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by snprbob86 5708 days ago
The magic of cloud computing: As someone running an app on Heroku, I had no idea. Luckily, I simply don't care.

Our app has a cyclic usage pattern and all is quiet right now. So rather than freaking out about it, I'll just let someone at Heroku figure it all out.

It would suck if it happened during our busy period, but then again I could say "We're working on it." and just assume the Heroku team will fix things faster than I ever could have with my limited *nix admin skills.

1 comments

How exactly is the fact that you didn't know about the outage "the magic of cloud computing"?

I get that you're saying your users don't care/didn't notice, but I'm clearly missing something because if I had an app on Heroku, I'd be a little nervous. When the cyclic nature of your app swings back around and it's in regular use again, this kind of outage might not be so magical.

Well technically, I was informed of it. I got email alerts and stuff, but I was busy doing other things, so I didn't read them.

Users surely noticed, but Heroku definitely noticed before my users did. They're quietly working on a solution and I can quietly go about my day. If my users start complaining, I'll have time to talk to them; time I wouldn't have if I was neck deep in log spew.

Having run apps on my own servers before, I know what a pain in the ass it is to deal with downtime yourself. I'm not particularly good at it, so I appreciate having experts take care of it for me.

Having experts be responsible for dealing with problems is not unique to "cloud computing".
Not unique to it, but it is implicit in it. This matters. If you are at the size where you can't have a dedicated staff monitoring your uptime 24/7 than you are at the size where a cloud solution is going to be more responsive than what you can afford.
> to deal with downtime yourself. I'm not particularly good at it, so I appreciate having experts take care of it for me.

This is downtime coming from their infrastructure, not your app.