Rails Web App Architecture in Heroku - heroku

Is it possible to configure multiple web-server to an app-server in heroku? Playing with heroku, I don't see that is possible. Heroku deployment as I understand doesn't support web and app server separation. Just wanted to double check my understanding.
Appreciate your thoughts on this!

Heroku as things stand today, does not have a web-server option. You got to keep this in mind for some of your app configurations like cacheing, response compressing etc.
In the case of rails or node platforms, you got to set app-level configurations or have middlewares to take care of these kind of things.

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Question about deploying a Shopify app to Heroku

I have question about Shopify app development and the deployment process.
I've used the getting started guide here, and I have an app that works fine when I use npm run dev and view the app in the store admin.
However, of course, once I stop the server from running, the app is no longer accessible.
I believe I need to deploy the app to Heroku (or something similar) in order to have it work in a non-development environment.
It doesn't seem like there is much guidance online from Shopify about the best way to go about this.
Does anyone know what steps I need to take in order to deploy my app to Heroku, so that I can use the app in by test store on another device?
It seems like every guide online stops JUST BEFORE explaining this process and I can't figure out why! I have tried everything online but nothing has worked:
Adding the code to Github and connecting it to Heroku
Using Docker
Any help is appreciated. Thank you!
You have zero obligations to use Heroku. If you have an IP address dedicated to your house, you could host the App using your house. If you co-locate your own server at an Internet business, and they give you IP addresses you can use that. If you wanted to use Amazon directly, you could use EC2. If you wanted to use Linode, or Azure, or any other cloud service, feel free! It is up to you!
Using Heroku (built on AWS) is traditional only in the sense that it is the original easy peasy hosting in the cloud service. Play with Heroku by reading Heroku-specific documentation or hosting information. This has nothing to do with Shopify. Shopify only mentions Heroku because traditionally, developers used it. No other reason.
If you want to learn how to use Heroku, 100% there are blog posts within easy reach for you to study and learn from.

Heroku Applications within AWS VPC

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.

How do you run utility services on Heroku?

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...

Scaling a Meteor app on Heroku

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.

What exactly is Heroku?

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.

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