Quantcast
Channel: Sazbean » web programming
Viewing all articles
Browse latest Browse all 4

Another Interview with James Lindenbaum, CEO of Heroku – Part 2

0
0

herokuYesterday, we had part one of our interview with James Lindenbaum, CEO of Heroku, which provides hosting for Ruby on Rail applications.  We had a great conversation with James, but there was a bit much for one post, so we divided the interview into 2.  Here’s the second part of our interview….

Sazbean: How should business users that are new to Ruby on Rails (ROR) use Heroku?

James: There are several different things about Heroku that make it unique:

Firstly, it’s free to get started.  Which is great for small apps, testing, etc.  It’s very cost effective and very fast.  This means that businesses can actually develop all those good ideas without having to worry about the costs associated with hosting and deployment. Rails is so productive that you can have an app up and running in a few days or weeks – letting businesses test a lot of ideas very quickly.

Secondly, businesses don’t have to worry about the transition when going from an experimental application to a live application.  We handle everything for them.  We have all the heavy duty enterprise stuff you need when your app grows.

We also are very useful for staging.  Most companies have a very complex deployment process, with servers for development, testing, and production.  There are a lot of challenges in keeping all those environments identical, which you need to do to avoid having unforeseen problems in production.  In Heroku, all environments are identical and with staging servers, which don’t use very many resources, you pay for only what you use, making it very economical.  You can quickly create and destroy servers, so many developers are creating a new staging server for every version and leaving them in the account so they now have an audit trail to do regression testing.

Sazbean: What do you feel differentiates Heroku from your competitors?

James: There are a few things we do uniquely.  We’re the only place where you can deploy provisionlessly – just push your code and you’re done.  No steps to worry about.  We’re also the only multi-tenant platform, other than Google’s App Engine, so the platform is always up to date.  All improvements we make to the stack get rolled out to all applications.  Heroku is handling all the maintenance of the application for you.  Our scaling time is so fast – just drag the sliders and after a couple of seconds your application is scaled up.  This is really important so people can quickly match changes in demand for their application.

Sazbean: How well does Heroku handly dynamic provisioning?  If your site gets covered in TechCrunch, how does that work?

James: Right now there has to be a human decision, but it’s very quickly scaled up and we handle all the details.  We’ll do auto-scaling in the future.  We basically already have it, but we’re still at a stage where people don’t really understand how rails apps perform.  When we ask people how they want to scale an app, they don’t know.  So we need to let the community catch up so they can help figure out how apps should be scaled up and provisioned.

Sazbean: Do you provide tools so people can figure out where they should be for provisioning?

James: Not yet.  That’s right around the corner.  We’re coming out with some great features soon.  Most people use New Relic right now, which is a plugin that collects performance information about your application and then provides graphs and charts so you can see exactly what’s going on.

We have some really interesting use cases now that we have over 30,000 apps running on the platform. HeyZap, a casual gaming company, created a Swine Flu game – Swine Fighter.  They built it and then publicized it and were featured on Times, Reuters and other news sources.  They’re running on Heroku and they came to us when they were going to be in USA Today in just 2 hours.  We told them to scale up their dynos, so they did, and that was that.  They were able to serve millions of users over just a few days.

We have another customer who wrote an application for a site in Hungary that’s like Facebook.  It really took off like crazy.  6 or 7 weeks ago they were doing 300-400 dynamic requests per second, sustained.  Even at night they were doing 40 requests per second. We were able to push through 1/2 billion page views, and that doesn’t count any of the caching that was going on.  We scaled up that fast in just a matter of days and they’re able to scale up and down with the demand.

Sazbean: Where do you see the market growth for enterprise Ruby on Rails (ROR)?

James: From our internal numbers, it’s growing, but hard to say across what industries.  We have Fortune 500 companies registering all the time.  But bigger enterprises are always slower to adopt.  So, you see what you’d expect: bigger companies are starting to use Heroku for staging, testing, rapid prototyping and smaller apps.  Some are using it for larger, mission-critical apps, but they’re still the outliers.

Sometimes when someone registers from a big company, we contact them to see if they’re using Ruby at work. Last year, they’d say “no, we’re only allowed to use Java at work, I’m using Heroku for a personal project.” Six months ago, they’d say “we’re not supposed to be using Ruby, but there are three of us working on this project, and we’re using Ruby, and don’t tell anyone.” Then a few months ago, the story started to be “they came to us and told us we had to get this project done on a really short timeline, and we told them we could only get it done if they let us use Ruby. They did and the project was a success, so now we’re doing a medium-sized Ruby project.”

We have a large company that has a 400-person development team, doing Java and Perl, and they realized they weren’t agile.  So they restructured into 20, 20-person teams, with 2 of them being Ruby teams.  Immediately, the 2 Ruby teams are just way more productive, so all the business people want their stuff going to the Ruby teams because it’ll be done in 2 weeks and it’ll be pretty.

We also have Ruby teams who finish projects and then they go to IT to deploy and IT says they can’t deploy it or it’ll be 3 months to provision for it.  So the Ruby guys go to upper management and say, “look we’re building these apps in a matter of weeks, and IT provisioning is taking twice as long as the entire project to deploy.  You’ve got to let us go outside.”  So, they get to go outside, but then there’s no support from IT and you have two choices: a service-driven, highly managed hosting provider with a lot of guys to help (which is very expensive), or Heroku, where things are harder to break.

One of our big drivers right now is the inability of IT to keep up with the rate of development.

Related posts:

Technorati tags: , , , , , , , , ,

Liked this post? Consider subscribing to our RSS feed or our monthly newsletter.

The post Another Interview with James Lindenbaum, CEO of Heroku – Part 2 appeared first on Sazbean.


Viewing all articles
Browse latest Browse all 4

Latest Images

Trending Articles



Latest Images