Is there a way to disable/re-enable Heroku autoscaling programmatically via API / CLI / rules (e.g. time of day?)
There does not appear to be any way to do this programatically. The documentation only references the Heroku Dashboard and the Platform API documentation doesn't reference autoscaling.
You might be able to toggle scaling on and off if use a third-party scaling tool like HireFire or Adept Scale, but you'll have to evaluate those options to see if they do everything you need within your budget.
Related
Classic approach on GCP is rent a linux host with static monthly payment. It doesn't matter if your application is not running or users aren't consuming it, you will always pay the static monthly payment. I think this is acceptable for production environments but for development and testing not.
This does not happen on Heroku :
If an app has a free web dyno, and that dyno receives no web traffic in a 30-minute period, it will sleep. In addition to the web dyno sleeping, the worker dyno (if present) will also sleep.
Free web dynos do not consume free dyno hours while sleeping.
Question
How stop or delete app on google (gae, cloud run, cloud build, containers) if does not receive web traffic?
If it is possible using just google tools it would be great:
https://cloud.google.com/products
Idea
Developing a basic router with nodejs which works as minimal balancer. If web traffic is not detected for some apps, an instruction to google cloud platform api could stop the app or container. This would also apply to other clouds.
Any help is appreciated.
Update
I cannot find any solution yet. I will try to add that feature here https://github.com/jrichardsz/http-operator or a basic shell script to detect incoming request to a specific port like How to print incoming http request on specific port
GCP is offering several serverless products (like you mentioned) and they offer a pricing where you are only charged for the resources you use (when requests are processed).
In Cloud Run you are only billed when an instance is handling a
request using the autoscaling to know more. See their pricing as well for a better overview.
For Google App Engine the app.yaml configuration file contains several settings you can use to adjust the trade-off between performance and resource load for a specific version of your app. You
also check this link how to manage the auto scaling settings.
You can also check this Google Cloud blog for other strategies in auto scaling your applications.
To answer the Comment below:
This video can help you better understand their differences to be able to see the appropriate service for your use case.
To clarify, there's 2 variations of cloud run, the first is managed by google and the other runs on gke. As long as your classic application (api app) is stateless, you should be able to deploy it as a container and take advantage of being charged based on only the resources you use. Snippets would fall under Cloud function where it only runs functions based on triggers.
You can choose to deploy your Cloud Run app on fully managed infrastructure ("serverless", pay per use, auto-scaling up rapidly and down to 0 depending on traffic) or on a Google Kubernetes Engine cluster.
It is also possible to run Docker containers in Serverless using App Engine (Flexible). App Engine is always fully managed, with auto-scaling. App Engine Flex auto-scales gradually and down to 1. App Engine Second Generation auto-scales up rapidly and down to 0.
In your current use case I would recommend to use Cloud Run, check its limitations first before getting started. See the official documentation here and on Cloud Run How-To Guides
I have a small Rails app which I'm keen to deploy through Heroku (as I do with other clients) however this is not intended to be a publicly available application and they need to deploy it within their AWS VPC as if it is accessible within their internal network.
Is this something which is possible? I know that Heroku is built on top of EC2 but wasn't sure quite how flexible it was and haven't been able to find anything documented.
If not possible would anyone be able to offer experiences of pre-built Rails AMIs that I might be able to use in order to replicate some for the Heroku deployment simplicity without having to worry too much about configuring and managing my own infrastructure for the app.
Sounds like git-deploy might be what you need for git-style deployment.
I also found quite an interesting blog post by Giles Bowkett that might be interesting to you.
In an answer to another question, it's noted that "Apps deployed to the hosted servers with 'meteor deploy' do not yet have any guarantees or SLAs about scaling." So that rules out the possibility of using their hosted servers if I want to be sure I can fully scale, now.
The answer further notes that "A server bundle generated with 'meteor bundle' is basically a single process app. It is up to you wire it up to multiple instances, or however you want to implement auto-scaling."
After reading that, I'm still very unclear on the question of scaling. On Heroku, I assume I can run "meteor bundle" single process apps in dynos. But if I use many dynos, each running a Meteor server bundle, is Meteor designed so that they can be wired up so that they are all synchronized with the same data (even if there's a lag)?
Answering my own question, the Meteor team has announced a roadmap which includes the scalability plans, for inclusion in Meteor 1.0.
Meteor is still very young platform. Before scalability,personally i would put question of security, as Meteor right now is having no security model in public release. Also no mention of security in Meteor docs, but Meteor team has confirmed that they are working on it, and future release will have it. Have a look here: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/10100813/when-can-we-expect-data-validation-and-security-in-meteor
So I think you and I (for security implementation) have to wait for more releases and perhaps before 1.0 scalability will be handled internally, or atlease they should have documentation explaining how to do that.
To get some idea about, how scalability will be handled and to get better picture on it, I think someone from meteor team should answer about scalability.
You can deploy meteor apps into Heroku but you need to stick with 1 dyno. Because Heroku does not support WebSockets or Sticky Sessions.
So you need to find another PAAS provider. Nodejitsu is a good option.If you wan't to scale into multiple instances, you need to find a way to sync write operations between instances.
Then You'll need Meteor Cluster - http://goo.gl/2aHJ2
I recently asked a similar question (Which PaaS would be best for a Meteor JS app that needs to be scalable?), and one of the answers explained the Heroku situation very well (I thought) - see https://stackoverflow.com/a/16468418/2311632 . It is also pointed out (https://stackoverflow.com/a/16468609/2311632) that one could deploy on meteor.com. While scaling is still on the roadmap, presumably they have or are addressing some scaling issues 'in-house', or can otherwise keep their service at the cutting edge of what's possible in scaling for Meteor Apps. Otherwise, you could go with EC2 and scale vertically (boost the power of a single instance) until Meteor hits the mark with official scaling solutions. Getting set up with EC2 is new to me, but this answer (https://stackoverflow.com/a/16468826/2311632) looks like a good starting point. I haven't tried it yet, but likely will soon.
Why should I use AppHarbor addons when I can get an account directly from the provider and have additional benefits (like multiple users or projects per account)? I know having addons per application centralizes configuration but it also means you have to go through AppHarbor.
In addition AppHarbor adds their header on the website of some providers (notably Airbrake), which ruins the design (looks out of place and has massive margins). On some addons pricing is much more flexible than the addon pricing (again, Airbrake is a good example - no idea what those plans offer!).
Provisioning add-ons through AppHarbor gives you the advantages of automatic application configuration, consolidated billing and being able to manage everything from AppHarbor (and not having to remember X logins and not having to remember to keep X credit cards updated at various services providers).
We've tried to make make the header as inconspicuous as possible, and it seems to work well on most of our add-on partners sites. Please drop us a line at if it causes breakage anywhere.
We're also continuously working with our add-on partners to keep their add-on plan offerings up-to-date and I've just shot the AirBrake guys an email. Thanks for alerting us to the problem!
I just started learning Ruby on rails and I was wondering what Heroku really is? I know that its a cloud that helps us to avoid using servers? When do we actually use it?
Heroku is a cloud platform as a service. That means you do not have to worry about infrastructure; you just focus on your application.
In addition to what Jonny said, there are a few features of Heroku:
Instant Deployment with Git push - build of your application is performed by Heroku using your build scripts
Plenty of Add-on resources (applications, databases etc.)
Processes scaling - independent scaling for each component of your app without affecting functionality and performance
Isolation - each process (aka dyno) is completely isolated from each other
Full Logging and Visibility - easy access to all logging output from every component of your app and each process (dyno)
Heroku provides very well written tutorial which allows you to start in minutes. Also they provide first 750 computation hours free of charge which means you can have one processes (aka Dyno) at no cost. Also performance is very good e.g. simple web application written in node.js can handle around 60 - 70 requests per second.
Heroku competitors are:
OpenShift by Red Hat
Windows Azure
Amazon Web Services
Google App Engine
VMware
HP Cloud Services
Force.com
It's a cloud-based, scalable server solution that allows you to easily manage the deployment of your Rails (or other) applications provided you subscribe to a number of conventions (e.g. Postgres as the database, no writing to the filesystem).
Thus you can easily scale as your application grows by bettering your database and increasing the number of dynos (Rails instances) and workers.
It doesn't help you avoid using servers, you will need some understanding of server management to effectively debug problems with your platform/app combination. However, while it is comparatively expensive (i.e. per instance when compared to renting a slice on Slicehost or something), there is a free account and it's a rough trade off between whether it's more cost effective to pay someone to build your own solution or take the extra expense.
Heroku Basically provides with webspace to upload your app
If you are uploading a Rails app then you can follow this tutorial
https://github.com/mrkushjain/herokuapp
As I see it, it is a scalable administrated web hosting service, ready to grow in any sense so you don't have to worry about it.
It's not useful for a normal PHP web application, because there are plenty of web hosting services with ftp over there for a simple web without scalability needs, but if you need something bigger Heroku or something similar is what you need.
It is exposed as a service via a command line tool so you can write scripts to automate your deployments. Anyway it is pretty similar to other web hosting services with Git enabled, but Heroku makes it simpler.
That's its thing, to make the administration stuff simpler to you, so it saves you time. But I'm not sure, as I'm just starting with it!
A nice introduction of how it works in the official documentation is:
https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/how-heroku-works
Per DZone: https://dzone.com/articles/heroku-or-amazon-web-services-which-is-best-for-your-startup
Heroku is a Platform as a Service (PaaS) product based on AWS, and is vastly different from Elastic Compute Cloud. It’s very important to differentiate ‘Infrastructure as a Service’ and ‘Platform as a Service’ solutions as we consider deploying and supporting our application using these two solutions.
Heroku is way simpler to use than AWS Elastic Compute Cloud. Perhaps it’s even too simple. But there’s a good reason for this simplicity. The Heroku platform equips us with a ready runtime environment and application servers. Plus, we benefit from seamless integration with various development instruments, a pre-installed operating system, and redundant servers.
Therefore, with Heroku, we don’t need to think about infrastructure management, unlike with AWS EC2. We only need to choose a subscription plan and change our plan when necessary.
That article does a good job explaining the differences between Heroku and AWS but it looks like you can choose other iaas (infrastructure) providers other than AWS. So ultimately Heroku seems to just simplify the process of using a cloud provider but at a cost.