Tonight's Amazon outage taking much of Heroku down for several hours (second time in as many weeks) has left me with two fundamental questions:
1) What is Heroku doing to make their architecture more available, such that their control surfaces are less sensitive to localized Amazon outages? I guess that I'm not even sure that their architecture is not highly available, but both of these last two outages have resulted in Heroku taking down their APIs while they restore service. This leads me to believe that even if my app was based outside the affected AZ, my site's availability would be affected by the outage since Heroku itself is so sensitive to these outages. 2) What is Heroku doing to make it possible for my app to be more available? I think that Heroku should be able to (almost instantly) spin up new instances of my app in other AZs when a particular AZ starts having problems. The bigger issue, of course, is the database. I would think that a premium plan that pays for a warm backup for my database located in another AZ from the primary database would be a popular feature for sites that value their uptime. One of my apps is just entering Beta, with a couple hundred users expected in a month or so -- at that time I would be willing to pay for that warm backup, but as far as I know I just can't get it with Heroku (or if I can, it will require a great deal of fiddling on my part). This feature in particular cries out to be an extra-cost add-on, where enabling the add-on spins up a warm backup for my database in a different AZ than my primary database, with automatic failover in case the primary becomes unreachable. I'd like to close by saying that I've been very impressed with what Heroku has done in making it easy to launch, manage, and scale anything from a simple static website to a sophisticated interlinked system of applications. It is now time for them to take the next step and bring the same philosophy to managing availability. I have no doubt that they can do this, suspect that they are already working on it, and would just like to have my beliefs confirmed, with a dash of "here's what's ahead" thrown in for good measure! -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Heroku" group. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/heroku?hl=en_US?hl=en
