I know this is not a really programmic question, but which one should I deploy my app too?
Basically, I will have a straight forward Rails app with a a decent database usage. Heroku is obviously a great platform and has a lot of gimmicks. Duostack however seems to getting bigger and bigger while still in beta, and I really like their autoscaling feature, since I wouldn't have to monitor my site like 24/7 to be as cost efficient as possible.
Secretly, I just hope that Amazon will extend Elastic to Rails, but that would probably take a while
Well you have to get an invite to use Duostack, I don't know how hard that is. Plus, if you're looking to do a production app, they're still in Beta so there's no 100% guarantee things will be stable, or that there won't be API changes.
ALso, is duostack going to offer a free usage tier?
If you're comfortable with the answers to all those questions, then just go for whichever one you like better.
One nice thing about Heroku is it is well-established enough to have a lot of third party integration, and that can make development just blissful if it includes the integrations you need :)
Probably not a wrong choice between the two, though. Request a beta invite and if you get in, try both. Since all you have to do is "git push" to deploy to both, it ought to be pretty easy to do a direct side-by-side comparison of the workflow.
Related
We need CI on Heroku for our RoR app.
We want to use an add-on. I don't mind paying a few bucks to avoid complexity / distraction.
I see its basically Railsonfire vs. Tddium
What are the factors that we should consider in choosing to use one vs. the other?
A similar question was asked at the link below, but it appears that this was before the add-ons above were created.
Proper continuous integration and continuous deployment with Git and Heroku
Another option is CircleCi, which makes it incredibly easy, though it isn't yet in the Heroku add-on marketplace.
I personally believe speed is the major consideration. The speed at which your team moves is tied to how quickly you can get notifications, and a platform optimized for speed is going to make a major difference.
In addition, on slow platforms, tests may fail randomly (for example, Cucumber might fail if a button doesn't appear in 3 seconds, which may not happen soon enough on a slow platform).
I'm a founder of CircleCi, and we make an incredibly fast CI solution (faster than both services you mentioned). It's really easy to set up (one-click), though it's not in the Heroku marketplace (yet).
One consideration I'd give you to… uh… consider is support. I don't know anything about the Tddium team, but I do know that a couple months ago I tried Rails On Fire was blown away by the support. I asked some crazy questions (I do crazy things) and Florian responded in email and on Twitter right away with both help and suggestions.
Then, when I decided not to use the service because it couldn't support one edge-case feature, he implemented the feature! I hadn't been using it for a couple weeks and he wrote back to me personally to say "Hey, we finally got that feature you thought would be helpful."
I've used Hudson/Jenkins for years and know what you mean about complexity. But I also think that having someone on the other end is pretty key, and the RailsOnFire team, for now at least, do that quite well.
What is the best way to get a ballpark idea of what kind of resources an application needs if it is running on Heroku (how many dynos and what db plan you should be running)?
My non-technical friend had his site built in rails and it is currently being hosted on Linode by the shop that built the app. They aren't providing the support he was hoping for, and is interested in having me move it over to Heroku, but we are trying to get an idea of how much more that is going to cost him. I tried contacting the dev shop directly to find out what the current instance is running on, but they aren't getting back to me.
I have access to their analytics, and the current repo, so from this can I glean what kind of initial setup we are probably going to need, and if so what should I be looking for? I realize that this is very situation dependent and not an easy question to answer, but any insight would be greatly appreciated.
dyno-blitzer will help you find out how many dynos you'll need to support 1,000 users, but there are a lot of questions you need to answer in order to try and ballpark what you'll need with Heroku:
How big is the database right now? How fast is it growing?
How many users do you need to support? If you only need 5, the numbers dyno-blitzer gives you probably won't be anywhere near what you need.
How much delayed processing work is being done?
What sort of things does the app need that have to be provided through add-ons with Heroku?
Once you know these, you should be able to get a rough ballpark, but it won't be laser accurate - this will heavily depend on the app and exactly what it's doing.
I am looking to start developing a relatively simple web application that will pull data from various sources and normalizing it. A user can also enter the data directly into the site. I anticipate hitting scale, if successful. Is it worth putting in the time now to use scalable or distributed technologies or just start with a LAMP stack? Framework or not? Any thoughts, suggestions, or comments would help.
Disregard my vague description of the idea, I'd love to share once I get further along.
Later. I can't remember who said it (might have been SO's Jeff Atwood) but it rings true: your first problem is getting other people to care about your work. Worry about scale when they do.
Definitely go with a well structured framework for your own sanity though. Even if it doesn't end up with thousands of users, you'll want to add features as time goes on. Maintaining an expanding codebase without good structure quickly becomes fairly horrible (been there, done that, lost the client).
btw, if you're tempted to write your own framework, be aware that it is a lot of work. My company has an in-house one we're quite proud of, but it's taken 3-4 years to mature.
Is it worth putting in the time now to use scalable or distributed technologies or just start with a LAMP stack?
A LAMP stack is scalable. Apache provides many, many alternatives.
Framework or not?
Always use the highest-powered framework you can find. Write as little code as possible. Get something in front of people as soon as you can.
Focus on what's important: Get something to work.
If you don't have something that works, scalability doesn't matter, does it?
Then read up on optimization. http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?RulesOfOptimization is very helpful.
Rule 1. Don't.
Rule 2. Don't yet.
Rule 3. Profile before Optimizing.
Until you have a working application, you don't know what -- specific -- thing limits your scalability.
Don't assume. Measure.
That means build something that people actually use. Scale comes later.
Absolutely do it later. Scaling pains is a good problem to have, it means people like your project enough to stress the hardware it's running on.
The last company I worked at started fairly small with PHP and the very very first versions of CakePHP that came out (when it was still in beta). Some of the code was dirty, the admin tool was a mess (code-wise), and sure it could have been done better from the start. But do you know what? They got it out the door before their competitors did, and became extremely successful.
When I came on board they were starting to hit the limits of their current potential scalability, and that is when they decided to start looking at CDN's, lighttpd caching techniques, and other ways to clean up the code and make things run smoother when under heavy load. I don't work for them anymore but it was a good experience in growing an architecture beyond what it was originally scoped at.
I can tell you right now if they had tried to do the scalability and optimizations before selling content and getting a website live - they would never have grown to the size they are now. The company is www.beatport.com if you're interested in who I'm talking about (To re-iterate, I'm not trying to advertise them as I am no longer affiliated with them, but it stands as a good case study and it's easier for people to understand what I'm talking about when they see their website).
Personally, after working with Ruby and Rails (and understanding the separation!) for a couple of years, and having experience with PHP at Beatport - I can confidently say that I never want to work with PHP code again =p
Funny to ask "scale now or later?" and label it "ruby on rails".
Actually, Ruby on Rails was created by David Heinemeier Hansson, who has a whole chapter in his book labeled "Scale later" :))
http://gettingreal.37signals.com/ch04_Scale_Later.php
I agree with the earlier respondents -- make it useful, make it work and get people motivated to use it first. I also agree that you should pick off-the shelf components (of which there are many) rather than roll your own, as much as possible. At the same time, make sure that you choose components for your infrastructure that you know to be scalable so that you can go there when you need to, without having to re-write major chunks of your application.
As the Product Manager for Berkeley DB, I've seen countess cases of developers who decided "Oh, we'll just write that to a flat file" or "I can write my own simple B-tree function" or "Database XYZ is 'good enough', I don't have to worry about concurrency or scalability until later". The problem with that approach is that a) you're re-inventing the wheel (and forgoing what others have learned the hard way already) and b) you're ignoring the fact that you'll have to deal with scalability at some point and going with a 'good enough' solution.
Good luck in your implementation.
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I'm trying to decide between Heroku and Engineyard.
Heroku seems so much better but they charge for everything and their prices are crazy!
Why one should use Heroku over EY or vice versa?
Heroku makes setup and launching of an app super-simple. You will be dependent to some degree on versions that Heroku supports (for instance, I heard today of a bundler versioning issue).
One thing to take into account with any "managed full-stack" solution like Heroku or EY is cost. You don't have to hire an ops person or have ops expertise, but you're still paying. Storage is where things get really expensive. Crank up your DB to a more than a few GB and watch the price go up.
We have in-house ops (was me doing it while coding, now a dedicated person) and run on Joyent. A big cost savings was having a few master-slave DBs and sharing them among a few dozen applications. We essentially have 100 Facebook apps running on Joyent at the same cost as 10 apps on Heroku. But this doesn't take into account the ops salary/time.
Everyone's needs are different, but the great thing is that its easy to experiment with these cloud deployment tools in quick fashion, and you will find that they each have their own strengths that you can leverage as you need.
What is most valuable to me, and my smaller clients, is to be able to experiment and get end-user feedback quickly. I have startup clients that want to be able to push out new ideas and test them quickly, deploy different combinations of ideas to different markets, get customer feedback, and keep moving forward. Launch a facebook app, a test server for an API integration client, a lightweight 'freemium' version of a product, etc. As traffic picks up, we make changes to scale up, and the increase in cost is never out of bounds (eg. our hosting costs are still well under the increase in value/revenue/marketing juice, etc).
EngineYard lets you play around with 500hrs for free, and you can easily turn it off when you are not using it, to stretch the 500hrs out. You can deploy your app quickly, deploy a CI server (that updates the app on every successful build), create a backup of your app or 'staging' server and see how it goes.
Amazon will give you 750hrs per month for free, for a year, if you are a new AWS customer. You can use this for a super fast CI server, hard-core image processing, batch reporting, whatever.
Personally I happen to use Heroku the most, as it just seems to work the best for my needs. I can put together a new application with full monitoring, backup, analytics, email, etc really fast, and feel confident in how to manage my setup (and confident that I can bring another person on board, and their learning curve will be pretty easy). As a freelancer, my use of Heroku has brought my setup time down to almost nothing, so I'm able to focus my time on understanding the business, and developing a great product. I'm not saying that can't be done on other platforms, I'm just saying heroku is working great for me in that way.
I do have one app that processes Voip data over UDP, so I'll need to figure out if I prefer amazon or engineyard for that (heroku won't let you open a UDP port, as far as I know).
I recently put together a presentation on these tools, and how I use them. (it was for newer developers, so it may be too basic for this audience, but there is a list of pros/cons that others may find useful)
Also, I think this conversation does belong here, and not necessarily on a webmasters forum, because the choice of hosting platform will influence your development capabilities and architecture, and the people making the decision are developers, not 'webmasters' or systems people.
I'd vote to use EngineYard over Heroku. Although you can probably deploy a large scale application on Heroku, there's a lot of lock-in you'll have to endure and the pricing can become crippling at higher levels of use.
EngineYard does provide application-level support, too, which is a fair bit better than what Heroku does.
If you're making a quick hobby application or simple demo site, Heroku is great for launching small, simple instances. If you're building a real application where it will need to scale, use EngineYard.
We have been running our platform on Heroku for about 9 months, and I am very satisfied.
I think the biggest complaint that most people have is that it gets "expensive" when your site gets large or high traffic. Personally, I think it is much more effective to focus on growing your business or improving your value proposition than maintaining servers or figuring how to get Rails working. (It is no easy task unless you want to spend a lot of time figuring it out). I would much rather pay Heroku to manage the servers for me than hire someone.
Here's what's great about Heroku:
Pretty easy to use. I didn't know anything about Rails when I got started, and Heroku was simple to get working.
Good documentation for most things.
OK tech support.
Extremely cost effective when you are small.
Heroku is pretty smart, and I am sure they are going to read this, so here's what can be improved:
Tech support: Typically you ask a question and they respond, and that begs a new obvious question. The tech support person should answer the next question I am going to ask. For example, I might ask how to do something, and then they tell me a certain way of doing it. Now I need information about it. Supply all the information in the first response, so I don't have to ask, "How do I use it?"
Documentation: Everyone has the same questions. The documentation could be greatly improved by adding all the questions and answers that I have asked, let alone the tens of thousands of other customers.
Logs: The free logging options are useless, and $100/month for real logs is silly. Our solution has been http://papertrailapp.com which has been outstanding. Use it.
I might as well throw my opinion in here since I have "tried" to use EngineYard and "successfully" use Heroku. While I think both are potentially good choices, I found deploying to Heroku much easier. The ala-carte pricing for Heroku add-ons may add expense, but it also gives you the opportunity to add functionality immediately to your app. The largest expense for our app is the actual web dynos, followed by the database. Heroku has a great selection of add-ons, many of which are free or low cost.
EngineYard also seems like a great company but I think they "hold your hand" a little less than Heroku. For my company, the benefits of Heroku outweighed the cost issue. The read-only filesystem which is a platform feature of Heroku also forces you to learn some new tricks.
I now have several apps (small to medium) on Heroku and happily have my assets served up from s3.
In the end, I would encourage you to try them both. EngineYard offers a 500 hour trial (though that is computing hours, not necessarily real-time hours) and Heroku let's you get started right away for pretty much free.
PS: When selecting add-ons consider your choice carefully, just like when you choose gems for your project. I have experienced an add-on that I was using, simply flaming out and had to scramble to replace that functionality. What was it? Progstr-Filer, which I was using for file uploads. That was a lesson learned.
It depends of the condition. On some case, it's highly expensive
Here we can get a 24 GB o RAM dedicated server for 99 euros.
I can have it set up an running my rail app in less than half an hour, with a mongodb database, as many runner that I want, etc...
Additionally, I can add "small" other project (the ones that costs between 15$ and 35$ monthly at Heroku)
If your business require huge amount of data and processing power, my advice is to use a dedicated hosting and spend the time in managing and monitoring your app.
I'm a big fan of ruby on rails, and it seems to incorporate many of the 'greatest hits' of web application programming techniques. Convention over configuration in particular is a big win to my mind.
However I also have the feeling that some of the convenience I am getting is coming at the expense of technical debt that will need to be repaid down the road. It's not that I think ROR is quick and dirty, as I think it incorporates a lot of best practices and good default options in many cases. However, it seems to me that just doesn't cover some things yet (in particular there is little direct support for security in the framework, and plugins that I have seen are variable in quality).
I'm not looking for religious opinions or flamewars here, but I'd be interested to know the community's opinion on what areas Rails needs to improve on, and/or things that users of Rails need to watch out for on their own because the framework won't hold their hand and guide them to do the right thing.
Regardless of framework the programmer needs to know what she's doing. I'd say that it's much easier to build a secure web application using something as mature, well designed and widely adapted as Ruby on Rails than going without the framework support.
Take care with plugins and find out how they work (know what you do, again).
I love Rails too, but its important for us to understand the shortcomings of the framework that we use. Though it might be a broad topic addressing these issues wont hurt anyone.
Aside from security issues, one other big issue is DEPLOYMENT on Shared Hosts. PHP thrives in shared hosting environments but Rails is still lagging behind.
Of course most professional Rails developers know that their apps need fine-tuned servers for production and they will obviously deploy on Rails-Specific hosts.
In order for Rails to continue success the core team should address this issue, especially with Rails 3.0 (Merb +Rails) coming..
An example of this is simple: I have a bluehost account, and i noticed the Rails icon in my cpanel. I talked to the bluehost support and they said its more or less a dummy icon, and that it doesn't function properly.
Having said that any professional who wanted to deploy a Rails App would not use bluehost. , but it does hurt Rails, when hosts say that they support it and then users run into problems which their support know nothing about..
The article you refer to defines technical debt as
[the] eventual consequences of
slapdash software architecture and
hasty software development
With rails, any development that is not test driven incurs technical debt. But that is the case with any platform.
At an architectural level Rails provides some deployment challenges. A busy site must scale with lots of hardware or use intelligent caching strategies.
My advice to anyone adapting Rails would be to:
use TDD for all your development
verify the quality off any plugin
you use by reading its tests. If
they are not clear and complete,
avoid the plugin
read "Rails
Recipes" and "Advanced Rails
Recipes" (Advanced Rails Recipes has
a good recipe for adding
authentication in a RESTful way)
be prepared to pay for hardware to scale your site (hardware is cheaper than development time)
From my experience, by far the biggest tolls you end up paying with RoR are:
Pretty big default stack (not counting plugins you might be using)
Updating models tends to be a pain in the ass, at least in production servers.
Updating Rails or Ruby themselves is a bit more complicated than it should, but this differs depending on your server setup.
As ewalshe mentioned, deployment is sometimes a drag, and further down the road, should you require it, scaling gets a bit iffy, as it does with most development frameworks.
That being said, I'm an avid user of RoR for some projects, and with the actual state of hardware, even though you do end up paying some tech debt to using it, it's almost negligible. And one can hope these issues will be reviewed eventually and solved.
With any level of abstraction there is a bit of a toll you pay - genericized methods aren't quite as fast as those specific to something built just for your purpose. Fortunately though, it's all right there for you to change. Don't like the query plans that come out of the dynamic find methods? write your own, good to go.
Someone above put it well - hardware is cheaper than developers. I'd add "at a sufficiently low amount of hardware"
I'm reading Deploying Rails Applications and recommend it highly to answer your concerns.
The book is full of suggestions to make life easier, taking a deployment-aware approach to your Rails development from scratch, rather than leaving it to later.
I don't think the choice of RoR implies a technical debt but just reading the first few chapters alerted me to practices I should be following, particularly on shared hosts, such as freezing the core rails gems so you can't be disrupted by upgrades on the host.
The 30-page chapter on Shared Hosts includes memory quote tips such as using multiple accounts (if possible) with one Rails app per account. It also warns about popular libraries such as RMagick possibly pushing your memory size to the point where your processes are killed (such as a 100MB limit, which it suggests some hosts periodically apply).