Heroku: Announcing the Add-on Provider Program

thetrumanshow 15 years ago |

Free idea here. Create an add-on that monitors your load and tells you when you've probably got too many workers and dynos.

Credit goes to the guy who got stuck with the $1300 Heroku bill... he inspired this idea.

link: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1688904

zach 15 years ago | |

Even easier would be an add-on that allows you to bump up your resources for a pre-determined time period, after which they return to baseline values.

That way there would be no need for further user intervention at all.

siong1987 15 years ago | |

an addon might be overkilled. try the heroku gem.

you can check out the example here: http://github.com/pedro/delayed_job/tree/autoscaling

for worker, you might have to track the number of jobs in your queue. for dyno, you might have to track the number of requests you get within a time period.

sabat 15 years ago | |

This is such a good and obviously needed idea that it makes me want to run out and implement it tonight. (No guarantees that I'll do it, but I'm 100% sure someone will.)

tfe 15 years ago |

Is anyone else stunned at how thorough and complete the documentation and support materials are for this launch?

I was blown away. Great job guys!

cmelbye 15 years ago | |

Definitely. I was just playing with kensa, which is a tool that they wrote for automatically testing your add-on. It checks to make sure everything is working properly. This includes your settings manifest, provisioning services, deprovisioning services, making sure the add-on is secure, etc.

judofyr 15 years ago |

I'm waiting for the recursive add-on: Someone creates an add-on, hosts it on Heroku and then enables the add-on in the add-on app.

pvh 15 years ago | |

I'm already building an addon as a Heroku app. Of course, I work for Heroku, so it probably doesn't count.

judofyr 15 years ago | | |

You're missing an important detail: Start using the add-on in the Heroku app. Since the add-on provides feature x, you can simply depend on it and remove feature x from the Heroku app :-)

pvh 15 years ago | | |

Way ahead of you. The tricky part is being able to bootstrap if the service crashes. It's pretty neat being able to basically provide artificial respiration for your web app in an emergency.

waratuman 15 years ago | |

The add-on that I've built has the provisioning system and server management portion on Heroku.

mark_l_watson 15 years ago |

I didn't see (from a quick reading of the docs) how developers get paid: via Heroku, or a direct charge to end users?

jon_dahl 15 years ago | |

It's via Heroku. They handle customer management and billing, and send revenue to you (after taking a cut).

grep 15 years ago | |

70% for you, 30% for Heroku.

wrs 15 years ago |

I'm kind of disappointed at the "neutral marketplace" philosophy. I'd prefer a "curated marketplace" where the Herokuans could be opinionated about what works best (in general, and with Heroku). Metrics are great but I actually value the opinion of the people who built and run Heroku more. (Of course their opinion could be a metric, but it didn't sound like it in the announcement.)

PStamatiou 15 years ago |

Notifo definitely needs to get on this..