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Engineering

Chrome’s Changes Could Break Your App: Prepare for SameSite Cookie Updates

In this post, we will cover changes coming to Chrome (and other browsers) that affect how third-party cookies are handled—specifically SameSite changes, how to test to see if your site is impacted and how to fix it.

⚓️ What is SameSite and why the big change? ⚓️ Prepare for Chrome 80 updates ⚓️ Step 1: Enabling SameSite Chrome flags and test to see if your site faces SameSite errors ⚓️ Step 2: Fixing cookie errors using appropriate attributes

What is SameSite and why the big change?

Back in May 2019, Chrome announced its…

Terrier: An Open-Source Tool for Identifying and Analyzing Container and Image Components

As part of our Blackhat Europe talk “Reverse Engineering and Exploiting Builds in the Cloud” we publicly released a new tool called Terrier.

Announcing Terrier: An open-source tool for identifying and analysing container and image components.

In this blog post, I am going to show you how Terrier can help you identify and verify container and image components for a wide variety of use-cases, be it from a supply-chain perspective or forensics perspective. Terrier can be found on Github .

Containers and images

In this blog post, I am not going to go into too…

Know Your Database Types

This blog post is adapted from a lightning talk by Ben Fritsch at Ruby on Ice 2019.

There can be a number of reasons why your application performs poorly, but perhaps none are as challenging as issues stemming from your database. If your database's response times tend to be high, it can cause a strain on your network and your users’ patience. The usual culprit for a slow database is an inefficient query being executed somewhere in your application logic. Usually, you can implement a fix in a number of common ways, by:

reducing the…

The Curious Case of the Table-Locking UPDATE Query

Update: On closer inspection, the lock type was not on the table, but on a tuple. For more information on this locking mechanism see the internal Postgresql tuple locking documentation . Postgres does not have lock promotion as suggested in the debugging section of this post.

I maintain an internal-facing service at Heroku that does metadata processing. It's not real-time, so there's plenty of slack for when things go wrong. Recently I discovered a Postgres performance issue that bogged down the system to the point where no jobs were being executed at all. After hours of…

Let It Crash: Best Practices for Handling Node.js Errors on Shutdown

This blog post is adapted from a talk given by Julián Duque at NodeConf EU 2019 titled " Let it crash! ."

Before coming to Heroku , I did some consulting work as a Node.js solutions architect. My job was to visit various companies and make sure that they were successful in designing production-ready Node applications. Unfortunately, I witnessed many different problems when it came to error handling, especially on process shutdown. When an error occurred, there was often not enough visibility on why it happened, a lack of logging details, and bouts of downtime as…

Static Typing in Ruby with a Side of Sorbet

As an experiment to see how static typing could help improve our team’s Ruby experience, we introduced Sorbet into a greenfield codebase with a team of 4 developers. Our theory was that adding static type checking through Sorbet could help us catch bugs before they go into production, make refactoring easier, and improve the design of our code. The short answer is that yes, it did all of that! Read on to learn a little more about what it was like to build in a type safe Ruby.

The Sorbet project’s logo

Static typing vs dynamic typing

…

Automated Continuous Deployment at Heroku

Over the past four years, the Heroku Runtime team has transitioned from occasional, manual deployments to continuous, automated deployments. Changes are now rolled out globally within a few hours of merging any change—without any human intervention. It's been an overwhelmingly positive experience for us. This post describes why we decided to make the change, how we did it, and what we learned along the way.

Where We Started

Heroku’s Runtime team builds and operates Heroku’s Private Space (single-tenant) and Common Runtime (multi-tenant) platforms, from container orchestration to routing and logging. When I joined the team…

Up to 75% Faster Maintenances with Heroku Postgres and Redis Premium Plans

As outlined in a previous blog post , Heroku Data services undergo routine maintenances for security and patching. In this post, we describe the process used to minimize downtime for Heroku Postgres and Heroku Redis premium ‘High Availability’ plans and how we optimized the process to perform up to 75% faster.

Data Services Architecture

High availability plans for Postgres and Redis are designed to have two database instances running at the same time. One is a writeable primary database server and the other is a read-only hidden standby. Since the standby is hidden, customers cannot…

Designing for Accessibility: Contrast Ratio

This is the second post in a two-part series about accessibility. The first post shares why designing for accessibility is important to us and why we encourage you to incorporate it into your software design process.

Heroku’s first accessibility initiative was to reach Level AA for luminance contrast ratio as defined by the internationally recognized best practices of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 . This ratio guarantees the legibility of text against its background, in order to ensure all users can perceive Heroku’s user interfaces equally.

This benefits people with color-vision deficiencies (like Deuteranopia or Protanopia which affect…

Dataclips Power Insights at Heroku

Every organization needs to be data-driven in order to be successful. Whether you're tracking an application's performance, incoming support tickets, or revenue rates, different components of any company depend on metrics that inform the health of the business.

At Heroku, we're hackers to the core, but that doesn't mean we're all programmers. We build on top of our own platform for everything we do, and one of the products we often use is Heroku Dataclips. If you haven't heard of them before, Heroku Dataclips allow you to create SQL queries in a web GUI that run on your…

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