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Heroku Blog

Real-World Redis Tips

Redis might sound like it’s just a key/value store, but its versatility makes it a valuable Swiss Army knife for your application. Caching, queueing, geolocation, and more: Redis does it all. We’ve built (and helped our customers build) a lot of apps around Redis over the years, so we wanted to share a few tips that will ensure you get the most out of Redis, whether you’re running it on your own box or using the Heroku Redis add-on. Use a Connection Pooler By using a connection pooler, you'll reduce the connection overhead and therefore speed up operations while reducing…

How Combatant Gentlemen Solved Service Discovery Using Heroku Private Spaces

Scott Raio is Co-Founder and CTO of Combatant Gentlemen], a design-to-delivery menswear e-commerce brand. What microservices are you running in Heroku Private Spaces? We’ve written an individual service for every business use case. For example, we have services for order processing, product catalog, account management, authentication, swatch display, POs, logistics, payments, etc. With all these different services, we chose Heroku Private Spaces as a way to make service discovery easier. We’re currently running about 25 services, which is a relatively small number compared to Netflix or Twitter (who employ hundreds of services). But we’re growing, and we’re always evaluating our…

Powering the Heroku Platform API: A Distributed Systems Approach Using Streams and Apache Kafka

We recently launched Apache Kafka on Heroku into beta. Just like we do with Heroku Postgres, our internal engineering teams have been using our Kafka service to power a number of our internal systems. The Big Idea The Heroku platform comprises a large number of independent services. Traditionally we’ve used HTTP calls to communicate between these services. While this approach is simple to implement and easy to reason about, it has a number of drawbacks. Synchronous calls mean that the top-level request time will be gated by the slowest backend component. Also, internal API calls create tight point-to-point couplings between…

Neither self nor this: Receivers in Go

Andrey Petrov is the author of urllib3, the creator of Briefmetrics and ssh-chat, and a former Googler and Y Combinator alum. He’s back again to free us of our old ways of thinking, so that we can embrace what's really special about receivers in Go. When getting started with Go, there is a strong temptation to bring baggage from your previous language. It’s a heuristic which is usually helpful, but sometimes counter-productive and inevitably results in regret. Go does not have classes and objects, but it does have types that we can make many instances of. Further, we can attach…

How Emarsys Approaches Service Sizing on Heroku

Based in Budapest, Hungary, Andras Fincza (Head of Engineering) and Rafael Ördög (Technical Lead) work for Emarsys, a global marketing automation platform. Read our Emarsys customer story to learn more about their migration experience on Heroku. How did you introduce microservices at Emarsys? We take an evolutionary approach to our architecture. Our marketing automation platform was originally designed as a monolithic system built in PHP and MySQL and running on in-house infrastructure. We were running two major services on our in-house infrastructure: one for HDS (historical data service) and the other for smart insights and analysis. However, it was hard…

How Belly Scales Using API Proxies with their Microservices Architecture: Interview with Darby Frey

Darby Frey is Director of Platform Engineering at Belly, the leading loyalty marketing platform in the U.S. For more information, Read our Belly customer story to learn more about how Heroku has helped Belly scale their business. How did you approach migrating to a microservices architecture? Originally, we built the entire business on one Rails app. Then a couple years ago, we pivoted to a microservices approach. It is still a work in progress, but we’re migrating components of the monolithic app whenever it makes sense. For example, when we need to add or expand a feature, or if we…

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