[okfn-labs] Heroku as a deployment platform for OKFN apps?

[Tom Oinn]

On 7 August 2012 10:01, Nick Stenning <nick at whiteink.com> wrote:
> On Sun, Aug 5, 2012 at 3:55 PM, Tom Oinn <tom.oinn at okfn.org> wrote:
>> On 5 August 2012 15:42, elf Pavlik <perpetual-tripper at wwelves.org> wrote:
>>
>>> for PaaS solutions Platform-as-a-Service lately i came across this OPEN stack:
>>> http://nodester.com/
>>>
>>> i looks like node.js only but it seams that they share all their code, which one can't say about Heroku or Nodejitsu :(
>
> Just to say that I'm a big +1 on Heroku for hosting smaller OKF
> applications. AnnotateIt is now running on Heroku, and a number of
> other bits and pieces (taxman.openspending.org, ok-api.com) are as
> well.
>
> As for the open platform/closed platform debate; I think this is a bit
> ridiculous. As Tom, I consider the openness a second-order concern.
> Attempting to put a 7 month old Node-only platform and the largest
> polyglot PaaS provider in the world on equal footing seems a bit silly
> to me =).
>
> In terms of "lock-in", there is none. From the perspective of your
> application, Heroku requires you describe how to run it in a
> Procfile[1] and load config variables from the application environment
> (which is advocated by the 12 Factor App anyway --
> http://www.12factor.net/). That's it. Is replicating that spinup
> environment on your own server really that hard?

Just to confirm this, I run textus locally on my dev machine (win7,
mingw shell, console2 terminal) with 'node src/server.js' having set a
few environment variables (although I could also have specified them
on the command line, I have a configuration module which gathers this
information from wherever it can). I run a default instance of
elasticsearch to act as the datastore.

If I want to get any changes I make onto the heroku instance I do a
'git commit' then 'git push heroku master' and about twenty seconds
later they're on the heroku app. If I don't like the changes I can
roll them back in my local repo, if I do I can push to upstream, all
very easy. No lock-in for sure - it's a valid concern (not that anyone
raised it..) but it's entirely possible to code in such a way that
it's a non issue.

-- 
Tom Oinn
+44 (0) 20 8123 5142 or Skype ID 'tomoinn'
http://www.crypticsquid.com