Diaspora Goes Zero Ops with Heroku

"The first time we scaled up on Heroku with one command in a terminal, I think I just stood up and walked away from my computer. It was so amazing."

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Diaspora Co-Founder Daniel Grippi wants to build a better way to interact online, not a massive configuration of servers.

Diaspora is an innovative social network that allows users to maintain their own profile and data while still interacting and sharing with others. Diaspora is also an open source project, allowing users to spin up their own “pod” on their own web host so they can share with others without worrying about privacy settings or third party sharing.

Previously Overwhelmed with Unnecessary Systems Administration

The Diaspora team originally deployed their application on Rackspace and spent months configuring servers instead of actually building their project. After constantly fixing Chef scripts and needing to set up an HA configuration just to make everything work, the team decided it was time to migrate to Heroku. “It seemed that once a week for a while we’d just be doing DevOps,” says Grippi. “We’re software guys—not sys admin guys. Now I know the ins and outs of Linux, which is cool but not what our project is about. We are trying to make software for people.”

Heroku’s “Zero Ops” Proposal

Grippi and his team decided to migrate to Heroku so they could eliminate the need for DevOps. After migrating from MongoDB to Amazon RDS, moving to Heroku “was not that bad”, according to Grippi. Diaspora was moved to Heroku in less than a week by just one team member, but the pay-offs have been tremendous. “I can’t even tell you how much time we’ve saved just being on Heroku. We used to spend an entire day each week just on DevOps. The first time we scaled up on Heroku with one command in a terminal, I think I just stood up and walked away from my computer. It was so amazing.”

A New Chapter for Diaspora

Diaspora isn’t just an application. It’s an open source project that people can deploy on their own servers in their own “pods”. Heroku makes it a lot simpler for Diaspora to offer this to their community. “Heroku takes what used to take a day to set up and condenses it into two minutes. It also allows you to take your one person pod and jump to a million person pod with one command in a terminal, and still be on the same platform. That’s powerful.” says Grippi.

“Heroku has really streamlined our work flow,” says Grippi. “Moving to Heroku has stripped away the notion that our application is running on servers.”

“Before, we wasted months configuring and documenting systems. Now, it’s about ‘Let’s write the future, let’s check New Relic, let’s deploy’. We don’t have to worry about a hundredth of the things we used to have to worry about before. It’s all about thinking about the app now.” - Daniel Grippi, Diaspora Co-Founder