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Engineering

Manage Real-time Event Streams and SQL Analytics with Apache Kafka on Heroku

Building a SaaS product, a system to handle sensor data from an internet-connected thermostat or car, or an e-commerce store often requires handling a large stream of product usage data, or events. Managing event streams lets you view, in near real-time, how users are interacting with your SaaS app or the products on your e-commerce store; this is interesting because it lets you spot anomalies and get immediate data-driven feedback on new features. While this …

Cache Invalidation Complexity: Rails 5.2 and Dalli Cache Store

Rails applications that use ActiveRecord objects in their cache may experience an issue where the entries cannot be invalidated if all of these conditions are true:

  1. They are using Rails 5.2+
  2. They have configured config.active_record.cache_versioning = true
  3. They are using a cache that is not maintained by Rails, such as dalli_store (2.7.8 or prior)

In this post, we discuss the background to a change in the way that cache keys work with Rails, why this …

Applying Seccomp Filters at Runtime for Go Binaries

Seccomp (short for security computing mode) is a useful feature provided by the Linux kernel since 2.6.12 and is used to control the syscalls made by a process. Seccomp has been implemented by numerous projects such as Docker, Android, OpenSSH and Firefox to name a few.

In this blog post, I am going to show you how you can implement your own seccomp filters, at runtime, for a Go binary on your Dyno.

Why Use …

Beyond Web and Worker: Evolution of the Modern Web App on Heroku

This is the first in a series of blog posts examining the evolution of web app architecture over the past 10 years. This post examines the forces that have driven the architectural changes and a high-level view of a new architecture. In future posts, we’ll zoom in to details of specific parts of the system.

The standard web application architecture suitable for many organizations has changed drastically in the past 10 years. Back in Heroku’s …

Rolling the Heroku Redis Fleet

Over the past few weeks, Heroku proactively updated our entire Redis fleet with a version of Redis not vulnerable to CVE-2018-11218. This was an embargoed vulnerability, so we did this work without notifying our customers about the underlying cause. As always, our goal was to update all Heroku Redis instances well before the embargo expired.

As a Data Infrastructure Engineer at Heroku, I wanted to share how we manage large fleet operations such as …

Rails Asset Pipeline Directory Traversal Vulnerability (CVE-2018-3760)

All previously released versions of Sprockets, the software that powers the Rails asset pipeline, contain a directory traversal vulnerability. This vulnerability has been assigned CVE-2018-3760.

How do I know if I'm affected?

Rails applications are vulnerable if they have this setting enabled in their application:

# config/environments/production.rb config.assets.compile = true # setting to true makes your app vulnerable

Note: The default value of this setting that ships with Rails in production.rb is …

Heroku CLI: Completing Autocomplete

The CLI Team at Heroku strives to create a CLI user experience that is intuitive and productive. We had “build CLI autocomplete” in the icebox of our roadmap for many years. But if we were going to ship it, it had to complement the existing CLI experience. This is challenging because the Heroku CLI is very dynamic: it comprises user installable plugins, and the data needed for completions is behind an API.

Recently, we spent …

Securing Dependencies for Rails 5.2 Active Storage

The Public Cloud Security (PCS) group at Salesforce partners very closely with Heroku engineering to review and advise on new product features across the platform, from infrastructure to applications. One of the most rewarding aspects about this partnership and working on this team for me is when we not only identify security concerns, but take an active role in building safe solutions.

Heroku recently announced support for Active Storage in Rails 5.2, which introduces the …

Modern Web Stack: Rails 5 API, ActiveAdmin, and Create React App on Heroku

How to blend a rock-solid CMS and API with the absolute best in front-end tooling, built as a single project and hosted seamlessly on Heroku.

Rails is an incredible framework, but modern web development has moved to the front-end, meaning sometimes you don’t need all the bulk of the asset pipeline and the templating system. In Rails 5 you can now create an API-only Rails app, meaning you can build your front-end however you like—using …

Rails 5.2 Active Storage: Previews, Poppler, and Solving Licensing Pitfalls

Rails 5.2 was just released last month with a major new feature: Active Storage. Active Storage provides file uploads and attachments for Active Record models with a variety of backing services (like AWS S3). While libraries like Paperclip exist to do similar work, this is the first time that such a feature has been shipped with Rails. At Heroku, we consider cloud storage a best practice, so we've ensured that it works on our platform. …

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