode into your own platform. Best of both worlds.

coldtea• 11 years ago

What features in the Heroku platform justify that?

Not having to care about deployment that much.

hkmurakami• 11 years ago

It reduces the number of engineers you have to hire to maintain your DO / AWS deployments.

As engineering talent becomes more scarce and expensive, the appeal of such a solution ironically increases.

dlss2• 11 years ago

PaaS solutions are worth more than IaaS I think -- someone is applying security patches, autoscaling your app, load balancing, etc. For a more apples to apples comparison:

It's 5x the cost of Elastic Beanstalk... 250 / (0.067 * 24 * 365 / 12) = 5.11 -- though this is misleading because the closest instance was an m3.medium, which has 3 vcpus and 3.75gb of ram. You can also get a major discount if you go reserved.

It's 0.68x the cost of App Engine F4 instances (the biggest available).. 250 / (0.20 * 2.5 * 24 * 365 / 12), though those only have 1G of ram, so that's assuming you somehow buy 2.5 of them :p

It's 2.2x the cost of AWS Lambda... 250 / ((0.000001667 + 0.000002501) * 10 * 60 * 60 * 24 * 365 / 12) = 2.28, though this is misleading because it'm adding up a 1.5gb instance and a 1gb instance. Also it's likely much cheaper as Lambda only charges you for used time, and almost all traffic loads are TOD / DOW dependent.

passiveincome3• 11 years ago

It seems like they still struggle with Security exploits--It's not a perfect system. For example:

https://blog.heroku.com/archives/2013/1/9/password_hijacking...

Also, you could get pretty solid protection and faster response time with something like unattended-upgrades

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/AutomaticSecurityUpdates

I think the value proposition mostly lies in the autoscaling, but seems like a waste in aggregate since most apps never hit any sort of scale.

milest• 11 years ago

I started with Heroku because it was so fast to get started. The documentation is very good and there are a lot of features that have allowed me to spend more time on building our app as opposed to doing devops/sysadmin. Some things I can do with one command: zero downtime deploy, rollback a release, add/remove dynos, provision a database. The list goes on. I've had several aha moments. My first rollback was a pretty big deal. I had a bunch of dynos running (12 or so) and I pushed a bad deploy. With one command, I was running the previous (working) version of the app. Actually, it was more like a "phew" moment.

Everyone here is right about the costs. It's very expensive. Especially compared to AWS and DO. But how much is your time worth to you? If I have to spend an extra $300 a month on hosting, that's fine--as long as I'm saving more than, say, 3 hours of time not doing sys admin. The dynos are expensive, but you don't have to provision machines and setup autoscaling groups. The database is expensive, but backups and upgrades take only minutes. The addons are all expensive, but... you get the idea.

I've run into limitations of Heroku and we now use AWS as well. I really like AWS, but it's a lot more work. The documentation takes more effort to read, initial setup is more complicated (AMI, IAM roles, Elastic IP, key pairs, etc). AWS is cheaper and the product is great and it does things Heroku can't, but I spend much more time on it.

johnward3• 11 years ago

Off topic: What's the best free alternative for small side projects?

detaro4• 11 years ago

Closest thing with a "full" free tier I know about is OpenShift. (For some stuff, heroku's free tier still can work out fine)

jslakro• 11 years ago

Yeah. I think Heroku is the best choice right now. A web dyno and a worker dyno running 18h/day for free

amalag• 11 years ago

AWS opsworks is free, you pay for the instances. So a small app can be free with their free tier for one year.

cpursley2• 11 years ago

convox.io is pretty awesome for deploying docker applications to AWS ~ part of the current ycombinator batch.

bdcravens3• 11 years ago

Worth noting that you can get 16GB RAM on AWS or Digital Ocean using Cloud66 and have almost the same deployment experience, for less.

New Heroku Dynos Get 2.5GB RAM

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