I have been using Heroku since last 3-4 years and now I have clients wanted to use openshift for their ruby application deploy.
I know heroku features and new to openshift. I know few features of openshift like gears, cartridges, marketplace etc.
Both use aws for online service and same git deployment strategy.
I wanted to know what is the advanteges of openshift over heroku to deploy ruby applications?
I would research the features of each platform and compare the features that are important to you. I would also try searching for "OpenShift vs. Heroku" which will return many articles contrasting these two platforms.
Honestly they are both good services, so which one you use will depend on what your requirements are. For example you can run almost any database on OpenShift, but need to use PostgreSQL or a third party database service with Heroku. You get more resources for free with OpenShift.
Your question is really too broad, not programming related, and any answers are going to be opinion-based.
Related
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.
Is there anything that I can install on my EC2 instances that make AWS Heroku-like?
e.g:
heroku create app
git push
But for AWS.
Well, now there is! It's called AWS Elastic Beanstalk (still in beta, as of March 2013)
After running the initial setup, further deployments should be as simple as git aws.push
EDIT: Just a nice and broad overview of deployment possibilities at AWS, by Werner Vogels (AWS CTO):
There are few topics I need to touch on before I can answer your question thoroughly; so please, bear with me.
A bit of insight
With respects to your two examples, Heroku utilizes a number of different technologies in order to achieve the level of simplicity it provides as a service platform. One of these technologies include: Heroku's proprietary toolbelt, which offers a set of command-line tools —that allows developers to interface with their applications— and an interact with many of the tools Heroku provides —such as terminal access for a number of different languages. The toolbelt itself relies on two other technologies: Ruby and Git; which come prepackaged with the install.
In a nutshell
Now, when you create a Heroku app you are effectively creating a git repository on the celedon cedar runtime stack (by default); this repository is then added as a remote repo. This allows you to immediately run git push heroku master. There is a lot more happening behind the scenes: for instance, when you push, your commits get intercepted by a git pre-receive hook which runs your app through a slug compiler and prepackages it for distribution across the dyno manifold; yet, I digress. For more information on more advance topics, check-out: https://devcenter.heroku.com/; there is a wealth of information here to read.
The stack
Now, let me explain the cedar stack as this is mainly what your question concerns. The Celedon cedar is one of many; however, this is the current default (for many reasons). This polyglot runtime stack currently provides six web languages (at the time of writing,) running on Ubuntu (11.04 stable, I belive). All of these technologies are operating on top of the AWS EC2 computing environment.
So to finally answer your question: You will need to install a suitable operating system such like: Ubuntu; a set of languages such like: Ruby, Python, Node.js, etc; Git (for deployment) and the rest is up to you.
If you have fixed number of instances make sense instead of usage Elastic Beanstalk use custom git deployment, like described in the article: http://www.jeffhoefs.com/2012/09/setup-git-deploy-for-aws-ec2-ubuntu-instance/.
Main idea to setup GIT repository on EC2 instance. When you want to deploy something just push your changes to remote repository, installed on EC2 instance.
I think this approach have next benefits in comparison with Elastic Beanstalk:
You don't pay for S3 buckets for storing application versions;
You have full control on application deployment steps.
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.
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.
Considering you're a startup with no funds for own server farm. Which existing solution can give you a peace of mind that any sudden increase in traffic won't bring everything down.
I know it's not just up to hardware, so we plan to have at least a load balancer, memcache and few db servers.
Is it possible to have a setup on AWS that would automatically add instances and bandwidth if the traffic increases?
What other advice you could give to deployment noobs? Thanks.
ps: I apologize in advance if a question is too broad or reflects inexperience on mentioned topics, but that's why I ask.
Heroku. Because you're a start-up, keep things lean and it doesn't get leaner than almost free (with 1 dyno + small shared DB). Spend time building your product, not on the infrastructure. You don't want to be installing patches when you should be talking to customers. Heroku is also flexible and allows you to scale up 'dynos' as your traffic increases so no worries about growing there. Heroku won't scale automatically for you, though, so do your own server monitoring. Heroku add-ons are also nice.
Recently we have done a very good comparison between AWS and Heroku and we decided to move to Heroku, here is the detail of this http://www.confiz.com/blog/tech-session/selecting-the-right-cloud-platform/
If you're on Python, you can try Google App Engine.
Migrating the Python app from one platform to another isn't too difficult once you get the past the learning curve as to what features is (not) available. GAE offers datastore, memcache, blobstore plus a few other goodies like dJango and Jinja (templating). Worth checking the Python start page and it didn't take me long to integrate it into Facebook and Dropbox too.
Stay away from Heroku. You can get EC2 for free for a year from Amazon. Scaling up heroku is extremely costly. Their pricing tends to be unclear and their customer service in general sucks.
BitNami for Amazon EC2 includes ready-to-run versions of Apache, MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQLite, Python, Django, Git, their required dependencies, and much more. It can be deployed via all-in-one free native installers, virtual machines and Cloud Images. maybe worth checking out.
My personal experience is that you should generally start with Heroku. Get your app out in the wild and find that product/market-fit or some type of traction. You will know you are going somewhere because customers will cause scaling issues. In this case, Heroku will allow you to scale with very little overhead. And for some time, this scaling will not hit you in the wallet.
Jump to AWS when you are ready. When will you be ready? When you have enough pain, in the wallet, where you need more control over the stack. You can hire a AWS devops type or learn about it, yourself.
Both Heroku and AWS have auto-scaling solutions, but whereas Heroku has a fairly flat learning curve -- that is what you are paying for -- AWS can get broad and steep fairly quickly. A Udemy AWS course or any of the hundred other online resources will get your started down building a robust AWS architecture.
Lastly, while performance should not be your primary concern, make sure that you are using best practices in your code. Your first user should not bring your system to a crawl. And AWS will not help if she does.
Hope this helps in some way.
This has been my experience. My saas start kits are built to deploy to Heroku out of the box for this reason. However, the start kits are also containerized. I know that you spoke of AWS explicitly, but with containers you can be infrastructure agnostic. This is worth considering!
Ted [at] https://stacksimple.io
Check out this blog series I'm starting because I found Heroku to not be scalable at all from a financial perspective compared to EC2 and Digital Ocean. Going to be showing how to put a Ruby application on Digital Ocean using Docker, which allows you the same flexibility and ability to scale up and down very quickly https://medium.com/#karimbutt/weaning-off-heroku-part-1-b7f123ae855f
It greatly depeneds whether you're looking for a PaaS, IaaS or SaaS, and what is the language you using.
AWS is a IAAS/PAAS with multiple components and layers.
Heroku is a PAAS supporting multiple languages, most notably Java, Ruby and Node.js
Other platforms come into play depending on your needs, you might want to take a look at this comparison as well: https://dictativ.com/compare/paas