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On April 21st 2011, Heroku experienced a widespread application outage. We have posted a full post-mortem detailing the causes and steps we are taking to prevent similar outages from happening in the future.

Heroku status always contains our current status. You can follow @herokustatus to follow status updates via twitter.

Bundler groups are commonly used to specify which dependencies of your application are needed in a given environment. You may have something like this in your Gemfile:

group :test do gem "rspec" end

Using the "test" group in this case allows you to specify the gems that are needed to test your application.

Since you won’t need these gems in production, you can speed up installation by ignoring the "test" group. Bundler provides this ability …

In December, we rolled out the public beta of a sweet new logging system for Heroku. The new system combines log output from your app’s processes and Heroku’s system components (such as the HTTP router). With all of your logs collated into a single, time-ordered stream, you get an integrated view of everything happening in your app.

Here’s a sample:

$ heroku logs 2010-10-21T14:11:16-07:00 app[web.2]: Processing PostController#list (for 208.16.84.131 at 2010-10-21 14:11:16) [GET] 2010-10-21T14:11:16-07:00…

The improved maintenance mode we described last month is now standard for all existing and new apps.

This new maintenance mode is faster and much more scalable, particularly for apps with more than fifty dynos. It handles maintenance mode at the HTTP router, providing an instantaneous response for turning maintenance mode on or off regardless of the size of your app.

It uses a standard page which serves with an HTTP 503 code.

(If you …

When your app is crashed, out of resources, or misbehaving in some other way, Heroku serves error pages to describe the problem. We also have a single page for platform errors, once known as the ouchie guy (pictured right).

While the approach of showing error information directly via the web has worked well enough, there was room for improvement on both developer visibility and professionalism of presentation to end users. With that in mind, we’ve …

At Heroku, we believe PostgreSQL offers the best mix of powerful features, data integrity, speed, standards compliance, and open-source code of any SQL database on the planet. That’s why we were so excited to see the new release of PostgreSQL, version 9.0.1.

The release is described as “the most anticipated PostgreSQL version in five years” for good reason. The release adds over 200 new features and improvements. For more on PostgreSQL 9, see the …

Access to application logs on Heroku has historically been one of the least usable functions of the platform. The “heroku logs” command was nothing more than a broadcast fetch of the logfiles for every web and worker dyno in your app. This worked ok for small apps, but the user experience became very poor once you got past five or ten dynos.

I’m incredibly excited to announce that today we’re rolling out the public beta …