Judoscale: One-Click Autoscaling for any hosting platform ✨

Greetings, Judoscalers! A great hello from ye old midwest Ohio where the temps have fallen well into the 50’s (including some 30’s-mornings) and we’re all wondering why we haven’t moved to warmer states yet! (Oh, just me? 😬).

ANYWAY, we’ve got some neat articles, insights, and wisdom to share with you this month. Check it out:

• 📝 Dealing With Heroku Memory Limits and Background Jobs
• 📈 Utilization-Based Autoscaling: Officially GA
• 💎 TBT: A Rails-based Marketing Site
• 🎙️ Podcast: All About Queues w/ Adam
• 🔢 The Universal PaaS Pricing Calculator
• 📝 (ICYMI) What Nearly a Decade of Autoscaling Your Apps Has Revealed to Us

Let’s dive in!

📝 Dealing With Heroku Memory Limits and Background Jobs

Your app hums along fine on Standard dynos…until you add video encoding, giant imports, or some other memory‑hungry job. Suddenly your worker needs a bigger box, and upgrading every worker to Performance dynos feels like buying a school bus because you might carpool once.... Sound familiar?

Luckily Adam took some time to write out a guide and strategy to having your cake and eating it, too: not forking over hundreds of dollars to run memory intensive background jobs while still successfully running those jobs! Inspired by Justin Searls’ need to process video, Adam takes us through a pathway for paying merely pennies while using GIGs of RAM 😎 check it out here:

📈 Utilization-Based Autoscaling: Officially GA

While we previewed our custom utilization-based autoscaling back in June, then deep-dove into the weeds about how it works in July, we’re excited to announce that Judoscale’s custom utilization metric and autoscaling are now live for all users. That is, if you want to autoscale to maintain a certain amount of headroom, you can enable utilization-based autoscaling whenever you want ✨. We recommend reading both of those linked articles to get up to speed with this new feature, but if you’re ready to go, check out the new getting-started docs here:

💎 TBT: A Rails-based Marketing Site

We wanted to take a little time to throwback (Thursday? Friday?) to a venture we started last year when we rebuilt our marketing site for the third (and last 🤞) time: building a marketing site, to replace a static site, with Rails. That turned out to be a bit of a spicy 🌶️ take... even in the Rails community! But we can’t tell you how many times over the last year it’s been extremely helpful. Two parts we want to remember. First, the “why”, here:

And second, the “how”, here (Youtube video):

🎙️ Podcast: All About Queues w/ Adam

Adam recently went onto The Bike Shed podcast (by Thoughtbot) to talk about queues. Be it job queue architectures, background job autoscaling strategies or opinions on background job systems (something we’ve written about before!), Adam was slinging nuggets of wisdom! Ultimately, it was a sharp, thoughtful discussion on building resilient systems that scale intelligently (and, of course, automatically 😉). Check it out and give it a listen here:

The Universal PaaS Pricing Calculator

So maybe you’ve been a little platform-curious. Maybe you’ve heard the hype about Render and Fly.io over the last couple of years and feel a little... 👀. Maybe you’re getting too big for your current platform and thinking about something like Amazon ECS, but actually getting a sense of how much something will cost on AWS before you actually use it is darn-near impossible. EITHER WAY! Our team built and maintains a universal PaaS Pricing Calculator to help you out!

Its goal is simple: compare the face-value, out-the-door costs for each platform once you describe your app setup.

So... thinking about jumping to Render or Fly? Maybe you’ll feel stronger about that idea once you see you’ll save fifty percent of your hosting costs! Or maybe you’ll feel less inclined if you see that you’ll double your hosting costs! The goal here is visibility. Check it out here!

📝 (ICYMI) What Nearly a Decade of Autoscaling Your Apps Has Revealed to Us

In case you missed it from last month’s newsletter, this article proved to be full of interesting insights that helped several teams!

Our little team is extremely proud to be inching closer to that ten-year mark — autoscaling millions of times along the way! We put our heads together and thought about some interesting insights that we could give back after so many years staring at a single thing (autoscaling)... and we feel like we’ve got some good points to share. Highly recommended reading for all devs! Read here:

That’ll do it for this month, friends! Hope you all have a wonderful Halloween and come to grips with the reality of the cold.... Oh how does it go? “...winter is coming....” 😉

— Jon & The Judoscale Team