Ruby on Rails -> App on Digital Ocean, Scheduler on Heroku

Question

I am currently building an app on RoR hosted on Digital Ocean.

I like to lighten the workload on the instance and transfer some on the crons stuff to heroku (free -tier).

I am wondering if anyone have done something similar and if so, let me know your thoughts and gotcha.

Answer 1

The first gotcha that comes to mind is that running scheduler on Heroku isn't exactly free. Per the docs at https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/scheduler

While Scheduler is a free add-on, it executes scheduled jobs via one-off dynos that will count towards your monthly usage.

So having the instance up and running may be possible on the free tier, but once you start processing jobs you'll be charged.

I think the hardest part will be figuring out the networking between Heroku and DigitalOcean, assuming you'll need the apps to use the same database.