Cloud application platform Heroku is coming off a streak of bad news after it was accused of misleading its customers about how some aspects of its service worked and potentially costing its users quite a bit of money in the process. Today, Heroku is putting the spotlight back on features again, with the launch of the public beta of its larger 2X dynos, which, in some ways, will also help alleviate the job-queuing issues that sparked the recent debate.
The 2X dynos (dynos are basically the containers that run an application process on Heroku) will offer exactly what the name implies: twice the memory (1GB instead of 512MB) and also twice as many CPU shares as the basic dynos (now called 1X). During the beta phase, the 2X dynos will cost the same as $0.05 per hour as the 1X dynos. After that, they will cost, as their name implies, $0.10 per hour. Heroku is also exploring the option to launch even larger dynos (4X+) in the future.
Heroku argues that these larger dynos will allow for increasing concurrency on single-threaded Rails apps using the Unicorn HTTP server for Rack applications. Heroku also says that the larger dynos will work well for JVM languages that can take advantage of the vertical scale the 2X dynos provide. In addition, the company says, this should help with performing memory-intensive background jobs for image processing and geospatial processing.
