Heroku Dynos Unable to Start

https://status.heroku.com/incidents/642

by mparramon • 12 years ago

77 22 12 years ago

status.heroku.com

shravan• 12 years ago

Request queueing on New Relic is going haywire on our app right now.

maxisnow• 12 years ago

We had a similar problem on our app, but were able to restart with more dynos.

stefangomez• 12 years ago

PX dynos seem to have not been affected

sprite3• 12 years ago

I can't even get in to New Relic.

guywithabike• 12 years ago

This was caused by their scheduled maintenance: https://status.heroku.com/incidents/641

I think they jinxed themselves: "Running apps will not be affected."

sparkman554• 12 years ago

I know it's popular to be a "developer-centric" organization these days, but please, please, don't schedule risky maintenance operations for 10 AM on a Monday, when your tools are in heavy usage.

Every SaaS product I've built has analyzed traffic, and performed migrations/deployments at off-hours (generally, after midnight in our dominant time zone). In this case, the outage may have resulted in hundreds (thousands?) of paged administrators across the world, but at least fewer end-users would have been affected.

Also, at scale, it's a good idea to deploy to a single cluster/zone first, and check error rates before deploying to the larger environment.

It's pretty scary that the 'professionals' to whom I've trusted my business aren't more savvy when it comes to high availability...

kawsper• 12 years ago

Are you sure that Heroku is peaking 10 AM on a Monday?

I believe they have off-hours, but as an international product it could be interesting to know when. I know a lot of European products with European users that all depend on Heroku.

sparkman554• 12 years ago

I'm not sure that Heroku is peaking at 10 AM on Monday, but I'm reasonably sure it's not a traffic nadir for them.

For example, 6 PM on Saturday PDT is 1 AM on Sunday GMT and 9 AM on Saturday in Hong Kong. This would almost certainly be a time of lower deployments / requests globally.

zzen• 12 years ago

They have a separate EU hosting region that has separate maintenance (and uptime that's actually significantly better then US region): https://status.heroku.com/uptime?region=EU

So yeah, it was a lame time to schedule maintenance.

pardner2• 12 years ago

There is no reason they cannot perform maintenance for US zones and EU zones at different times and avoid M-F mid-day for everyone. So it's probably "just easier" for Heroku this way.

sprite3• 12 years ago

Started getting tons of emails from end users. Went to investigate and was greeted with this:

! ! Heroku has temporarily disabled this feature, please try again shortly. ! See http://status.heroku.com for current Heroku platform status.

Hopefully they will be backup up soon. Also wonder if we will get any sort of reimbursement? I currently spend around $3k/month with Heroku.

pardner2• 12 years ago

Compounding the issue of irresponsibly scheduling maintenance for US zones mid-day in the US, they ALSO broke ability to scale worker processes to zero, so there was literally NO way to wind your app down and prevent worker jobs from firing off.

When the platform started getting wonky we shut off our worker dynos so the system would not fire off emails while the system is in a known-screwed-up state.

The console said workers were set to zero.

But... in our logs we watched the (supposedly off) workers continue to fire off.

Nice FUBAR all around, Heroku.

silasb• 12 years ago

Makes zero sense to do an 2 hour update on a Monday at 10 AM PDT.

Horrible horrible timing. I'll likely be getting blamed for this since I recommended Heroku.

alrs4• 12 years ago

Do you want to start working night shifts? The people who know how do this stuff command six-figure salaries and are highly in demand.

Every startup is looking for the design/dev/ops unicorn. You want to start trying to find nocturnal unicorns?

stevepike• 12 years ago

These don't need to be night shifts. Back when I worked in bigco, we had very competent ops teams around the world - we'd even send developers abroad for 3-12 month periods to train with them and share information.

Smaller companies use Heroku so we don't have to build the same expertise in house. They're able to charge a premium not because their developers have to work crazy hours, but because there's a certain base cost to having these kinds of distributed teams.

sprite3• 12 years ago

Seems everything is returning to normal now. Here is a New Relic screenshot from the outage: http://i.imgur.com/WB7U2mz.png

Heroku Dynos Unable to Start

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