Heroku, the cloud platform Salesforce acquired in 2010, today launched a new class of dyno that has 12 times the RAM and 40 times the CPU power of a regular dyno. In Heroku’s world, dynos are the containers your applications run in, with the most basic ones costing 5 cents per hour.
The new performance dynos, which are part of the Heroku XL family that the company is launching with this release, run on machines that are highly isolated from the rest of the Heroku infrastructure. While regular dynos run on a multi-tenant infrastructure, performance dynos do not share their CPUs with other applications. This, the company argues, allows for a “high and consistent quality of service” that allows apps to run faster and with better response times.
Heroku argues that some of the largest app on its platform now often exceeds 10,000 requests per second; both Urban Dictionary and headline factory Upworthy run on the platform. In total, Heroku serves over 5 billion requests per day for about 60,000 requests per second on average and 90,000 at peak times. These kinds of large-scale apps, the company says, will benefit from these new performance dynos.
As part of the Heroku XL package, developers also get access to runtime metrics to help them better understand their resource consumption and 24/7 premium support.
Heroku runs on Amazon’s infrastructure and the company says that the performance dynos use Amazon’s c1.xlarge EC2 instances. Amazon charged $0.58/hour for these, while Heroku charges $0.80/hour. While the new dynos are isolated from the rest of the infrastructure, the company notes, users can still easily scale their existing dynos up to the new size (or switch down to a lower-performance dyno) as needed.
As Amazon continues to roll out larger and updated instances, chances are Heroku, too, may move away from just offering a limited amount of dyno types (right now there are three, including the new one) to give its users a wider variety of options.
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