Zero downtime on Heroku

Question

Is it possible to do something like the Github zero downtime deploy on Heroku using Unicorn on the Cedar stack?

I\'m not entirely sure how the restart works on Heroku

Answer 1

I can't address migrations, but the part about restarting processes and avoiding wait time:

There is an beta feature for heroku called preboot. After a deploy, it boots your new dynos first and waits a while before switching traffic and killing the old ones:

https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/labs-preboot/

I also wrote a blog post that has some measurements on my app's performance improvements using this feature:

http://ylan.segal-family.com/blog/2012/08/27/deploy-to-heroku-with-near-zero-downtime/