Routing requests to a specific Heroku Dyno

Question

I built an real-time collaboration application with Prosemirror that uses a centralised operational transform algorithm (described here by Marijn Haverbeke) with a Python server using Django Channels with prosemirror-py as the central point.

The server creates a DocumentInstance for every document users are collaborating on, keeps it in memory and occasionally stores it in a Redis database. As long as there is only one Dyno, all requests are routed there. Then the server looks up the instance the request belongs to and updates it.

I would like to take advantage of Heroku's horizontal scaling and run more than one dyno. But as I understand, this would imply requests being routed to any of the running dynos. But since one DocumentInstance can only live on one server this would not work.

Is there a way to make sure that requests belonging to a specific DocumentInstance are only routed to the machine that keep that keeps it?

Or maybe there is an alternative architecture that I am overlooking?

Answer 1

When building scalable architecture the horizontal autoscaling layer is typically ephemeral, meaning no state is kept there it typically serves either for processing or IO to other services as these boxes are shut down and spun up with regularity. You should not be keeping the DocumentInstance data there as it will be lost given dynos spin up and shut down during autoscaling.

If you're using Redis as a centralized datastore you would be much better off either saving in real-time to Redis and having all dynos write/call to Redis to keep in sync, Redis is capable of this and would move all state from ephemeral dynos to a non-emphereal datastore. You may however be able to find a middle ground for your case using https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/session-affinity .

I run 123 Dyno an autoscaling and monitoring add-on for Heroku for more options and faster, configurable autoscaling on Heroku when you get there.