The Great Migration

Today we completed a migration of Apollo from one of our personal AWS (Amazon Web Services) account, to a new account just for Apollo. Doesn't sound super exciting I know, but there's a neat story behind it for those interested in the technical bits of Apollo.

When we first set up Apollo, we weren't really thinking long term; we just set it up on a personal account and called it a day. It quickly became a bit of a pain to deal with though, as for the last six months I've been messaging TMC at the beginning of each month and transferring him money to pay for hosting. This inconvenient, but the integrity of the application wasn't affected (just my sanity).

Fast forward to a few weeks ago, and Apollo essentially crashed twice in a two week period. We were initially at a loss as to what happened, as historically crashes have been related to coding errors. This time however it was caused by a limitation with the hosted option we'd selected. We were using what's called a "burstable" instance, where we have a set amount of CPU credits available to us in a given time period. We had crossed the threshold of CPU usage where we were consuming more credits than we were allotted, which brought our instance down to a baseline level of performance that wasn't able to keep up with the demands of hosting Apollo. The result was essentially a crash of the app, with Apollo appearing offline.

The crashes were the catalyst for the account migration, as we knew we had to change instance types anyway. We've since moved to a different instance that is designed for a more consistent load, and doesn't have restrictions on how much CPU we're allowed to use. The new instance is slightly more expensive to host, but the old one simply wouldn't do; keeping Apollo online is too important!

Not only is Apollo now using a more robust hosting solution, I don't have to wire TMC every month, which is the real winner in my books!

On a more general note, you may have noticed that Apollo hasn't received any major feature development in the last two months. This was a planned absence for me, as I put in a lot of time in effort leading up to the launch of Premium and wanted some time to recharge and enjoy the nice weather. That being said, I'm ready to dive in again, and plan on delivering a major feature by the end of August. Stay tuned!

Lastly, thank you for supporting Apollo. You are deeply appreciated!