

AppHarbor (YC W11) launches add-on ecosystem using Heroku's (YC W08) API - troethom
http://blog.appharbor.com/2011/06/27/announcing-add-ons

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drtse4
Am i the only one who doesn't understand why someone should use a
memcache/redis instance hosted by a third party?

I've never used this kind of services but the first impression is that just
the RTT between your server and the third party's one will have a huge impact
performance-wise, removing every advantage you could have from the use of
these DBs.

And what about security? Are memcache/redis/mongoDB/etc... made to be exposed
to the public internet (requests _content and format_ are carefully inspected
by the server and during development, the implementation have been tested
carefully with fuzz testing or similar techniques) or these hosted solutions
add an additional layer that increases security/safety?

These issues could be mitigates (not resolved) when both parties are on the
same platform, but not everyone is on EC2/Heroku.

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joshz
At least in the case of Cloudant (CouchDB) the servers are in the same
facility as AppHarbor.

<http://blog.cloudant.com/dot-net-couchdb-cloudant-appharbor/>

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almightygod
IMO the appharbor add-ons page is a poor replication of the already poor UX of
the heroku add-ons page.

I get that your a heroku clone but it probably wouldn't hurt to show a
_little_ innovation.

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barrydahlberg
Nice that they have add ons and pricing for them but I wish they'd sort out
their own _preliminary prices_ first...

<http://appharbor.com/page/pricing>

Until there is solid pricing and a decent story around support it's very hard
to use for anything that matters.

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waratuman
I'm not to familiar with .NET, but it is interesting to see other providers
come up that are similar to Heroku. The add-on system that is developing is
great. All of the providers are specializing in what they do best.

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mwdev
This is a great addition! I'll have to start experimenting with moving off of
SQL to Mongo.

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benologist
Why's Redis so significantly more expensive than other services?

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friism
We don't set prices for add-on providers offerings, but note that Redis is an
in-memory database and that memory is more expensive -- per GB -- than disk.
(I'm an AppHarbor co-founder)

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benologist
I know you guys don't set the price, just found it odd. It's persistent in-
memory according to wikipedia, doesn't that make it like mongodb?

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marcc
But Redis should have at least as much RAM as you have data and will only use
the data from RAM. You cannot swap or store it on a slower disk, while Mongo
can use a disk file.

Redis can backup or journal to disk, but this is just so the data is
persistent between restarts, not used in queries or runtime.

* Updated based on comments: I originally wrote that redis requires as much ram as data (technically more) but I'm correcting this to state that Redis CAN use disk, but Salvatore, the man behind redis, publicly states that he does not recommend it as a solution.

~~~
latch
This is incorrect. Redis can swap out to virtual memory when it runs out of
RAM. Although, it should be leveraged with some care
(<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2606096>)

~~~
marcc
Thank you for the link. I actually do remember reading that, and I guess I
completely forgot it was even possible. After reading about it, I told myself
that redis will be in-memory only for the solution I was using it for. I'd
definitely be curious to see some real world performance numbers for redis
using the disk VM before considering it an option.

