Lab 7—Heroku

Objectives

• Deploy a simple web page with Heroku
• Explore advantages and drawbacks of cloud services
• Please pair program today!

Pre-lab

This lab should be done either in the CS VM or on the CSEL machines, please don’t do this lab natively on your own machine unless you understand how to work the apt or brew package managers (so that you can list and obtain everything in the 3308 package) and are sure you have everything in the 3308 package installed already.

1. If you have not yet done so, install the CU CS 3308 package in your VM

    sudo apt-get install cu-cs-csci-3308
   

2. Update package sources and install the latest versions

    sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade
   

3. Install PostgreSQL and Python

    sudo apt-get install libpq-dev python-dev
   

4. Signup for a free Heroku account.

Exercise

Go to Heroku’s Python tutorial.

1. During the Set up step, download the version of the Heroku Toolbelt for Debian/Ubuntu.
2. Login with your email and password, and follow the instructions given in the tutorial.

3. When you are done with the Push local changes step in the Heroku tutorial, you’ll display the answers to the following questions in your example Python web app. You may modify python-getting-started/hello/views.py to serve the answers in the index function.

   • Your names
   • Current date
   • CSCI-3308
   • Answers to the following questions

Questions

Write two or three sentences per question.

1. When would you choose an IaaS over PaaS and why? Give an example scenario where an IaaS would be the best option and explain why it is a better choice than a PaaS (in your scenario).
2. Describe a security concern in cloud computing data storage.
3. Why shouldn’t all software and apps migrate to the cloud? Give an example or two of software that would not benefit from being in the cloud.

The remaining steps in the Heroku tutorial (provision add-ons, start a console, etc) are optional, but may be helpful if you want to use Heroku to deploy your class project.

Credit

To get credit for this lab exercise, show the TA and sign the lab’s completion log.

Lab material by Liz Boese.