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Adam McCrea @adamlogic.com · 08/07/2026

We migrated our ~2,800 RPS app from Heroku to Render. The migration was seamless, but the overall deployment experience just doesn’t hold up. Here’s what we learned. judoscale.com/blog/judosc...

judoscale.com

Judoscale on Tour: Render Has the Pieces, Not the Workflow

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Adam McCrea @adamlogic.com · 13/05/2026

Render made it SO EASY to connect logs and metrics to a third-party observability tool. Railway, as far as I can tell, doesn't support either. 😞 What am I missing?

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Adam McCrea @adamlogic.com · 11/05/2026

Do you know someone new to the Ruby community that wants to attend RubyConf in July? I have an extra ticket to donate. DM me.

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Adam McCrea @adamlogic.com · 04/05/2026

Render might not be a great option for high-traffic apps using a separate hosted DB. (This is from our own prod app)

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Adam McCrea @adamlogic.com · 04/05/2026

Went to Blue Ridge Ruby last week with Jon Sully. He blogged his thoughts, and I co-sign all of it. I love these small regional confs so much! judoscale.com/blog/blue-r...

judoscale.com

Blue Ridge Ruby: A Couple of Reflections

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Adam McCrea @adamlogic.com · 13/04/2026

We miss you too 😊 Sounds like a good setup for you!

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Adam McCrea @adamlogic.com · 08/04/2026

Nice! Remind me where you moved to?

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Adam McCrea @adamlogic.com · 06/04/2026

We REALLY want to know what's going on at Heroku ...so we wrote them a letter 🤷‍♂️

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Adam McCrea @adamlogic.com · 23/03/2026

Who is doing really great in-app contextual help? I want... - Contextual: If I'm confused about a UI element, the help is right there. - Non-intrusive: When I don't need the help, it doesn't clutter the UI. - Obvious: I don't have to dig for it Not sure how to balance the last two.

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Adam McCrea @adamlogic.com · 23/03/2026

Heroku is doubling down on the "sustaining engineering" language and it really bothers me. For most devs, "sustaining engineering" == "maintenance mode" If they don't want customers to think they're in maintenance mode, they need clearer language.

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Adam McCrea @adamlogic.com · 27/02/2026

What's happening at Heroku, and what does it mean for your team? judoscale.com/blog/heroku...

judoscale.com

Heroku: What’s Next

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Adam McCrea @adamlogic.com · 24/02/2026

Gotcha... I feel like "staging" is a misleading name there, but I think it's a good workflow.

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Adam McCrea @adamlogic.com · 24/02/2026

Disposable review/preview apps (for pull requests) are good for that, but I can see how for some teams that's not enough.

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Adam McCrea @adamlogic.com · 24/02/2026

How common is it these days for teams to have a staging environment, versus auto-deploying main to prod?

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Adam McCrea @adamlogic.com · 18/02/2026

What I don't like: Env vars require a code change. And for secrets, I actually had to *destroy* my machines after I unset a couple. Heroku might be the only platform where you can change an env var and it just restarts. Just works, and fast. Easy to overlook until you don't have it.

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Adam McCrea @adamlogic.com · 18/02/2026

Thoughts on env vars as I spend some time with Fly... I actually like that Fly separates env vars and secrets as distinct concepts. Confused me at first, but it makes sense. Secrets get extra protection, env vars are for config. Good semantic separation.

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Adam McCrea @adamlogic.com · 18/02/2026

I love how Northflank's pricing page lets you choose the timeframe for the metered pricing. All metered pricing should have this.

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Adam McCrea @adamlogic.com · 16/02/2026

I just updated our PaaS Pricing Comparison Calculator: - Added Amazon ECS Fargate - Updated pricing for Railway - Factored CPU time-slicing for Fly shared machines Heroku still stands out as the most expensive, but the others are very competitive!

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Adam McCrea @adamlogic.com · 16/02/2026

Can you expand a bit on "compliance"? That's not something I've had to deal with personally. Not sure what to look for.

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Adam McCrea @adamlogic.com · 13/02/2026

Idea: The Judoscale Platform Tour... We deploy our 3,000+ RPS Rails app across each of the fully-managed hosting platforms and write up our experience in detail. Things I'd want to cover: - cost - perf - DX/vibes - review apps - setup - env/secrets - scaling What else would you want to see?

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Adam McCrea @adamlogic.com · 11/02/2026

Define "plotting" 😉 For years I've been hearing the chorus of "I've had it with Heroku we're leaving", but the Judoscale numbers don't show it. I don't think this is any different. We'll see...

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Adam McCrea @adamlogic.com · 10/02/2026

Everyone is freaking out the Heroku blog post. Take a breath. There's no way Heroku shuts down anytime soon. The post confirms they won't be making improvements... how is that any different from the last decade? Migrate eventually, but take your time. You literally have YEARS.

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Adam McCrea @adamlogic.com · 10/02/2026

No idea. But we don't have this level of intel about Heroku either, right?

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Adam McCrea @adamlogic.com · 10/02/2026

I'm not in that camp myself, but I'd recommend Hatchbox for sure.

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Adam McCrea @adamlogic.com · 09/02/2026

Our experience: Worse performance, clunky UI, confusing process model and pricing. But some of our customers love it! 🤷‍♂️

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Adam McCrea @adamlogic.com · 09/02/2026

If you're thinking of leaving Heroku, here's a simple mapping: If you want the easiest switch, go with Render. If you want Docker and more flexibility, go with Fly. If you want to be a sysadmin, use a VPS (don't need to scale) or Amazon ECS (do need to scale)

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Adam McCrea @adamlogic.com · 05/01/2026

Something a bit different on the Judoscale blog—Jon Sully interviewed ME to get my thoughts on hosting in 2026. Really happy how this turned out! judoscale.com/blog/black-...

judoscale.com

Black Box Hosting vs. Glass Box Hosting: An Interview With Judoscale's Adam

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Adam McCrea @adamlogic.com · 07/11/2025

Two identical production apps running in parallel—or as Jon calls it, "scaling sideways"... just little technique we use to efficiently scale. judoscale.com/blog/scalin...

judoscale.com

Scaling Sideways: Why You Might Want To Run Two Production Apps

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Adam McCrea @adamlogic.com · 03/11/2025

On @searls.bsky.social latest podcast he mentioned "Heroku" and "price", so I can't help but respond. I made the post public since I think it's a really useful pattern. tldr: Got a high-memory job that pushes you to perf dynos? Isolate it and scale to zero.

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Adam McCrea @adamlogic.com · 15/09/2025

Nearly 10 years (!!) of autoscaling, some patterns never change: noisy neighbors, too many queues, scaling workers to zero (and saving 💰), and the chaos of downscaling too far. Stability is boring, repeatable choices. Here's what we've learned 👉 judoscale.com/blog/autosc...

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Reposted by Adam McCrea

David Hill @davidhill.dev · 15/09/2025

On the latest episode of The Ruby Gems podcast, @adamlogic.com from @judoscale.com joins Marty Haught and I to discuss how to turned a side project into a full-time business. Give it a listen! www.buzzsprout.com/2509083/epis...

buzzsprout.com

Adam McCrea: Judoscale - The Ruby Gems Podcast

Adam McCrea shares how he turned a side project into JudoScale, a Ruby-focused auto-scaler now powering thousands of apps.  We discuss his origins in the Ruby community, how he (mostly) bootstrap...

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Adam McCrea @adamlogic.com · 14/07/2025

Here's our write-up on the WHY and HOW of this whole goofy experiment. judoscale.com/blog/rails-...

judoscale.com

Rails On-Premise... At RailsConf!

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Adam McCrea @adamlogic.com · 14/07/2025

If I was responsible enough to do any sort of ROI calculation, this never would have happened. Instead, we went all-in on RailsConf with 15 homemade videos and a custom local-only app to run our booth. I'd do it all over again.

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Adam McCrea @adamlogic.com · 10/07/2025

As requested by absolutely no one, a supercut of every kazoo clip we made for #railsconf2025

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Adam McCrea @adamlogic.com · 09/07/2025

Really hope we don’t get kicked out of the last #railsconf for bringing kazoos 🎶

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Adam McCrea @adamlogic.com · 08/07/2025

Visit our booth at #railsconf to get your kazoo! Watching us make fools of ourselves is just a bonus.

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Adam McCrea @adamlogic.com · 04/07/2025

If it’s not at least a little bit cringe, we didn’t go far enough. #railsconf #kazoos #marketing

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Adam McCrea @adamlogic.com · 03/07/2025

Marketing technique #77: Humiliate yourself for attention. #railsconf #kazoos

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Adam McCrea @adamlogic.com · 02/07/2025

Y’all this is only the beginning. Buckle up! #railsconf #kazoos

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Adam McCrea @adamlogic.com · 01/07/2025

That’s where proactive autoscaling comes in. By targeting, say, 60% utilization, you’re building in 40% headroom for unexpected spikes. You’re trading efficiency (and some cost) for reliability. 🧠 More on the differences and trade-offs: judoscale.com/blog/introd...

judoscale.com

Autoscaling: Proactive vs. Reactive

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Adam McCrea @adamlogic.com · 01/07/2025

Most autoscalers are reactive—they respond to traffic after it spikes. That’s usually fine… until it’s not. If your app gets hit with big surges of traffic all at once, even the fastest queue-time autoscaler might not spin up capacity in time to avoid slowdowns or timeouts.

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Adam McCrea @adamlogic.com · 01/07/2025

One week until #railsconf! The whole Judoscale team will be there with... kazoos?

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