

Heroku Production Check - abhia
https://blog.heroku.com/archives/2013/4/26/introducing_production_check

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pilif
Dyno redundancy and DNS CNAMEs to protect the rest of the platform if YOU get
DDOSed looks to me like things their customers have to do to compensate for
shortcomings of the platform.

That's of course totally ok. What I dislike is how it's being sold as a
feature or simple precaution.

Why should I pay double because they have to restart my vm? Why can't they
bring up a new one and then kill my current one? Why are they talking about
isolating DDOSed customers instead of protecting them?

Again, I can see these issues, but don't sell the workaround as a feature

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mattsoldo
I'm a PM at Heroku. The dyno redundancy check has nothing to do with
protecting the platform. It is a best practice for production apps to have
redundancy at the web server level. This protects your app from downtime
should underlying servers fail, or if the web server process were to crash.
N+1 redundancy for the win.

Also, it does not cost customers double because the first dyno is free with
each app.

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mccolin
So it actually costs an infinite percentage more to run that second dyno ;-)

But I agree your points on redundancy at the webserver level.

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eriktrans
Despite all the hate surrounding Heroku lately, they're doing a pretty good
job improving their product for users. This is good.

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rickyc091
I beg to differ. They are definitely releasing a lot of features lately, but I
feel that their core product is degrading. There has been a lot of bugs lately
with Heroku.

To list a few, right when the whole debacle regarding concurrency started,
they had a bug with their scheduler which wouldn't terminate processes. What
ended up happening was that customers got billed for processing time they
didn't use. Heroku fixed the billing issue after they were told of this issue.
There was also a minor security issue where you could grant applications
access to heroku via oauth, but you couldn't reject it. Not a huge deal, but
it would be nice to revoke apps instead of leaving them out in the limbo. I
could probably name off a few more issues I've been having with Heroku, but my
point is, I'd rather they spend more time fixing the current issues instead of
spinning off new features.

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rickyc091
For starters, I'd love my support request to actually get responded to. To
this day (one month later), the support request is still opened. The issue was
fixed, however those who were affected received a canned respond. I'm sure
thousands of paying customers would not have been aware they were over
charged.

"We discovered that your February invoice # was not calculated correctly
beacuse of an issue with our usage data system. We have not charged your
credit card while we've been investigating and repairing the issue. We will
run automatic transactions within the next two business days to collect on
your February charges. You can see your corrected invoice on the dashboard:

    
    
      https://dashboard.heroku.com/account
    

We apologize for the inconvenience this has caused."

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ddagradi
[reposting stolt45's comment that got killed]:

Hey Ricky, we've definitely had some billing related issues recently. We've
just finished the initial stages of moving onto a new system which should help
clear up the cause of the issues like the one you mention in your last post.
Sorry about the delays. If you email me at chris [at] heroku [dot] com and
I'll make sure you're taken care of.

~~~
rickyc091
Thanks ddagradi + bgentry. Jen from Heroku got back to me shortly afterwards.

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jreposa
For one of my apps it says that I'm not using a production ready database. I'm
using Amazon RDS. How well will the DB add-ons integrate with this check?

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moriya
IIRC you actually have to remove the Heroku postgres DB for it to pass if
you're running RDS.

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jclem
This is correct. If there are no Heroku Postgres DBs, the test is skipped. If
there are any, the test only passes if there is at least 1 production-tier
database.

