Heroku Iron.io worker vs cron vs worker dyno

Question

My understanding is that Heroku charges Cron tasks based on the actual amount of time the task runs, using a dyno (based on: https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/scheduler#dynohour-costs).

So, if I need a quick task to run every X minutes, I could use the cron addon to process it, instead of a worker dyno and I would be charged a fraction of the cost.

So, if everything above is true, what is the use of the Iron.io workers? They charge (about) the same as dynos from the cron jobs and they can't connect to the DB.

I have a feeling that I am missing something.

Answer 1

I'm under the impression that IronWorker can use the databases for Heroku. I may be mistaken about this, however.

I can't claim a great deal of experience with cron tasks on Heroku, so forgive me if I get its limitations wrong. However, I'm under the impression that scaling from one dyno to many dynos is a little bit of a process. Where IronWorker shines is really in enabling the number of worker servers to fluctuate based on demand--you have the capacity to scale at a moment's notice, but are only paying for the scale you're actually using.