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SxSW Interactive starts today. The crowds have arrived, the sessions have begun, and the ExactTarget Orange Oasis is open. Please stop by and say hello at the Heroku purple pavilion there, or schedule a private meeting or demo. Check out the SXSW Fitbit Leaderboard from ExactTarget while you are here. This Heroku app logs and tracks your steps at SxSW. You can join the Leaderboard by logging into Fitbit, and sending a mail to fitbit@exacttarget.com. Also join us for the Heroku SxSW meetup on Sun from 5 – 8p. We'll have food, a haiku poetry slam, and drinks. Have a…

Visibility into your application is necessary to properly analyze and troubleshoot issues as they arise. One of the key factors to good visibility is using logs as event streams and treating them as the canonical source of what happened on an app. The challenge with using logs is to correlate events across the stack consisting of your application's code and Heroku's platform components. Today, we are releasing new functionality that makes this simple. By using the emerging X-Request-ID convention, you can easily correlate multiple log entries to individual HTTP(s) requests. HTTP Request IDs are now enabled on all Heroku apps.…

Every year tens of thousands of people descend on Austin, TX for the SxSW Conference to learn about the latest in digital technologies. This year Heroku is descending as well and we want to see you there. Orange Oasis Fri., March 7th and Sat., March 8th Brass House – 115 San Jacinto Blvd (@ 2nd St) Heroku will be a part of ExactTarget’s Orange Oasis at Brass House. Close to the convention center, but out of the noise and crowds of SxSW, we’ll have a Purple Pavilion inside the Orange Oasis. Please stop by and say hello, or schedule a…

Having a web or mobile app become hugely popular is one of those "good problems" to have. But success is still its own challenge – making any architecture work at high volume can often create a unique kind of complexity. And as the Internet grows, and apps become more prevalent, its an increasingly common requirement. The largest app on Heroku routinely exceeds 10,000 requests / second, and two of the top 50 sites on the Internet (as measured by Quantcast) – Urban Dictionary and Upworthy – run on Heroku. Across all apps, Heroku is now serving over 5 billion requests…

Today we’re making an important piece of Platform API tooling available: A machine-readable JSON schema that describes what resources are available via the API, what their URLs are, how they are represented and what operations they support. The schema opens up many interesting use cases, both for users and for us at Heroku working on improving and extending the API. A few examples are: Auto-creating client libraries for your favorite programming language Generating up-to-date reference docs Writing automatic acceptance and integration tests We are already using the schema to maintain the API reference documentation on Dev Center and to generate…

Currently in beta, the Heroku Platform API lets developers automate, extend and combine the Heroku platform with other services in a programmatic, self-service way. Today we are setting the capstone into the API by adding slug and release endpoints to the API beta. These API endpoints are special. They expose a very core part of what Heroku does best: Quickly and safely releasing new versions of an app onto the Heroku platform. Using the new slug and release endpoints, platform developers can build integrations and services that completely sidestep the traditional Heroku Git deployment flow. So instead of requiring git…

Editor's note: This is a guest post from Rikki Endsley. Rikki Endsley is a technology journalist and the USENIX Association's community manager. In the past, she worked as the associate publisher of Linux Pro Magazine, ADMIN, and Ubuntu User, and as the managing editor of Sys Admin magazine. Find her online at rikkiendsley.com and @rikkiends on Twitter. A code of conduct is a signal to attendees that conference organizers have carefully considered the issues involved with attending events, and that they want to make their conference welcoming and safe for everyone. Heroku recently adopted an event sponsorship policy that shows…

Last week we released a new version of our node buildpack that features dependency caching, faster downloads of the node binary, and support for any recent version of node. This new build process is now the default for all node apps on Heroku, so keep deploying your apps as you normally would and you should start to notice the speed improvements. Faster Deployments The new buildpack makes use of a build cache to store the node_modules directory between builds. This caching can mean dramatically reduced build times, particularly in cases where your modules include binary dependencies like pg, bson, or…