For my PHP Web App I am using the PHP Buildpack. Now I would like to schedule a Tasks that should be triggered every month. Normally I would use CronJobs for that.
How can I achieve that within the Swisscom Application Cloud?
Swisscom App Cloud is based on Open Source Cloud Foundry
Upstream Cloud Foundry doesn’t have a feature equivalent to cron jobs (task scheduler). Stay tuned, I guess this feature will be soon implemented, because lots of people migrating from Heroku to CF. Heroku offers a cron job feature. Subscribe to Swisscom App Cloud Newsletter to read announcements.
There are workarounds for scheduling tasks, see Scheduling tasks on Cloud Foundry on blog.pivotal.io for a Ruby/Rake based example. Sorry for PHP I didn't found example code. There is no elegant solution! You need to implement yourself some kind of workaround. Would be great if you publish your code to GitHub.
If you need cron jobs only in data store, for example MariaDB offers Events.
Events are named database objects containing SQL statements that are
to be executed at a later stage, either once off, or at regular
intervals.
They function very similarly to the Windows Task Scheduler or Unix
cron jobs.
We had a simular issue. As written by #Fyodor, there is no native solution in Cloud Foundry. We did some research and found vendors like https://www.iron.io/.
Finally, we ended up with a very simple solution.
We expose all our background jobs via an https interface.
As we anyhow use Jenkins for CI/CD and it has lots of scheduling capabilities, we use our existing Jenkins to trigger these jobs via a simple cURL call to the HTTP endpoints.
Related
I am building a project which will live on a single server that will contain multiple services running side by side. I am using ansible to provision the server to automate setting everything up.
Services running:
Headless CMS
Database
Other nodejs API etc...
If in the future I would need to scale this project up, I would then want to separate the above services out onto their own servers which has led me to creating separate ansible roles for each of the above services.
My Question:
I am having real difficulty in working with pm2 to get my 2 nodejs apps running with each other.
I know that I can have a single ecosystem.config.js file containing multiple apps which would fit my current architecture (everything hosted on a single server). However this would be a pain later down the road if I were to switch one of my ansible roles to its own server.
Is there a way to deploy to production my nodejs related apps using pm2 management but in a way where they have their own configuration files and systemd service which I can define in ansible?
If I have multiple ecosystem.config.js files for each nodejs app, can pm2 mangage these with the default systemd service it offers when running:
pm2 startup
Or should I just write my own separate systemd services which I could then manually install in each ansible role through templates?
I'm really lost here and have spent so much time trying to work out the best approach to take so any help would be great!!
After doing some more research on this matter I came across this super helpful thread on pm2's github. Basically it seems that for automation using systemd services is the way to go and not bother with pm2's startup (which does create a systemd service, but more complex to manage when using automation software such as ansible.)
I strongly recommend you read it if you stumble accross this question!
https://github.com/Unitech/pm2/issues/2914
I found out that the task queue is being primarily used for App Engine standard environment. I am migrating our existing services from App Engine to Kubernetes. What would be a good alternative for task queue? Push queue is the one which is being currently used.
I read documentation online as well as gone through this link: When to use PubSub vs Task Queues
But there is no clear answer as to whether Pub/Sub is a good alternative on Kubernetes.
Edit:
My current use case is that a service performs similar tasks for a set of ID's and some task which takes some time to complete so the queue would take this task and process it while the service can perform other things in parallel. While Pub/Sub is mainly needed where we have publisher and subscriber here the service itself has some tasks which it needs to keep processing in parallel!
I would think Cloud Pub/Sub is a great tool for message queues. It's orthogonal to how you deploy/run your services, whether with Kubernetes or something else.
There's a lot of relevant documentation for using pubsub with Kubernetes on GCP, like this page.
is there a way to setup Heroku to get a notification you when your config variables are updated?
thanks a lot
sorry for the very late reply, but I spoke with Heroku back then, and they said that it wasn't something that they did at the moment.
Very late to the party here, but just to give an updated answer. Heroku has support for webhooks so you can monitor those + more events on your end.
If you rather not build your own consumption pipeline, consider using LightFlare (I'm the creator) that has out of the box support of consuming Webhooks events from many services (heroku included) and notifies you at your choice(s) of destinations (slack / email etc ...).
LightFlare currently supports monitoring on services like:
Infra: GCP, AWS, Azure, heroku
Code/release: GitHub, bitbucket, netlify
Commerce: shopify, gumroad
More integrations based on our customers asks
Heroku is fantastic for prototyping ideas and running simple web services, I often use it to run Python web services like Flask and Django and try out ideas. However I've always struggled to understand how you can use the infrastricture to run those amazingly powerful support or utility services every startup needs in its stack. 4 exmaples of services I can't live without and would recommend to any startup.
Jenkins
Statsd
Graphite
Graylog
How would you run these on Heroku? Would it be best just getting dedicated boxes (Rackspace, e.t.c) with these support services installed.
Has anyone one run utility deamons (services) on Heroku?
There are two basic options. The first is to find or create a Heroku addon to accomplish the task. For example, there are many hosted logging solutions you can use instead of Graylog; Rails on Fire or Travis can be used instead of Jenkins. If an appropriate addon doesn't exist, you can effectively make your own by just running the service on an AWS EC2 instance.
The other alternative is to push the service into being a 12factor application so that it can run on Heroku as well. For example, you could stub out whisper's filesystem calls so that they store in a backing service instead. This is often pretty painful and brittle, though, unless you can get your changes accepted by the upstream maintainers.
you could also use another free service in conjunction with it. OpenShift has a lot of Java related build services and tools that can be added.
I am using a mix of heroku, openshift, mongolab and my own web hosting. Throw in dropbox and box for some space...
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.