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November 22, 2024

🤖 Judoscale News: Introducing ...the Judo Scale?! ⚖️ (November 2024)

Greetings, Judoscalers! We hope that you’re all having a fantastic Friday as we head into this holiday season. This year’s first snow just fell on Ohio soil yesterday! But fear not, this team won’t be distracted 😎 we’ve got a fresh batch of updates, resources, and tools for you.

  • 🎉 New Platform Integrations On The Way
  • ⚖️ Introducing The Judo Scale...
  • 🔐 Cloudflare + Heroku SSL Explained
  • 📆 Scheduled Scaling
  • 📝 Propshaft Part 3
  • 🆙 Vertical vs Horizontal Scaling

New Platform Integrations On The Way!

That’s right! We’re excited to announce that we’re currently building support for autoscaling applications hosted on Railway and Fly.io! 🎉🎉🎉

We expect these new integrations to be in beta very soon and would love to invite your applications in for some autoscaling goodness while we polish off the details! If you have an application on Railway or Fly and would like to beta-test Judoscale’s integration, please let us know! Just reply to this email 😁

Graphic of the Judoscale logo with a heart and the Fly.io and Railway logos

Introducing The Judo Scale!

...sort of! Actually this was a gag that we planned in conjunction with Drew Bragg for his extremely fun conference slot at RubyConf last week, “Who Wants to be a Ruby Engineer?” Drew was looking for folks to “sponsor” the show and put up some giveaways — the only requirement being that we had to create a funny commercial!

But what could an autoscaler give away as a physical prize? It came to us in the middle of the night: a new product. The Judo Scale. (See, it’s two separate words now!) It’s perfect. So Adam and I locked ourselves away in a cave for a couple of days and came up with this beautiful commercial for The Judo Scale. We hope this gives you as good as laugh as we had making it 😂

A still from the Judo Scale commercial, featuring Adam dressed like Billy Mays and delivering an infomercial-style pitch in true comedic gold

The Judo Scale. A magical, totally-real, definitely-not-a-joke product hitting shelves at your local stores soon. 😉

Cloudflare + Heroku SSL Explained!

We feel like we saw this question asked quite a few times over the years and finally wanted to give a comprehensive answer and playbook for it. When setting up a new Heroku app, how does one properly configure Cloudflare to securely sit in front of it? Do we need to create certs? What do we set the SSL level setting in Cloudflare to? Why are we getting SSL errors?!

We wrote this guide to act as a guiding star for how we setup fresh Heroku applications with proper SSL between the layers. And while the guide is comprehensive in teaching, the actual steps of doing are super easy! Give it a read, audit your own applications’ SSL settings, and let us know what you think!

Opengraph share image that’s a green background, the blog post title, and the author name

Scheduled Scaling!

We talked in last month’s newsletter about our new scheduling interface in Judoscale — this:

A screenshot of our new scheduling UI, resembling a weekly calendar

But we recently tweaked some of our back-end logic to allow processes to scale based only on a schedule! That is, we can now scale based on timing alone — not based on queue time, response time, or any other metrics. This can be especially handy for particular use-cases, background workers in certain applications, and even some frameworks we don’t yet support native adapters for yet.

This also means that, if you don’t want to worry about metrics at all and just want to get some quick time-based autoscaling in place, you can! Keep it simple!

A screenshot of the new scheduling UI with two ranges, one for weekdays and one for weekends

Propshaft Part 3

In last month’s edition we also shared links to the first two parts of a now three-part series around Propshaft — Rails’ new asset delivery pipeline. In case you missed those, the first was How Propshaft Works: A Visual Breakdown and the second was How CDNs Work (Propshaft / Static Assets Pt. 2). We’ve since release the third installation of that series! This time correlating and understanding how Propshaft’s delivery mechanisms work with, and for the new importmaps setups:

Opengraph share image that’s a green background, the blog post title, and the author name

Definitely worth a read if you’re working with Rails 8 and/or the newer Javascript delivery mechanisms that Rails is moving towards in general! The simplicity in these frameworks is really quite nice.

Vertical vs Horizontal Scaling

Lastly, we added one more article to the blog all around scaling basics: vertical vs. horizontal as it pertains specifically to Heroku. Heroku’s an interesting case for this type of discussion since Heroku forces us into certain limited boxes — dynos, being the primary example. Meaning that we can’t necessarily freely scale to any level we want! We must work within the confines of the dyno tiers that are available to us... and accept the costs! Read more here:

Opengraph share image that’s a green background, the blog post title, and the author name

That’s all for us this month! We hope you enjoy your holidays until we check in next, have a great big turkey if that’s your thing, and stay warm as you dig out your old winter coat (I’m right there with you!).

Cheers!

— Jon & The Judoscale Team


P.S. Do you want a Judoscale T-shirt? We’ve given several away at Rails World and RubyConf the last few months and, honestly, we’re having fun giving them away and seeing folks wear them — just look at this smile!

Adam wearing the new ‘autoscale and chill’ shirt while laying sideways on a wall

If you want one for yourself (you get to choose the color and style!), reply to this email and let us know! Consider it our holiday gift to you ❤️

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