Is heroku hosted in singapore?

[Raj]

Hi all

First of all nice to join this group.. i am newbie to rails & just
started arnd 2mths back in building some custom website..
currently i am hosting my app on heroku and it seems working fine. but
there seems to be some intermittent delays, but as a free user i don't
want to complain too much :).

I am aware heroku runs on amazon ec2 platform & but still it is not
clear whether heroku can be hosted on ec2 singapore region? As of now
i can't find a way to select heroku hosting location? if you have any
idea please let me know.

Also does heroku committed for long term in hosting apps on ec2? as
salesforce bought heroku, does it move to force platform some time in
future?

Also did any one tried hosting app on rightscale with ec2 singapore?

Raj

[Boon Kiat, Han]

raj

Did a fair bit of heroku-ing myself (recently a clojure app on the cedar stack).

I think you have to consider Heroku as a platform provider/PaaS to you

and EC2 as the infrastructure provider to Heroku. Heroku thus is hosted in whatever servers Amazon assigns - thus - the Cloud.

You prob should focus on your app, its performance, and consuming those services proffered by Heroku (which are rock-solid) rather than question their infrastructure decisions, even if they move for any reason, you should continue to enjoy the service/levels as endorsed.

I think heroku is well-optimized for global delivery, is there a pressing need to micromanage the zone?

It's anyway not the reason why your app is sluggish or slow.

---

From: Raj <rajam...@gmail.com>
To: Singapore Ruby Brigade <singap...@googlegroups.com>
Sent: Tuesday, August 9, 2011 5:44 PM
Subject: [SRB] Is heroku hosted in singapore?

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[zan]

my experience hosting on singapore ec2 has been good. but latency can be erratic at times.

[Tamas Herman]

On Tue, Aug 9, 2011 at 7:24 PM, zan <lian...@gmail.com> wrote:
> my experience hosting on singapore ec2 has been good. but latency can be
> erratic at times.

there are many things u can do about this which are a lot scalable and
more longterm solutions than moving to a singapore data center.

client side caching by setting the http cache-control header.
server side page / fragment / query caching in memcached.
THEN
reverse proxy caching with the proxy placed into singapore.

it requires more architecting though, of course.

--
tom

[Ernesto Fries Urioste]

from network perspective you always should have the content near to your users.

if your customer base is mainly global, the US is still best connected.

if you serve a lot of customers you can use CDN Networks or global load balancers.

AWS and SoftLayer are good providers. Also your local Webhoster if you like to serve a specific market.

br

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[Raj]

Thanks all for replies..

My main concern is not only speed (but it doesn't hurt to have better
speed by hosting closer to usage location) but also about security of
data being hosted.
for example if i develop a cloud application which can store some
sensitive personal information in cloud, it would be better to store
them in singapore to
allay customer concerns about privacy & being safe. Although as a
technical people we may think it may not make much difference in
hosting singapore or US, but layman consumers feel better when their
personal data is in country where they live. Moreover having able to
host in multiple regions can provide high reliability of service.
Heroku is hosted on US east & it already broke down twice in last
4months or so.

I have sent mail to heroku about their plans for hosting in asia
region & reply is below.

We don't have any near-future plans to host apps in any Asian
locations. If you're worried about delivering your assets in that part
of the world, though, you might look into hosting your assets on a
content delivery network (CDN), like Amazon CloudFront, for example.

EngineYard which is heroku direct competitior , offers to host in all
amazon locations. Based on what i read, engineyard is very expensive
although they offer excellent support. But it seems right choice if
you have mission critical production applications. but deploying rails
app in engineyard is not as easy as heroku.

It seems heroku beats all in how fast you can deploy application.

On Aug 10, 5:19 pm, Ernesto Fries Urioste <erne...@fries.fr> wrote:
> from network perspective you always should have the content near to your users.
>
> if your customer base is mainly global, the US is still best connected.
>
> if you serve a lot of customers you can use CDN Networks or global load balancers.
>
> AWS and SoftLayer are good providers. Also your local Webhoster if you like to serve a specific market.
>
> br
>

> On Aug 10, 2011, at 5:11 PM, "Tamas Herman" <hermanta...@gmail.com> wrote:

[sausheong]

Hi Raj,

If you're concerned abt 'security' you shouldn't host on any public
cloud provider. Cloud providers will in fact replicate your data
across their availability zones for disaster recovery and other
purposes so if your sensitive data cannot leave the country then you
shouldn't host them in such providers. You should also read your SLA
on data stored, I doubt there is much gaurantee of that with the price
we normally pay for using a cloud infrastructure service like EC2.

[Tamas Herman]

if speed is not such a concern, then maybe u can try to extract the
database component onto a singapore server. it will be a lot slower
without the right caching and queuing, but hey, u can show your
customers how would a moderate cost solution look like.

they might change their minds about safety and stuff, especially if u
explicitly bill them for system administration and explain what can
happen if it's not done.

let them know what is the cost equivalent of such a reliable and
redundant system which u can get at heroku.
(calculate with 1 voxel server + 1 hot standby / backup ec2 instance +
their maintenance cost to keep them up to date and synced...)

at the end it will look really expensive, but they might say:
"okay, but we can give up on reliability, just get 1 voxel server"
let's say it halves the cost.

that cost u save is actually the cost of having a less reliable, more
time sucking system locally.
plus the other half of the cost is still a magnitude higher than heroku's cost.

personally, i've experienced the bad effect of having huge performance
/ storage capacity at your disposal.
u start to do programming in a very lousy way, which wastes these
resources at a lot higher rate.
it means u will out grow the dedicated hardware fast and there is
nowhere to go afterwards, because adding more machines, together with
the higher maintenance cost just doesnt worth it.
at the end u should sit down for a month or two and refactor and
re-architect your solution.
which is not cheap either and anything, but fun, plus it's a quite
risky and complicated continuous migration...

--
tom

[zan]

how about the latency? my experience with sg ec2 is its latency can be erratic. it's mostly due to singtel routing traffic out i think. is voxel's latency consistent?

[Raj]

sausheong,

based on what read on aws website, it seems data doesn't leave
particular location without our approval.
means we can restrict data storage to particular location but it may
make it less reliable & hard to recover faulty data.
As you suggested devil might be in details & so it is always better to
go through SLA's in detail to understand how
data is handled.

I agree public clouds are not best approach to host sensitive data but
private clouds can be expensive for start up
kind of companies..