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52. Building and Scaling a Heroku Add-on

Corey Martin is a Customer Service solutions architect at Heroku. He’s interviewing Adam McCrea, a software developer and the creator of Rails Autoscale, a Heroku add-on that allows developers to auto-scale their Ruby On Rails apps. They begin their conversation by talking about auto-scaling and how McCrea’s experience as a developer inspired him to create an application that would automatically handle the scaling of web and worker dynos. Having seen how valuable the initial app was for the company he worked for, McCrea set about turning his creation into a sellable product that could be used by other developers.

If you’re working with more than one Heroku dyno, there’s a lot of guesswork involved in scaling resources. Rails Autoscale takes care of this problem, by automatically determining how many dynos an app needs, scaling them up when required and down when there is excess capacity, all in real-time. By using an app to take care of the process, McCrea knows that a vitally important process is taken care of regardless of fluctuations through the day or week, saving users money and providing peace of mind. The app also measures requests queuing time, as opposed to total response time, which provides a more accurate indication of real-time capacity requirements.

Martin and McCrea round out their conversation by talking about McCrea’s experiences turning his application into a sellable product and how the Heroku Elements Marketplace has helped him get Rails Autoscaling into the hands of over 200 paying customers. McCrea says that as with everything there are trade-offs, but not having to worry about marketing Rails Autoscaling or handle billing have made the experience easily worthwhile for him. Finally, McCrea explains his attempts to further spread word about Rails Autoscaling, including engaging with the bootstrapper community on Twitter and attending conferences.

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