News

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 …

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
…

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 …

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 …

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 …

There have been thousands of reported security vulnerabilities in 2013 alone, often with language that leaves it unclear if you're affected. Heroku's job is to ensure you can focus on building your functionality, as part of that we take responsibility for the security of your app as much as we're able. On Friday, November 22nd a security vulnerability was disclosed in Ruby (MRI): CVE-2013-4164 . Our team moved quickly to identify the risk to anyone …

Editor’s Note: This is a guest post from Jonathan Cipriano, creative developer based in San Francisco currently working as a Creative Research & Development Manager at AKQA.

A few weeks back, the Make-a-Wish Foundation made a 5-year old cancer survivor named Miles dream come true by helping him play out a Batman-style adventure in San Francisco. The city was morphed into Gotham for a day with the help of 12,000 volunteers. A …

Editor's note: This is a guest post from Ken Fromm and Paddy Foran at Iron.io. Iron.io's services are designed for building distributed cloud applications quickly and operating at scale.

Platform as a Service has transformed the use of cloud infrastructure and drastically increased cloud adoption for common types of applications, but apps are becoming more complex. There are more interfaces, greater expectations on response times, increasing connections to other systems, and lots more processing …