PSA: commits-to hosting has moved off Heroku

[kingdonb]

The Heroku-pocalypse is upon us, and free hobby-dev databases are no more a thing. This meant our Heroku hosting bill would have gone up from $14/mo to $24/mo (it's a $7/mo cost for the dyno and $5/mo for the database)

I was added to the Heroku team a while ago, and development hasn't moved much in the last year or two. But I really care about this app for some reason! It just resonates with me, I built this integration with Beeminder and I've been using it productively to ensure I keep on coming up with things I'd like to be able to say later on, that I've done.

It's great! And it's an example of ruby fibers for concurrency (I needed for my process to wait around 4 hours between pulling the current set of promises and whether they've been finished yet so I started with a script that exits when it's done, calls sleep for 4 hours, and then executes itself again after the wait... but that was clunky and difficult to monitor and test, so I decided to implement fibers with an "hourly heartbeat" to see if the fiber scheduler is still working and a 4-hourly scrape.)

Anyway, this is all outside of commits-to, but for anyone that might be using or considering using the app, I wanted to post a notice that your data has moved locations.

The new serverless database backend is at bit.io and the servers that run commits.to and commitstew.com are now in my home.

I expect to keep things like this until I have a need for production to run in the cloud! It's on Kubernetes, deployed with Hephy Workflow, to keep the delivery job as similar as possible to how it was on Heroku.

There is one known issue since migrating: the "cache" endpoint that Heroku was hitting every hour is broken, doesn't work, and we don't have another hourly job to ensure it gets called every hour. So when you first hit the site, it will probably be cold and take a few seconds longer to respond, or require a second request (I'll create a separate issue for that.)

If you want to be involved in the development of commits.to you can still! I can grant deploy access to anyone that wants it. We will have to manage passwords manually, but it's very easy and works just like Heroku did, except for heroku.com.