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February 20, 2025

🤖 Judoscale News: What is PaaS-Ops? 🤔 (February 2025)

Greetings, Judoscalers! With Valentine’s Day having swung through in hurry, we’re officially closer to Spring than we are to last Fall! If you’re one of the many who’ve been covered in snow these last few weeks (✋ same), I hope you’re enjoying the great indoors 😉 it’s beautiful... through a window!

Photograph of a sunset over a snow-covered street through the window of a home

We’ve got some fun updates for you on the Judoscale front this month:

  • 💸 A FREE trip to Sin City Ruby!
  • ✍️ Small Teams Need PaaS-Ops, Not DevOps
  • 💰 New (Cheaper!) Pricing for Direct Integrations
  • ✍️ Practical Steps to Reduce Heroku Costs
  • 🏎️ Railway is a “Go”!

Let’s dive in!

💸 FREE Trip to Sin City Ruby

Interested in going to Sin City Ruby in April? Want to see the Vegas sights, escape to the warm desert, and hang with lots of great Ruby folks? You’re in luck! We’ve got an extra ticket and we want to give it to you! We’ll cover your hotel stay, too.

Learn how to win here and, just FYI, the odds of winning are (surprisingly) incredibly high right now. Good luck!

An AI-generated image of the Las Vegas strip with popular signs and buildings in view, with giant floating Rubies also throughout the image

✍️ Small Teams Need PaaS-Ops, Not DevOps

Did we coin another needless buzz-term for the software community? Maybe. Do we stand by it in earnest? Yes. Did we get some flack on Reddit anyway? Of course; it’s Reddit! Okay, all jokes aside, we really do stand by this take — both the concept of “PaaS-Ops” and the statement that it’s the right route for small teams. We took quite a bit of time to go through all the different layers of hosting a modern web application — tooling, metrics, platforms, etc. — and differentiated how a small team ought to approach the topic vs. a larger, ops-driven, team might. You can read the full article here:

💰 New (Cheaper!) Pricing for Direct Integrations

That’s right! Judoscale is now cheaper and simpler for our direct-integration (Render, Amazon ECS, Railway, Fly, etc.) customers! While we previously implemented a metered approach, we found over time that customers missed the simplicity of our Heroku-style, limits-based approach. It’s much easier to reason about Judoscale being $30/mo than “well it’s $0.00087 per CPU per hour...”. So we changed it! All of our direct-integration pricing is now simply based on the maximum number of instances your app runs. ✨

We also created a nice new pricing calculator to quickly determine which pricing tier your app should subscribe to.

Screenshot of the Judoscale pricing calculator

See the new prices here: for Render, for Amazon ECS, for Fly.io, and for Railway.

✍️ Practical Steps to Reduce Heroku Costs

Also on the prices-front, we wrote a new guide all about real-world mechanisms for reducing your Heroku costs. Four or five actionable steps you can take today that can help reduce the amount of money your team forks over to big purple! Read all about that here:

🌲 Heroku Fir Early Access

We’re excited to announce that, as Heroku add-on marketplace partners, we’ve received early access to the upcoming next-generation Heroku stack, Fir! We haven’t been able to get a simple example app up and running quite yet (there are still some kinks to work out), but we’ll be excited to share some early notes and feedback with you all soon.

Here’s to hoping for less neighbor noise and better cost-to-performance ratios!

🏎️ Railway is a “Go”!

Last and certainly not least, we’re excited to announce that our integration with Railway is complete! Judoscale now offers fully-featured autoscaling for applications hosted on Railway. Yay! We’re in the final stages of our integration to Fly.io as well (if you want early access, reply to this email!) — Judoscale will soon scale all of the major platforms!

Judoscale hearts Railway

And that’s it for us this month! We’ll catch you all in March and, hopefully, at Sin City Ruby after that. Let’s close out this month with a little chuckle:

Whenever my wife is upset I let her color in my black and white tattoos.

She just really needed a shoulder to crayon.

You’re welcome 😏

— Jon & The Judoscale Team

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