Question

This question is inspired by this recent outage:
https://status.heroku.com/incident/212

There doesn’t seem to be much I can do here. I can’t push at all, and pushing seemed to be what broke it in the first place. AFAIK, I can’t switch over to a new server deployed on aws or elsewhere without fiddling with the DNS records. What should I do?

Answer 1

When you use an “all-in-one” service like Heroku you accept and understand than, in case of this kind of issue, you’re in their hands and there’s nothing you can do.

You can keep a backup system configured elsewhere but, from my point of view, this is a waste of time and resources because:

• it requires you to configure and clone all Heroku settings and features
• it’s a double work
• in case of issues, the only way to redirect the traffic to your app is to change DNS settings. The change requires DNS changes to propagate
• if you can clone Heroku features, you might not want to use Heroku at all

It’s a good idea to have an off-site backup of your application, database and features. But on the other side, these issues are the trade off of using this kind of services.