heroku-buildpack-multi

are able to do it. It generally takes quite a few people to do it and far too often I have seen it come at the cost of being able to move quickly. Not excusing heroku for making these mistakes, I think it blows pretty hard. I just think there is no good alternative. I believe that you are seriously underestimating the amount of effort required to deliver 99.9% reliability. I also believe you are underestimating how much heroku does for you on a git push if you think it is a bash script that has already been written. If that were true we would all have Heroku behind the firewall. 5. Heroku's implementation of buildpacks on their stack sucks? They have the only real implemenation of buildpacks? I agree forking/maintaining the fork sucks, I think there should be an easier way to install apt-get dependencies (ENV var). Alternatively you can use: https://github.com/ddollar/heroku-buildpack-multi which supports versioning and chaining. You just make a buildpack for your custom bits, and install it before your ruby buildpack I agree I don't often switch between ruby interpreters, however I do frequently upgrade MRI ruby versions, and the fact that it as easy as changing one line has saved me a lot of time. IMO this is much easier than any alternative I am aware of. I have written a few buildpacks and I have found buildpack multi to be pretty composable. I agree Dockerfiles are a decent alternative, however the part missing is a scheduling/discovery layer. Mesos docker integration is coming along via the folks at mesosphere but you still need to wire up the bits and pieces yourself. 3. I agree it is expensive, I think it is cheaper than a full time ops person to a pretty decent scale, and I think you need a lot more than 1 ops person to get close in terms of SLA, and featureset. Honestly I think you just traded one set of problems for another. Who is going to get paged when both the vm's hosting a service die? Who is going to get paged when you run out of disk space? Co-location of apps? Hosting multiple ruby versions on all your hosts? I don't fully appreciate your model but IMO it sounds like you have a client expectations problem.You should set the deliverable as a deployable app with the target as heroku, if they want to pay more for a VM they can pay more but they should understand the tradeoffs. If they want their own custom maintained servers or pay for you to maintain them, but it ain't free. It will cost you time and hopefully their money. I don't swap language often if ever, however I do like to use more than one language depending on the problem I am solving.

out buildpacks: 5.1) Install libgeos on all the hosts running a specific application? 5.2) Create and scale new worker instances on demand? 5.3) How do you setup logging for all these servers? 5.4) Health checks for these services (tcp, http) 5.5) Alerting and automatic failover * pssh? That will work fine until you spin up a second server and forget all the incatations to get your software up and running. * Puppet? I am sorry but Puppet, chef and their ilk are horrible, who knows what state any machine is ever in at any point in time. humans will inevitably forget to ensure absent, or make an assumption about state in puppet land. Nevermind the slow feedback loop in puppet land. Oh hey you want to change all the servers running X to now run Y instead, good luck with that. * Mesos? Mesos is the best open source scheduler out there, Marathon makes it easy to deploy to and there are scripts to run easily on ec2. However if you want to install native dependencies (libgeos etc) you will still need to do one of the above things. * Docker? Docker is an amazing way to package your app up and ship it to run on Mesos, however how do you package docker apps and ship them? Guess what? Buildpacks. Now consider this on Heroku (5.1) Add the https://github.com/ddollar/heroku-buildpack-multi (5.2) Change your procfile (5.3) There are plugin's for that Oh hey you can also write your own language, write a buildpack for it, and deploy it to production without ever having to get an ops person anywhere to setup a server for you. I am sorry but that is nothing short of amazing. 2 and 4) I agree 100%, it sucks to feel powerless and have no insight as to when things will be resolved, however if you work in any decent size org ops things will go down, and you will also have to wait to see any resolution. I agree it feels better to see people working busily in your office because you can see the sense of urgency. I 3) Pricing: In regards to pricing: yes Heroku is very expensive. However for small and medium teams it is much cheaper than hiring an ops person. You also get an economy of scale when you use Heroku; Think of all the things heroku takes care of for you: automatic failover on hardware/software(segfaults)/vm issues. Disks filling up on some host (it is embarrassing how many times I have seen something as simple as this cause issues). Agility; You need to switch MRI out for JRuby or rubinius, no problem, just update your ruby "version" in your Gemfile. The Heroku platform is superior in almost every way for running small to medium size applications then any in house cooked alternative. I am very familiar with the alternatives out there, I have contributed to dokku's buildpack repo https://github.com/progrium/buildstep, and have patched docker. There is no good behind the firewall/on my vm/hardware alternative for heroku atm. People are making progress but you won't really get anything as full featured as heroku. Best of luck to you Brian.