Tag: database
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Zero Downtime Migrations
August 15, 2015
For any sufficiently large application, you want to minimize interruptions to service while deploying new code. This is especially challenging for migrations on Heroku and other Platforms-as-a-Service, where you have a Catch-22 problem; you want to run your migrations, first, but you can’t run them until you’ve deployed the migrations to production. Usually, at this point, your new migration-dependent features are in the deploy, too. So when your application restarts, and the migration hasn’t run, yet, your poor application will trip some exceptions, and perhaps, create problems for your users. Of course, you could put the app into maintenance mode, but that creates more downtime for your users.
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The Slow Road
June 1, 2014
Once a week, we run a query on our production system that takes a very long time to complete. Invariably, it times out because the default settings on Heroku are (quite reasonably) for web / API interactions; anything longer than 30 seconds is too long and the connection should be closed to let other requests through. How do you get around this, then? You could set up your
database.ymlfile so that you connect to your production database from a developer workstation. This is actually quite useful, but opens up a hellacious security hole. Let’s not get started about the consequences of accidentally runningrake db:drop:all! Moreover, you want your system to be automated as much as possible, and that means running your tasks on a Heroku instance. Fortunately, with a little hackery, you can modify the connection timeout settings within your application. Do this carefully, and make sure that it can not leak into your running web application dynos.