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

Wed Aug 8 10:21:20 UTC 2012

In the past I've spent a lot of time and hackery rigging up EC2 instances
so i could type `git push amazon master` to deploy a Flask app ...
Friedrich pointed me to Heroku for my latest project and I really do love
it. No looking back!
In particular I've been loving the ability to schedule background worker
processes which run maintenance tasks on the Postgres database (which was
also a cinch to fire up).
So. I am +1 on all this.

On Tue, Aug 7, 2012 at 1:17 PM, Tom Oinn <tom.oinn at okfn.org> wrote:

> 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
>
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>
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