

How FlightCaster (YC S09) built multi-platform scalable apps on Heroku (YC W08) - jaf12duke
http://infoq.com/articles/flightcaster-heroku-rails

======
boggles
I find the non-free options no Heroku to be vastly more expensive than hosting
options elsewhere such as Slicehost, Dreamhost and Amazon ECS.

They provide a valuable service in terms of taking administration issues out
of the picture and letting you just focus on developing your app.

But my feeling is this is not targeted at hackers who are surviving on rice
and beans but rather those who are more likely to either have well-paying day
jobs that can subsidize their startup hobby on the side or have enough VC
capital to not bother with the mundane details of hosting administration and
its associated time and financial burdens.

Not that there's anything wrong with that - Heroku has come up with an
ingenious business model because it really does satisfy a need in the vanity
hosting market where cost is not an issue - but belonging to the rice and
beans category myself at the moment, I just find that I'm sadly not their
target demographic - as much fun as it is to use Heroku's free option for
little toy apps.

Deploying to Heroku really is a delight and I think we will see more services
like them start up over the next few years.

~~~
wr0ngway
If you are looking for a free tool for rails deployment, check out my project
<http://wiki.github.com/wr0ngway/rubber> (The Quick Start section gives a good
feel for it) - while the EC2 account isn't free, its not too bad, especially
if you aren't running a full time instance. I've also done some abstracting
out of the ec2 bits, so theoretically you could write a slicehost/other
adapter if you were so inclined.

~~~
boggles
This is cool. How much tinkering would it take to use this for Sinatra
deployments to EC2?

~~~
wr0ngway
Not much, that was one of my focuses in the current release as we needed to
deploy a sinatra app. I think the only thing that missed the release was
generating a Rakefile into the project root for non-rails projects. Here's
what ours looks like: <http://gist.github.com/189256>

Ping me on the rubber mailing list if you have any questions - I'd be
interested in hearing how this works out for a non-rails app for someone other
than myself :)

------
icey
Since I know the FlightCaster guys read HN, I'd like to make a suggestion of
something I'd love to see.

When I take a flight that's not on Southwest and more than an hour in length,
I like to do the first-class / business class upgrades when I check in because
they aren't that much more expensive (usually $50 to $100 per leg). It's one
of my few guilty pleasures.

Anyways, it would be pretty cool if there was a way for me to predict which
flights have a higher likelihood of having those types of flight upgrades
available (which is to say flights that are statistically less likely to have
a full first or business class).

I have no idea if you guys even have access to that kind of data, but whenever
I book travel now I guess as to the likelihood of being able to upgrade on the
day.

~~~
jrockway
Most airlines have a separate fare class for upgrades like this. For domestic
flights on AA, for example, the fare class is "X". So you can use any tool
that shows you fare inventory (like ExpertFlyer) to check this.

And of course, your chances of upgrading are greatly improved if you have
status on the airline. This is very easy to get. (AA is doing a double EQM
promotion right now, which means one transpacific flight gets you Gold status.
With this, you check a box when making your reservation, and if there is
availability in the next class of service, you are automatically upgraded 24
hours before the flight. Much better than gambling on the rare "LFBU" kiosk
upgrade.)

Anyway, statistics are nice, but it's pretty easy to _ensure_ you get the
upgrade. I fly about 50k miles a year, and have only missed one segment in the
last two years. (And that was my fault; I checked in without enough "upgrade
stickers" and was removed from the upgrade list. I got back on about an hour
before the flight, and missed the upgrade by one spot. Oh well :) I have also
been upgraded for free on a variety of generally non-upgradeable segments this
year, too. A very nice undocumented bonus of having status.

~~~
icey
I used to be able to do this when I was flying back and forth to London every
8 weeks; but I don't fly enough now for any carrier to really care about my
business. I probably only fly about 3,000-4,000 miles a year anymore.

------
leif
Is anyone else bothered by the fact that InfoQ interviewed a team of really
smart guys doing exciting and challenging (and computationally intensive) data
analysis on a sparkly new-ish cloud host that's supposedly doing great things
for scalability, and wasted so much time talking about HTML5 and mobile web
UI? Aren't there a million web designers out there they can interview instead,
or am I just missing something?

I know they had a "Part 1" (which my computer is utterly failing to access
right now or I'd verify the following), but from what I remember, it was about
how they use Clojure, and there's an entire scalability angle to get that I'd
rather hear.

~~~
fluffee
Sigh... just RTF part 1 before moaning:
<http://www.infoq.com/articles/flightcaster-clojure-rails>

It goes extensively into detail about their use of Clojure. The fact that the
2nd part's title is "Building FlightCaster's Frontends for the Web and
Smartphones" could've tipped you off about what's inside...

------
timdorr
_We also found that Flightstats was reporting an imaginary airline (Oceanic
Airlines)._

I guess someone at Flightstats is a Lost fan.

