Gems/Services for autoscaling Heroku's dynos and workers

Question

I want to know if there are any good solutions for autoscaling dynos AND workers on Heroku in a production environment (probably a different solution for each of those, as t

Answer 1

HireFire.io (The Service, not the Open Source Project) now allows you to use your New Relic metrics to auto-scale your web dynos. New Relic is a performance monitoring tool provided as an add-on through Heroku. They have a free tier and it's sufficient to use with HireFire.

You can auto-scale based on:

• Response Time
  • This is the Response Time you find on the New Relic Dashboard. It's a combination of various factors including Request Queuing, Database Performance, App-Layer, Router, etc.
• Apdex Score
  • This allows you to scale based on your New Relic Apdex Score, enabling you to scale based on user experience/satisfaction, which is determined by this score.

Aside of this we have become language/framework agnostic. For worker dynos all you have to do to get auto-scaling working is to setup a JSON end-point at a certain path in your app that returns a very simple JSON string containing the queue size (we provide convenient, but not required, macros for the Ruby language and some out-of-the-box support for Django apps, but like I said it works for any language/framework by manually setting up a JSON end-point - it's very easy). For web dynos, you can use the HireFire Metric Source with basically any language/framework, and the above mentioned New Relic Metric Source for languages/frameworks that are supported by New Relic (these are common languages such as Ruby, Python, Java, etc).

Disclaimer: I built HireFire.