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Heroku Blog

Let’s Debug a Node.js Application

There are always challenges when it comes to debugging applications. Node.js’ asynchronous workflows add an extra layer of complexity to this arduous process. Although there have been some updates made to the V8 engine in order to easily access asynchronous stack traces, most of the time, we just get errors on the main thread of our applications, which makes debugging a little bit difficult. As well, when our Node.js applications crash, we usually need to rely on some complicated CLI tooling to analyze the core dumps.

Ground Control to Major TOML: What Is a TOML File and Why Do Buildpacks Use TOML?

YAML files dominate configuration in the cloud-native ecosystem. They’re used by Kubernetes, Helm, Tekton, and many other projects to define custom configurations and workflows. But YAML has its oddities, which is why the Cloud Native Buildpacks project chose TOML as its primary configuration format.

What is TOML?

TOML stands for Tom’s Obvious, Minimal Language. It’s a configuration file format created to be simple, readable, and predictable. Designed for humans first and machines second, TOML avoids syntactic ambiguity and is easy to understand even at a glance.

The format uses a key-value structure and supports sections, arrays, and nested tables. Its goal is to be as clear and minimal as possible while still expressive enough for most configuration tasks. Unlike JSON, TOML allows comments. Unlike YAML, it doesn’t rely on indentation for structure, which reduces the likelihood of formatting errors.

TOML has gained adoption in modern developer tools. The Rust package manager Cargo and the Python dependency tool Poetry both use TOML. In the cloud-native ecosystem, containers and Cloud Native Buildpacks also rely on TOML for configuration.

What is a TOML file?

A TOML file is a plain text file with a .toml extension that stores structured configuration data using TOML syntax. It defines settings using simple key-value pairs, and organizes related settings using headers and tables.You can learn more about TOML from the official documentation, but a simple buildpack TOML file looks like this:

How a Live Tutoring Platform Helps the Working World Get Ahead

In today’s global economy, English proficiency unlocks opportunity. People all over the world are motivated to improve their English skills in order to make a better life for themselves and their families. Cambly is a language education platform that helps millions of learners advance their careers by connecting them with English-speaking tutors from a similar professional background.

For many language learners, speaking is often the hardest skill to improve in a classroom setting. Conversation time …

Making Time to Save You Time: How We Sped Up Time-Related Syscalls on Dynos

I work on Heroku’s Runtime Infrastructure team, which focuses on most of the underlying compute and containerization here at Heroku. Over the years, we’ve tuned our infrastructure in a number of ways to improve performance of customer dynos and harden security.

We recently received a support ticket from a customer inquiring about poor performance in two system calls (more commonly referred to as syscalls) their application was making frequently: clock_gettime(3) and gettimeofday(2).

In this …

Container and Runtime Performance Improvements

Today we’re sharing three performance enhancements that we have recently rolled out to apps running in Private Spaces:

  • Dynos upgraded to the latest generation infrastructure for 10-15% perf improvement
  • More consistent performance for Small Private and Shield Space dynos
  • Optimized clock source selection

Heroku is a fully managed platform-as-a-service (PaaS) and we work tirelessly to continuously improve and enhance the experience of running apps on our platform. Unlike lower-level infrastructure-as-a-service systems, improvements are applied automatically …

Streaming Data Connectors Beta: Capture Postgres Changes in Apache Kafka on Heroku

Today we are announcing a beta release of our new streaming data connector between Heroku Postgres and Apache Kafka on Heroku. Heroku runs millions of Postgres services and tens of thousands of Apache Kafka services, and we increasingly see developers choosing to start with Apache Kafka as the foundation of their data architecture. But for those who are Postgres-first, it is challenging to adopt without a full app rewrite. Developers want a seamless integration …

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