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Engineering

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…

A Fast Car Needs Good Brakes: How We Added Client Rate Throttling to the Platform API Gem

When API requests are made one-after-the-other they'll quickly hit rate limits and when that happens:

That tweet spawned a discussion that generated a quest to add rate throttling logic to the platform-api gem that Heroku maintains for talking to its API in Ruby.

If the term "rate throttling" is new to you, read…

Building a GraphQL API in JavaScript

Over the last few years, GraphQL has emerged as a very popular API specification that focuses on making data fetching easier for clients, whether the clients are a front-end or a third-party.

In a traditional REST-based API approach, the client makes a request, and the server dictates the response:
$ curl https://api.heroku.space/users/1

{
“id”: 1,
“name”: “Luke”,
“email”: “luke@heroku.space”,
“addresses”: [
{
“street”: “1234 Rodeo Drive”,
“city”: “Los Angeles”,
“country”: “USA”
}
]
}

But, in GraphQL, the client determines precisely the data it wants…

From Project to Productionized with Python

This blog post is based on From Project to Productionized , a talk given at PyCon 2020 at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. You can use this post today to learn how to deploy a Python application on Heroku. More specifically, we’ll show you how to deploy Django apps, including setting up your Django configuration, building continuous delivery pipelines, adding middleware, and everything else that goes into deploying Django on Heroku.

If you’d prefer a generic guide explaining how to deploy a Python application on Heroku, check out Getting Started on Heroku with Python .

https://www.youtube.com/embed/1923eduj0Gg

Imagine…

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