Heh, nothing will make people go back to taking Heroku's side faster than a class action lawsuit on the other side. This would be an awesome form of submarine marketing if they were actually behind it :)
Um, why? I was one of many plaintiffs in a class action lawsuit against EA (which was settled in our favor). That did not help EA's image at all :)
It looks pretty bad when your customers complain about problems that are hidden by your own monitoring tools, and then you tell them to buy more crap to fix it! It's not a small amount either -- as mentioned the queuing time was larger than the request time. And on top of it you're paying out the nose for this crappy monitoring tool.
Even people who have been somewhat screwed by this issue with Heroku tend to love Heroku; Salesforce could make this right with generous payouts to affected people and 2-6mo of engineering to offer a better load balancer as a service (Actually, I think I could build this as a third party provider, even)
EA is basically a lost cause; their business model and culture is the problem. Having better sacks at Dachau wouldn't have helped the Nazi image, either (to auto-Godwin)
Well that's what they should have done BEFORE the threat of class action lawsuit. It makes them look at a lot worse if it happens after.
I'm pretty surprised they didn't offer refunds already. It was pretty clear they were asked for, and with no update by now, it's safe to say they were refused. That seems unreasonable to me. If you were in the position RapGenius, would you honestly not have expected a refund already?
I wonder what happened to Heroku. They used to be awesome. They still have elements of being awesome, but seem either resource constrained or self destructive. I find it hard to believe Salesforce wouldn't give them what they need to do things correctly -- ranging from "go multi-AWS Region or move off AWS" to building a decent load balancing system to handling this fiasco.
> Actually, I think I could build this as a third party provider, even
I dont use Heroku, but if you read Rap Genius' original paper discussing the queuing problem, they specifically stated that there is nothing that they can do about it.
RG couldn't do anything while using Heroku's load balancing infrastructure (well, other than rewriting their app to be more constant in performance).
A third-party could do a load balancer entirely outside of Heroku or even AWS, feeding sessions in based on feedback from the application ("intelligent routing"). Heroku even offers a way to bill for that kind of thing. You can open outgoing connections from each dyno and then load-balance over that.
Doing it with ELB would be possible I think, but I don't really like AWS ELB. I think it would make the most sense to do near US-East AWS, but arguably a CDN type service could do it from many locations. Being closer to users (as long as your connectivity to US-East/Heroku is still good) helps performance more.
While I agree this sways me to Heroku's side, I don't think this is their marketing ploy.
Rap Genius says they aren't involved either, so this is probably a single-person law firm looking to create some buzz for himself. He should threaten to sue Amazon next for all the times they haven't held their end of the bargain. That'll get him a ton of publicity.
