š¤ Judoscale News: Scheduled Scaling š (October 2024)
Greetings once again, Judoscalers! Hard to believe that those 90ā days have skipped on by and the fuzzy-socks-mornings of fall are upon us. As I write this here in Columbus, OH, itās a chilly 42ā. Canāt stop the seasons! Also canāt stop the Judoscale team from building neat things! Hereās what weāve got in store for you this month:
- š Revamped Scheduling Interface
- š¤Æ New Autoscaling Controls
- š¢ Response Time Now Uses Median
- š How Propshaft Works
- š„ Rails World & Chill?
- š Heroku Alternatives
Revamped Scheduling Interface
Okay, honest-moment here, we sort of hated our scheduling UI. So we finally gave it some much-needed love and rebuilt it from the ground up! Scheduled autoscaling is built around... a schedule (duh!). So we went back to the drawing board to figure out exactly what a schedule should look like (visually speaking) and what was too far. We wanted simple, but capable. Weāre super excited with where we landed:
This new weekly-calendar interface has all the right UI sparkle (mouse hover-over highlighting, anybody?) but none of the extra complexity of a full calendar. Scaling on a schedule should be simple. We think this new visual approach for scheduling your autoscaling is just that: simple.
Please feel free to read more about this update in our changelog or hop into Judoscale and check it out for your app now! It's now live for all customers and replaces the previous interface.
New Autoscaling Controls
Weāve exposed a couple of new controls for autoscaling! Hereās the short version of each:
Upscale Sensitivity: by default we use 10-second buckets to determine if your application has a queue time spike and needs to upscale. That is, if your queue time rises too much over a 10-second period, thatās when scaling will kick in! But for some apps, thatās actually too fast. If your application is prone to momentary queue time spikes for various reasons and you donāt want to scale up (only to scale right back down), you can now increase the time period we assess for your scaling.
Downscale Jumps: Weāve had āupscale jumpsā for a long time āĀ scale up by 4 dynos/processes instead of just 1 at-a-time, for example āĀ but now you can down-scale by more than 1 at-a-time, too! Just be careful. This setting is best for applications that run tens of dynos/processes at once. If you only run a handful of dynos/processes and downscale by three at-a-time (for example), you might chop off more capacity than you can handle and scale right back up!
Response Time Now Uses Median
For customers autoscaling based on their response time (not queue time!), weāve slightly changed how we handle aggregate metrics to determine if scaling is necessary. Where we previously used a 10-second average value, we now use a 10-second median. This essentially helps us ignore cases where there may be a couple of slower endpoints while the rest are performing well,Ā giving us a better sense of estimated capacity levels.
A note: if youāre a customer currently using Response Time scaling and would like to switch to Queue Time scaling (which we highly recommend!), feel free to click the new āSetupā button in Judoscale for a wizard to help you through that process:
How Propshaft Works
Fresh off the presses this month is a two-part series around Propshaft and static assets in Rails! How theyāre compiled, where they go, what happens to them, and what that means in the bigger picture.
The first post is How Propshaft Works: A Rails Asset-Pipeline (Visual) Breakdown and covers everything internal to a Rails application āĀ starting with āwhat even is a static asset?ā
The second is How CDNs Work (Propshaft / Static Assets Pt. 2), expanding outside of the Rails application itself to understand how static assets behave in the bigger, production, ecosystem!
Rails World and Chill?
Adam and Carlos ventured up to Toronto for Rails World 2024 last month and had a fantastic time. Meeting many of you was a treat and giving out free T-shirts was a joy! If you too would like to Autoscale and Chill, reply to this email and weāll get you hooked up with a free t-shirt of your own!
Heroku Alternatives!
š Have you been considering leaving Heroku? Or considering a different platform for your next project? Maybe youāre just a little platform-curious. Well first, donāt worry āĀ you can take your favorite autoscaler with you!
But letās open up a serious conversation about newer platforms here. There are some great options out there now! Jeff wrote all about it in Deciding Between Heroku Alternatives and we think itās worth a good read!
Thatās all for us this month! Hope you all stay warm, enjoy the season youāre in, and take some time to appreciate the fall colors beginning to roll across the trees š.
Cheers!
ā Jon & The Judoscale Team
P.S. Did you know Judoscale now has a Maintenance Mode feature? Maintenance mode disables autoscaling across your entire application (not just a single process) with one click so that you can.. maintenance things!
Just click the āEditā button for whichever App youād like:
And find the Maintenance Mode toggle waiting for you: