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Engineering

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 early days in 2008, a standard web application architecture consisted of a web process type to respond to HTTP requests, a database to persist data,…

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 this one. The most important aspect of our job is keeping customers safe from security vulnerabilities, while also minimizing disruption and downtime. Those two objectives are…

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 false. By default, Rails apps running in production mode are not vulnerable to this exploit. How do I fix it? To remediate this vulnerability, applications can either change…

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 some time brainstorming the experience we wanted from Heroku CLI Autocomplete and decided it was time. We took “build autocomplete” out of the icebox and…

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 ability to generate previews of PDFs and videos. As a security engineer, hearing about a new feature in a product that automatically parses media files…

A Rock Solid, Modern Web Stack—Rails 5 API + ActiveAdmin + 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 Create React App, for example. It’s no longer 100% omakase. And for projects that don’t need CMS-like capabilities, Rails and that works pretty great straight away. Create…

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. In this post, we'll share how we prepared for the release of Rails 5.2, and how you can deploy an app today using the new…

MJIT: A Method Based Just-in-time Compiler for Ruby

I sat down with some Ruby friends in Hiroshima last year to have a conversation about just-in-time compilation for Ruby, specifically the new MJIT method-based implementation. Those of you who are already familiar with JITs and how they work might want to skip directly to the interview, the rest of us are going to hang out for a minute and learn about how things presently work in Ruby, and what it is exactly that the MJIT would change. How does a Ruby program run? Computers don’t speak Ruby or any other high-level language, they only speak machine language. In a…

A Dive into Ruby CVE-2017-17405: Identifying a Vulnerability in Ruby’s FTP Implementation

At Heroku we consistently monitor vulnerability feeds for new issues. Once a new vulnerability drops, we jump into action to triage and determine how our platform and customers may be affected. Part of this process involves evaluating possible attack scenarios not included in the original vulnerability report. We also spend time looking for "adjacent" and similar bugs in other products. The following Ruby vulnerability was identified during this process. Vulnerability Triage A vulnerability, CVE-2017-8817, was identified in libcurl. The FTP function contained an out of bounds read when processing wildcards. As soon as the vulnerability was made public, we went…

SHIFT Commerce’s Journey: Deconstructing Monolithic Applications into Services

Editor’s Note: One of the joys of building Heroku is hearing about the exciting applications our customers are crafting. SHIFT Commerce – a platform helping retailers optimize their e-commerce strategy – is a proud and active user of Heroku in building its technology stack. Today, we’re clearing the stage for Ryan Townsend, CTO of SHIFT, as he provides an overview of SHIFT’s journey into building microservices architecture with the support of Apache Kafka on Heroku. Software architecture has been a continual debate since software first came into existence. The latest iteration of this long-running discussion is between monoliths and microservices…

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