Heroku Autoscaling with Andrew Gwozdziewycz

When an application is using all of its available resources, that application needs to be scaled. Scaling an application means giving it more resources–typically servers. Autoscaling is an engineering practice where an application is automatically given more or less resources based on how healthy the application performance is at a given time.

Applications on Heroku have access to autoscaling. Heroku users don’t need to worry about provisioning new servers manually because the platform does it for them. In this episode, we explore how Heroku built autoscaling.

Andrew Gwozdziewycz [@apgwoz] is an operational experience engineer with Heroku. As he describes, autoscaling requires frequent health checks of an application. Since thousands of applications are running on Heroku, a metrics pipeline using Kafka and Cassandra supports the high volume of health check data. That data feeds into the decision process for when an application needs to scale.

Full disclosure: Heroku is a sponsor of Software Engineering Daily.