Show HN: our Startup Weekend project - autoscale your Heroku dynos & workers

[keo]

Startup Weekend just started in our city and we thought we'll build a Heroku autoscaler that really works, and saves you not only from slowly building traffic but from the slashdot effect as well.<p>Those who tried out ddollar's gem (and all forks of it) or even Heroscale know that the problem's not so trivial to solve.<p>We hope people will get it, and pay a small monthly fee to save many days of inrastructure coding so they can focus on business logic instead.<p>URL is: http://scalefu.com/

[rabble]

I'm pretty sure Heroku doesn't want autoscale. I know it's been proposed many times, i asked myself many times. They think it encourages people to write bad code which isn't optimized.

[burke]

That's what they say. My money is on it encouraging people to leave more dynos running than necessary, thus yielding more income for Heroku.

[keo]

That's true, but it also works in the other direction: you get slashdotted, which kills your 2 running dynos. If you're away from your computer, your traffic is long gone by the time you get back, and Heroku missed some revenue because you didn't scale up.

Anyway, Heroku's business model isn't about making money on their oblivious users, I would rather bet on their add-on store's which now has a very minimal marginal cost to expand.

[Dudu]

Makes sense...

[hopeless]

I don't think that's true. There a fork of delayed_job which does autoscaling of workers on Heroku and... it's written by a Heroku employee. It's regularly mentioned on the mailing list too.

https://github.com/pedro/delayed_job/tree/autoscaling

[keo]

I talked with them too - and yes, they do not intend to release such thing, because "everyone's scaling needs are diffent".

I think needs aren't so diverse and there's quite a huge mass who has almost identical needs.

[letitbe]

Sounds logic. I like the idea, but I really wonder, if Heroku let it happen.

[keo]

clickable URL: http://scalefu.com

[pukati]

I like it!

[xtro]

I like it!