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Engineering

Router 2.0: The Road to Beta

Last month, Heroku announced the beta release of Router 2.0 , the new Common Runtime router!

As part of our commitment to infrastructure modernization, Heroku is making upgrades to the Common Runtime routing layer. The beta release of Router 2.0 is an important step along this journey. We’re excited to give you an inside look at all we’ve been doing to get here.

In both the Common Runtime and Private Spaces , the Heroku router is responsible for serving requests to customers’ web dynos. In 2024, Router 2.0 will replace the existing Common Runtime router. We’re being…

More Predictable Shared Dyno Performance

In this post, we’d like to share an example of the kind of behind-the-scenes work that the Heroku team does to continuously improve the platform based on customer feedback.

The Heroku Common Runtime is one of the best parts of Heroku. It’s the modern embodiment of the principle of computing resource time-sharing pioneered by John McCarthy and later by UNIX, which evolved into the underpinnings of much of modern-day cloud computing. Because Common Runtime resources are safely shared between customers, we can offer dynos very efficiently, participate in the GitHub Student Program , and run the Heroku Open…

The Adventures of Rendezvous in Heroku’s New Architecture

This article was originally authored by Srinath Ananthakrishnan, an engineer on the Heroku Runtime Networking Team

Summary

This following story outlines a recent issue we saw with migrating one of our internal systems over to a new EC2 substrate and in the process breaking one of our customer’s use cases. We also outline how we went about discovering the root of the issue, how we fixed it, and how we enjoyed solving a complex problem that helped keep the Heroku customer experience as simple and straightforward as possible!

History

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Building a Monorepo with Yarn 2

In true JavaScript fashion, there was no shortage of releases in the JavaScript ecosystem this year. This includes the Yarn project’s release of Yarn 2 with a compressed cache of JavaScript dependencies, including a Yarn binary to reference, that can be used for a zero-install deployment.

Yarn is a package manager that also provides developers a project management toolset. Now, Yarn 2 is now officially supported by Heroku, and Heroku developers are able to take advantage of leveraging zero-installs during their Node.js builds. We’ll go over a popular use case for Yarn that is enhanced…

Extend Flows with Heroku Compute: An Event-Driven Pattern

This post previously appeared on the Salesforce Architects blog. Event-driven application architectures have proven to be effective for implementing enterprise solutions using loosely coupled services that interact by exchanging asynchronous events. Salesforce enables event-driven architectures (EDAs) with Platform Events and Change Data Capture (CDC) events as well as triggers and Apex callouts, which makes the Salesforce Platform a great way to build all of your digital customer experiences . This post is the first in a series that covers various EDA patterns, considerations for using them, and examples deployed on the Salesforce Platform.

Expanding the event-driven architecture of…

How I Broke `git push heroku main`

Incidents are inevitable. Any platform, large or small will have them. While resiliency work will definitely be an important factor in reducing the number of incidents, hoping to remove all of them (and therefore reach 100% uptime) is not an achievable goal.

We should, however, learn as much as we can from incidents, so we can avoid repeating them.

In this post, we will look at one of those incidents, #2105 , see how it happened (spoiler: I messed up), and what we’re doing to avoid it from happening again (spoiler: I’m not fired).

Git…

The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Ruby Object Allocations

Your app is slow. It does not spark joy. This post will use memory allocation profiling tools to discover performance hotspots, even when they're coming from inside a library. We will use this technique with a real-world application to identify a piece of optimizable code in Active Record that ultimately leads to a patch with a substantial impact on page speed.

In addition to the talk, I've gone back and written a full technical recap of each section to revisit it any time you want without going through the video.

I make heavy use of theatrics here,…

Let’s Debug a Node.js Application

There are always challenges when it comes to debugging applications. Node.js' asynchronous workflows add an extra layer of complexity to this arduous process. Although there have been some updates made to the V8 engine in order to easily access asynchronous stack traces, most of the time, we just get errors on the main thread of our applications, which makes debugging a little bit difficult. As well, when our Node.js applications crash, we usually need to rely on some complicated CLI tooling to analyze the core dumps.

In this article, we'll take a look at some easier ways to…

Ground Control to Major TOML: Why Buildpacks Use a Most Peculiar Format

YAML files dominate configuration in the cloud native ecosystem. They’re used by Kuberentes, Helm, Tekton, and many other projects to define custom configuration and workflows. But YAML has its oddities, which is why the Cloud Native Buildpacks project chose TOML as its primary configuration format.

TOML is a minimal configuration file format that's easy to read because of its simple semantics. You can learn more about TOML from the official documentation , but a simple buildpack TOML file looks like this:

api = "0.2"

[buildpack]
id = "heroku/maven"
version = "1.0"
name = "Maven"

Unlike YAML, TOML doesn’t rely on significant whitespace…

Making Time to Save You Time: How We Sped Up Time-Related Syscalls on Dynos

I work on Heroku’s Runtime Infrastructure team, which focuses on most of the underlying compute and containerization here at Heroku. Over the years, we’ve tuned our infrastructure in a number of ways to improve performance of customer dynos and harden security.

We recently received a support ticket from a customer inquiring about poor performance in two system calls (more commonly referred to as syscalls) their application was making frequently: clock_gettime(3) and gettimeofday(2) .

In this customer’s case, they were using a tool to do transaction tracing to monitor the performance of their application. This tool made many…

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