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it_user7899 - PeerSpot reviewer
Owner at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
Consultant
Heroku vs NodeJitsu vs Appfog

For the next few months, I’ll be working with the team at LocalRuckus, building a new Node.js API and application.  As a small shop with no dedicated Sys Admin or Dev Ops, its essential that we find Node.js hosting that is flexible, fast, and cost-effective.  I’ve been considering three major players in the Node.js hosting scene, Heroku, Nodejitsu, and Appfog.  There are some good comparisons out there (I especially like Daniel Saewitz’s article), but I wanted to share my 2 cents.

Value for Development

Heroku provides a great feature for development/sandbox apps – your first dyno is FREE.  Combine this with the starter Postgres package, and you can have a development version of you app up and running for $0/month.

Nodejitsu does not offer a free tier, so you are on the hook for paying for pet projects, etc.  That said, their pricing starts at $9/mo for a micro package, and scales up pretty gently from there.

Appfog provides a pretty great package for trying out an app.  You can provision your database, caching server, queue server, and application servers in a few clicks, all managed from one central dashboard.

Winner:  Appfog

Value for Production

Heroku pricing scales linearly with your traffic.  Using a simple slider, you can add new dynos to your application.  Each new dyno runs $35/mo, however, there is no commitment – you can scale up for brief spikes, and scale down if traffic subsides.

Nodejitsu and Appfog, on the other hand have fixed monthly prices.

Nodejitsu prices based on drones, which seem to offer 256MB RAM and processing power roughly equivalent to half a heroku dyno.

Appfog prices based on RAM, which creates a bit of a problem.  While 2GB of memory can be had for $20/mo, moving up to 4GB is a rather steep $100/mo.

Winner: Heroku

Deployment

Heroku – Deploy to a git repository

Appfog – Use the downloadable af tool to push updates

NodeJitsu – Use the jitsu tool or git integration.

Winner: Nodejitsu

Database

Heroku leverages expertise in Postgres, providing plans that scale with your application, including free database levels for getting started.  Production databases support 1TB of data, starting at $50/month.  If you prefer another database platform, Add-Ons are available for Redis, Mongo, Couchdb, ClearDB, JustOneDB, and Amazon RDS.

Nodejitsu continues to take a fairly minimalist approach, with no built-in database.  They provide Add-Ons for Mongo, Redis, and CouchDb.

Appfog allows you to use your service instances to host Redis, Mongo, Postgres, or MySql databases.  They also provide add-ons for Mongo and ClearDB.  The main knock here is that your database shares the processing and memory quotas with your other services, and I’m skeptical that such an approach could support a high traffic app.

Winner: Heroku. Production quality Postgres, with great Add-Ons for a variety of other databases.

Other Languages

Heroku Nodejitsu Appfog
  • Ruby
  • Java
  • Python
  • Clojure
  • Scala
  • Play
    None
  • Ruby
  • Java
  • Python
  • Php

Tie: Appfog & Heroku. Appfog’s PHP support opens a lot of opportunities (such as hosting WordPress), however, Appfog seems to have trouble keeping their runtimes up to date. As of July 2013, Node.js was only up to version 8. Heroku provides good language options, and a serious commitment to keeping the runtimes up to date.

Other Considerations and Final Thoughts

An important consideration for many node apps is web socket support.  Nodejitsu has it, the others don’t.  If you need this feature, your choice is clear.  At this point, Heroku’s flexibility, large community, and great add-ons make it my go-to for applications, however, I think Appfog has put together a great offering, and I’m looking forward to using it more in the future.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
Perez  Cato - PeerSpot reviewer
Software Engineer at Infosource Solutions
Real User
Top 10
Helps in development environment but configuration is complex
Pros and Cons
  • "We use Heroku to run generic data. We also use it for our customer development environment. It helps us to build and test websites."
  • "The tool's configuration is complex."

What is our primary use case?

We use Heroku to run generic data. We also use it for our customer development environment. It helps us to build and test websites. 

What needs improvement?

The tool's configuration is complex. 

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been using the solution for three years. 

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

I rate Heroku's stability an eight out of ten. 

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

I rate the product's scalability a five out of ten. My company has 10-15 users for the solution. 

How was the initial setup?

I rate the product's setup an eight out of ten. The deployment of lightweight applications gets completed in a minute, while heavy applications can take around 10 minutes to complete. 

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

I rate the tool's pricing a three out of ten. 

What other advice do I have?

I rate Heroku a six out of ten. 

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

Public Cloud

If public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud, which cloud provider do you use?

Amazon Web Services (AWS)
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
Buyer's Guide
Heroku
October 2024
Learn what your peers think about Heroku. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: October 2024.
814,649 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Senior programmer at a tech vendor with 51-200 employees
Real User
Continuous integration, simple deployment, and beneficial application
Pros and Cons
  • "The most valuable feature of Heroku is the continuous integration and applications it provides."
  • "We have to do daily restarts of some processes, which is annoying, and the support for custom CI could be better."

What is our primary use case?

We are using Heroku to create applications for the education sector.

What is most valuable?

The most valuable feature of Heroku is the continuous integration and applications it provides.

What needs improvement?

We have to do daily restarts of some processes, which is annoying, and the support for custom CI could be better.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been using Heroku for approximately 10 years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

The solution is stable.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

Heroku has been scalable. We have not had any problem.

We have approximately 200 people in my organization.

How are customer service and support?

I have used the support a few times and my experience has been good.

How was the initial setup?

The deployment of Heroku is easy, it did not take a lot of time.

What about the implementation team?

I sometimes do the implementation of the solution for my customers and there are times they have done the process themself.

We have two engineers for the support of this solution.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

The price of Heroku could be less expensive.

What other advice do I have?

My advice to others is for them to always look for alternatives because there could be something better on the market, such as better performance.

I rate Heroku an eight out of ten.

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

Public Cloud
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
Director at Imaginedone
Real User
Good pricing, highly scalable, very easy to set up, and allows us to focus on the functionality that we need and takes care of everything else
Pros and Cons
  • "It is easy to deploy applications, and we don't need to bother about software updates on the server. We don't need to bother about machines, servers, and hardware. We only need to care about the system and functionality that we need or want to develop. They take care of everything else. It provides high availability. It is a pretty good solution that provides everything that we need. It has everything that we need to run our applications. We have many different applications, and we generate three million bills for a company in Brazil. We see more than a billion requests per day in another application. Everything works just fine, and it is very good."
  • "Their support is good, but they can improve their response time."

What is our primary use case?

Our clients use it to deploy the production, development, and staging environments. Its version depends on our clients' needs. Usually, it is a customized system that needs to be scaled.

How has it helped my organization?

For a client, we pay for one computer for running the application. When we have to generate their bills, we scale up to 100 computers, and we are able to generate three million bills in five minutes. Before using Heroku, it took them 10 hours to generate these three million bills.

What is most valuable?

It is easy to deploy applications, and we don't need to bother about software updates on the server. We don't need to bother about machines, servers, and hardware. We only need to care about the system and functionality that we need or want to develop. They take care of everything else. It provides high availability. 

It is a pretty good solution that provides everything that we need. It has everything that we need to run our applications. We have many different applications, and we generate three million bills for a company in Brazil. We see more than a billion requests per day in another application. Everything works just fine, and it is very good.

What needs improvement?

Their support is good, but they can improve their response time.

For how long have I used the solution?

We are a partner of Heroku since 2009.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

Its stability is very good. In the last few years, we had only one problem with stability where we couldn't log in to their administrative control panel, but it did not impact the running of the application. 

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

Its scalability is very good.

How are customer service and technical support?

We don't need to talk to them a lot. Five years ago, we needed their help because we had a memory issue with an application, and they helped by email. The response was very good, but it was not as much on-time as phone support. Their support has improved since they have been acquired by Salesforce.

How was the initial setup?

It is very easy to set up. You have the application up and running with just two commands. It takes 20 seconds. That's why Heroku is very good.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

Its price is very good.

What other advice do I have?

If you want to use Heroku and all of its functionalities, you need to understand how to develop an application to run it in the cloud.

I would rate Heroku a ten out of ten. It is a good tool.

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

Public Cloud

If public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud, which cloud provider do you use?

Other
Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer: Partner
PeerSpot user
it_user9303 - PeerSpot reviewer
Engineer at a tech vendor with 51-200 employees
Vendor
All That Cloud: Amazon, Google App Engine, Windows Azure, Heroku, Jelastic

You wanna be in the cloud? You have plenty of options. I’ve evaluated or used many of them, so here are a few words about each. (I will include some Java-related comments, as I’m using Java, but most of the things apply to all (supported) languages). But before I go into a bit more details for each service, let me summarize what “the cloud” actually means when it comes to hosting your applications:


  • auto-scaling – if there is an increased demand, you automatically get more resources (more virtual machines in most cases) to handle the requests. For the regular application this is rarely useful, but it’s nice to have it and be sure that your service never dies because the load is too high

  • pay what you use – simply put, this is in fact the option to choose small servers when you are small, and bigger servers when you are big. The “cloudy” thing here is that you can do that easily, rather than reconfiguring some remote machines

  • cloud infrastructure – this is fancy talk for “we deploy these services and take care that they are working”. So instead of installing and configuring a message queue on your machines, you hook up to an already installed and managed message queue. Or database, email service, or cache.

  • management tools – you get consoles, command-line tools and web UIs for handling your installations. This is both a plus (the tools are higher level than working with native commands), and a minus (there’s a learning curve)

  • load balancers – all services offer these, and you rarely care what’s the software and hardware of the load balancer

The overall plus is the ease of use – you need way less system administration knowledge, and even if you have it, you need to do much less in order to have a real-world-ready application. It is not necessarily cheaper than regular servers (actually, it might be more expensive). But let’s see what each service does:

Amazon Web Services (AWS). This is the most popular option.


  • General flow: you create an EC2 instance, which is a virtual machines, ssh to it and have full control. You can bring up and kill copies of your instance whenever there’s higher load.

  • Flexibility: since you have root control over your machine, it is very flexible.

  • Usability: the AWS console and the Elastic Beanstalk give you very nice UI for managing applications. With Beanstalk you can deploy applications without even opening a console, just drop a war file. In reality you will at least need to provide some configuration though. The best thing is having predefined instance images, so you can have “Tomcat with MySQL” up and running within a minute. There are already nice solutions built ontop of the Amazon API, like RightScale.

  • Features: in addition to the basic instance functionality, you have a lot of extras – managed database, elastic IPs, DNS, cloud storage, CDN, mail service, message queue, cache (this one is not that good, btw), etc. So instead of installing and managing these services on your instances, you can use the Amazon versions.

  • Pricing – you are charged for the number of hours your instances are running

  • Trial: yes, 1 year (a micro instance).

Google App Engine (GAE). This is a PaaS (Platform as a Service), so you don’t get your own virtual machines and are limited in the use of some standard APIs (for example, you can’t spawn threads), and you can’t use a file system (you need the Blobstore API instead)


  • General flow: you create an application and deploy it (through command line or IDE plugin). You don’t manage servers and you don’t have ssh – you have just the app. The app runs in a sandbox, and you may need to use some proprietary APIs in order to store to a NoSQL store, use MapReduce, etc. You have less control. You can browse the datastore, view log files and performance metrics via the admin UI, as you don’t have regular access to the target “machine”

  • Flexibility: low – you deploy to a sandbox. You are limited to the configurations the admin UI offers you

  • Usability: the admin UI is OK (not perfect, but I can’t say something bad)

  • Features: fewer extras, but still good ones – email, datastore, task queue, memcached, etc.

  • Pricing – generally, you are charged for the amount of resources you are consuming

  • Trial: yes, its is free as long as you use small amount of resources

Windows Azure. You get virtual machines, you can use remote desktop / ssh to administer them.


  • General flow: you create a virtual machine and that’s it (similar to AWS). You can also deploy simple web sites using php, asp or node.js (which is PaaS, similar to GAE)

  • Flexibility: high for the VM, low for the PaaS

  • Usability: the admin UI is OK

  • Features: caching, database, service bus

  • Pricing – fine-grained, pay-as-you-go or prepaid plans

  • Trial: yes, 2 months (the smallest virtual machine)

Heroku. Platform as a Service – you deploy an app in a sandbox and have a lot of useful add-ons for other services. You have two types of “dyno” – one that services web requests, and one that services background requests.


  • General flow: you download the heroku toolbelt, run it (the latest version fails on Windows though – it installs ruby 1.9.2 and requires 1.9.3, so you have to edit the bat file) and then use it to create and deploy applications

  • Flexibility: low, because you run in a sandbox, but each add-on is configurable and there are a lot of add-ons, so it’s better than other PaaS options. The bad news for Java developers is that it only supports deployment by checking out from git, and building with maven. No other version control system or build tool. (there is hg-git adapter, which you can try if using mercurial, but it starts getting hacky)

  • Usability: there is a need for command-line work, which is not that usable. The web UI is OK.

  • Features: most of the things you can imagine are available as add-ons

  • Pricing – you pay per dyno, per database and per add-on (if paid)

  • Trial: yes, you get 750 hours monthly for free – this means you get it for free if you have low usage

Jelastic. Platform as a Service for Java only – you deploy an app in a sandbox. You can configure the architecture and use various 3rd party services. It’s not as popular as the other services, but I got an app running quickly (with some useful input from their support)


  • General flow: you create an application, choose an architecture via a nice UI (it’s reconfigurable later), and then deploy your war file. You configure the maximum number of servers that you want your application to use. Everything is configured with the web UI

  • Flexibility: low, because you can’t ssh to the machine. However, you are free to edit some application server configurations and have a limited, but sufficient access to the file system, you also can configure each of the additional services you use (databases, for example)

  • Usability: the interface is pretty good (I’d say better than the rest)

  • Features: you can use additional services – MySQL, MongoDB, CouchDB, memcached, building with maven. (The list is way smaller than what Heroku offers)

  • Pricing – you pay per application server instance and per additional service (MySQL, SSL, load balancer, etc.)

  • Trial: yes but just 2 weeks

There are many other options, notable RackSpace, which is a traditional hosting company, and the cloud options are simply virtual machines with some “cloudy” features, like auto-scaling. I listed only the popular options that I’ve actually tried (I’ve used AWS, GAE extensively, and deployed sample applications on the other three). The evaluation above does not aim to be complete, and I’ve certainly missed some points here and there.

There’s no “winner” – use different options for different scenarios. But it’s good to know what limitations are imposed by each service, and what’s the approach and general mindset. Because, especially with platforms like Heroku and GAE, you need to change the way you think about deployment.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
it_user232497 - PeerSpot reviewer
it_user232497Americas Cloud Ecosystem & Partnerships at a tech company with 10,001+ employees
Vendor

All... might be useful to update as many of these details are now invalid.

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it_user7923 - PeerSpot reviewer
Developer at a computer software company with 51-200 employees
Vendor
6 Ways to get More Bang for your Heroku Buck While Making Your Rails Site Super Snappy

We love Heroku. It makes deployment so easy and quick. However, it can start to get pricey when you add additional dynos at $35 each a month.

With a small amount of work, you can get a lot more out of your Heroku hosting whilst drastically improving the performance of your site. You might need to spend a little bit of cash on other services, but a lot less than if you simply moved the dyno slider up a few notches, and the result will be much better scalability.

So how do we max out the performance of our Heroku apps? First we stop using Heroku for things it’s bad at, then we let it do more of what it is good at, running your application code.

1. Offload Assets to S3 and CloudFront using asset_sync

By default a Heroku dyno is responsible for serving all the assets for your site, so every page load will involve multiple requests to the dyno.

The asset_sync gem modifies asset pre-compilation to sync all of your assets to an Amazon S3 bucket from where they are served directly and freeing up your dyno to handle more requests.

If you want to speed things up even more, you can slap Amazon’s Cloudfront CDN in front of your S3 bucket with multiple subdomains. Michel Sikkes has an excellent guide to serving you assets with S3 and cloudfront. Your assets will be served through Cloudfront from multiple subdomains (e.g. assets[0-3].myapp.com), all of which point to the same bucket. Not only will your assets be served through CloudFront’s speedy global CDN, but most will be downloaded in parallel. Browsers make a limited number of concurrent requests per host name (2 for IE, more for other browsers) so using multiple CNAMEs increases the number of concurrent connections, significantly reducing the page load time for users with good connections.

The cost of serving assets from S3, even with CloudFront, is very cheap and scales directly with the amount of data. Compared to adding another Heroku dyno this is great value, and has the added benefit of speeding up overall page loads.

2. Don’t Upload and Process Files with your Web Dynos

If you use something like CarrierWave or Paperclip, by default the uploading and processing of images is done by your dyno. While this is happening your dyno is completely tied up, unable to handle requests from any other user. If one person uploads a 2Mb image on a slow connection everyone else will be locked out for the duration.

To prevent this from happening you need to decouple the upload process from your dyno. The CarrierWave Direct gem does just this. With a bit of client-side magic it uploads files to S3 directly, rather than through the dyno. The images then get resized by background processes using DelayedJob or Resque. This obviously has the downside that you’ll need a worker running, but there are ways to manage these cost-effectively which I’ll talk about next.

Another option, which we’ve used recently, is the awesome Cloudinary service. They provide direct image uploading, on-demand image processing (including face detection, which even seems to work on cats) and a worldwide CDN all in one package. There is a free tier to get you started, and for $39 (slightly more than one Heroku dyno) their Basic plan will be more than enough for many sites. Obviously you could just spend money on another dyno, but that just scales your performance linearly, without really solving the fundamental performance bottleneck.

3. Background Processing the Smart Way with Delayed::Job and HireFire

Background processing with Delayed::Job is a great way of speeding up your web requests. Potentially slow tasks like image processing or sending signup emails can happen outside of the request-response cycle, making it much snappier and freeing up your dyno to handle more requests. The downside is that you need to run a worker dyno at $35/month.

Michael van Rooljen’s HireFire modifies Delayed::Job and Resque to automatically scale the number of worker dynos based on the jobs in the queue. Because Heroku charge by the dyno/second, spinning up 10 workers for one minute costs the same as one worker for ten minutes, so with HireFire you can potentially get things done quicker while paying less than you would if you ran a dedicated worker dyno.

HireFire does have one limitation, it only works for jobs scheduled for immediate execution. If that is an issue Michael has a HireFire service that will monitor your application for you, so jobs scheduled in the future will be run.

4. Offload Complex Search to a Dedicated Provider

If you have an application that needs to perform complex searches over large datasets don’t do it in your application directly. If searches regularly take a long time (a couple of seconds or more) consider using something like Solr (available as a Heroku plugin), Amazon CloudSearch, or one of the many Search as a Service providers. You’ll not only get faster search performance in many cases, but you’ll save vast amounts of development time trying to optimise your in-app search. Of course, if you have a simple application with straight-forward search then this probably won’t be worth it the cost, but it’s something worth considering.

5. Turbo-Charge your Application with Memcache backed View Caching

If you’ve not encountered caching in Rails, stop reading this article right now, go read the Rails Guide to Caching and then DHH’s short guide to key based cache expiry. Caching in Rails 4 will be even better, with improved support for “Russian Doll” caching.

View caching in Rails can have a profound effect on your application’s response time. In the past we have found that rendering pages, especially complex ones with lots of partials, can easily account for two-thirds of the total processing time, much more than you might expect.

Simply using caching will help speed up your application, but the default cache store is not shared between dynos so the benefits are limited. In contrast, a Memcache store is shared between your dynos so they all benefit from any cached item. Heroku has two add-ons that let you very easily add memcache to your project. The Memcachier addon gives you 25mb for free, and is pretty reasonably priced from there on up. Just adding a small cache store of 25mb can make a significant difference to the load time of your pages.

6. Finally: Slice and Dice your Dynos with Unicorn

So after spending a little bit of time, and a relatively small amount of cash, we’ve offloaded much of the work that was being done by our web dyno and onto services that are better suited to it; drastically speeding up our request-response cycle. Our single dyno can now handle significantly more users per minute, who are happier because they get a much faster response from the site.

However the default Heroku dyno configuration only handles one request at a time. If you wanted to increase your level of concurrency in the past you would have to increase the number of dynos. That’s all changed with the release of the Rack server Unicorn which can handle multiple concurrent connections. For most applications a single dyno should be able to handle between two and four connections at a time. The main constraint will be memory (limited to 512mb per dyno), so keep an eye on the gems you are loading in your production environment. Florian at Rails On Fire has done a great introduction on setting up Unicorn on Heroku. If you’ve followed the previous steps you should be using less memory on your web dynos, allowing you to use more threads.

Putting it all Together

At the end of all this we’ve freed up our Heroku dyno from doing things it’s not very good at like serving static files and uploads, and juiced up its performance when doing what it’s great at, serving Rails application requests with no sys-admin in sight.

Each technique can be easily applied to your existing applications, but if you develop with them in mind from the start you get all the benefits with almost no additional work. On their own each one will help the performance of your application, but combining them together will significantly extend the amount of time before you have to start forking out for lots more dynos, and when you do you’ll get much more bang for each of your thirty-five Heroku bucks.

If you’ve got any other tips for getting the most out of a Rails application, whether or not it’s on Heroku, we’d love to hear about it them!

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
it_user8355 - PeerSpot reviewer
it_user8355Architect at a tech company with 51-200 employees
Vendor

Great tips! Thanks

PeerSpot user
Engineer at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
Consultant
Some insights into PaaS market

Platform as a Service is a one of the GROWING sector of cloud computing. PaaS basically help developer to speed the development of app, saving money and most important innovating their applications and business instead of setting up configurations and managing things like servers and databases.

Other features buying to use PaaS is the application deployment process such as agility, High Availability, Monitoring, Scale / Descale, limited need for expertise, easy deployment, and reduced cost and development time.

Major forces driving the PaaS

- Pay as you Go
- Low start up cost
- Leave the plumbing to expert
- PaaS handles auto scaling/descaling, Load blancing, disaster recovery
- PaaS manages all security requirements
- PaaS manages reliability, High Availability
- Paas manages manay third party addon’s for you

Barrier to PaaS adoption?

- Less Control over Server and databases
- Have to be expert to mange security controls and audits
- Costs will be very high if not governed properly
- Premature and dobious in current day and age

Major PaaS providers are Heroku, Jelastic, and Engine Yard. When we talk about revenue, The global PaaS market is estimated to grow from $1.28 billion in 2013 to $6.94 billion in 2018 at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 32.54% in this period. In terms of geographies, North America continues to be the biggest market for PaaS solutions. In 2012, PaaS revenues ($1.2 billion) was the tenth of the size of SaaS ($14.4 billion), a fifth of IaaS ($6.2 billion), and just a tiny fraction of BPaaS ($84.1 billion).

PaaS has always taken a very small space in the cloud computing arena as compared to the other two segments: IaaS and SaaS. But the trend has recently shown a drift with PaaS market showing a very high growth rate in terms of revenue. Though it is still not as huge as the other two segments but now holds a significant proportion of the pie. PaaS has now been adopted by most of the big cloud computing and IT solution providers like Amazon, IBM, Google etc. as one of their main services.. Many small players have also emerged and made the market very dynamic and competitive. Application developers are benefiting from this fact resulting in more adoption and thus increasing the demand for PaaS all the more in various sectors.

We expect to see more and more application development companies choosing PaaS over IaaS or traditional Hosting, as they can then focus on driving innovation and building apps that change their interactions with customers, partners and community. It will make them free of the details of infrastructure, so they can push the possibilities of the latest technology to build great web and mobile applications.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
it_user105252 - PeerSpot reviewer
it_user105252CTO at a healthcare company with 51-200 employees
Vendor

I don't see how the "barriers" are inherent to PaaS:
-->Managing servers is a cost TO BE AVOIDED - so that's actually a benefit of PaaS not a barrier
--> Security is no more difficult than implementing good security practices on a Web App. And much of it is simpler since you don't have to figure out how to optimally configure your Web Server, your Platform server (OS) and your middle ware server for optimal security. you only have to deal with App level and data level security.
-->Costs are inherently LOWER than with VMs since you do not have to have staff managing the VM stack and scaleout is easier to implement so you can start with a smaller instance
--> As for premature.... based on?

it_user7917 - PeerSpot reviewer
Engineer at a tech company with 51-200 employees
Vendor
How I hosted a local television contest for $2.37 on heroku

Big spender.

There’s my heroku bill after hosting the voting for a local television contest. $2.37. Over 40,000 people used the app over a period of 2 weeks.

I spent the same amount on coffee this morning.

What?! How?!

I’ve always been really interested in scaling and getting the best possible performance out of limited resources.

I had the opportunity recently to build out the voting back-end for a local television contest. Projects like this are fun because I had the flexibility to try out something new and a lot of people would be using it.

The Stack

I wanted to build an API to handle the voting and get the best performance out of it. Usually I’d use Sinatra for this, but this time I chose to try out Goliath, which is a non-blocking Ruby web server for building APIs. I also used Grape since it would make writing the API even easier.

I hosted it on Heroku. My initial goal was to see if I could keep it to only 1 dyno (more fun with a challenge).

If you’re not familiar with Heroku, a dyno is the equivalent of a small virtual server with 512mb of memory. They also give you your first dyno for free. So all I ended up paying for was the postgres basic database add-on.

Stress Test

Before releasing it, I did some stress testing with Siege. I couldn’t have this app failing when it went live.

212.45 transactions per second.

On only 1 heroku dyno.

WOW GOLIATH IS FAST.

Each transaction was a single GET request, that hit the database (postgres) and returned the count of contest votes. Postgres was probably the slowest part of each request. I could optimize even further by caching with memcached. Maybe next time.

The 200+ transactions per second was way more speed than I needed for this app. And much more than I expected to get out of a single dyno.

I knew that the traffic for this app would be pretty sporadic. Highly dependent on when it was mentioned on TV. Without Goliath, I would have needed to use more dynos to account for the spikes in traffic. But with the performance I was seeing out of Goliath, I knew it could handle the peaks with just 1 dyno.

See the details of the Seige test here.

If you’d like to try it out yourself, the app I used to run this contest was a modified version of Mathy Poll. Which is open source and you can grab it on github.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
it_user4401 - PeerSpot reviewer
it_user4401Developer at a transportation company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Vendor

This is a really great idea. Thank you for sharing this information with us.

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Updated: October 2024
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