Bordertown Labs Blog
Notes from Bordertown Labs with posts regarding software development for the iPhone, Ruby on Rails, tips and code.
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Posts tagged "heroku"
Apr 27th, 2009 @ 11:19 am
Time to refocus
The transition to Heroku, and more generally to hosting apps in the cloud, has transformed the way I think about my development efforts.
Aside from the enormous increase in power Heroku gives us in terms of computation, stability and convenience, there’s a subtle shift in consciousness that happened as soon as I embraced the new pricing model. Paying appropriately for resource usage encourages us to focus our efforts on what matters, micro and macro; from performance tuning to business strategy.
For example, it’s time to assess the real cost of keeping Pocket alive. After 3 years, people continue to sign up for Pocket and it has nearly 6,000 users. Nowadays it’s a silly service with many direct competitors and serious usability flaws. The project’s partners have moved on, yet Pocket sits there consuming resources on my little server while it collects and organizes people’s bookmarks.
I could see value in much lighter weight version of Pocket that lets a user send new bookmarks to any of their multiple Delicious accounts (doesn’t everyone have several accounts?). Plus I still haven’t seen a comparable tag browser implementation, which I always wanted to pluginize. Oh, and I never released the feed browser thing, which I know I would use often.
Then there’s Fuel, which should be stripped down into a bare bones life logger.
I’d like to pull together my best work over the past 3 years of Ruby on Rails development and release a few iPhone apps while I’m at it. The transition to cloud computing might be just the boost I need.
@ 10:43 am
Migrating into the cloud
Today I made the transition to Heroku. Now my hosting cost is flexibly determined by resource consumption. Stability and performance are ensured because our site will be hosted in Amazon’s cloud.
Heroku’s technology is quite impressive. It’s built on top of Amazon’s Elastic Computing Cloud infrastructure. User requests are distributed across identical instances of my site based upon real-time traffic load. All important system level performance and data security configurations are managed automatically. Resources are automatically allocated and released, adapting to my site needs every moment. I pay for resource consumption. I never need to worry about upgrading server hardware or software again since the entire architecture is in the cloud, which is distributed across thousands of Amazon’s vast server farm.
As you let this idea settle into your thinking, you start to realize that the computing power available through the Internet has become immensely greater than you might have imagined. With respect to scaling, cloud computing removes humans and specific hardware concerns from the equation. Applications running in the cloud are much less constrained by physical limitations like CPU, RAM, storage or even geographic location. If an app needs more power, the grid allocates it when and where it’s needed.
“The future is here. It’s just not evenly distributed yet.” —William Gibson
