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Explain Heroku dynos Like I'm Five

Jamshid Tursunboyev on March 22, 2018

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Brian Kephart

git push heroku master turns your code into a recipe (slug).

Every day, Heroku cooks breakfast (starts a dyno) from that recipe. What if you threw a tantrum and smeared your eggs on the wall (runtime error), or someone came and dumped sand in your cereal (corrupted server files)? Well, tomorrow's breakfast still will turn out fine, exactly according to the recipe.

What if you have a big family? Order more breakfasts (scale up to more dynos).

What if your family has a vegetarian and someone who hates mushrooms? Request different cooking processes (dyno types – worker, web, etc.).

Your family has to share a table with a few other families, cafeteria-style (multi-tenant hosting in AWS). If you pay more, you can double your space and your turns with the salt shaker (2x dyno, more CPU & RAM but still multitenant). If you pay a LOT more, you can get your own table (Performance dyno, Med or Lg, dedicated EC2 instance).

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Jamshid Tursunboyev

That was awesome!!! Thank you

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Jen Chan

And while we're at it... is it just my impression or one is unable to ever git clone their heroku repo history?

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Brian Kephart

You can clone the repo using git clone https://git.heroku.com/your-app.git. The url is on the Settings tab of your Heroku dashboard.