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App Architecture

Announcing General Availability of Heroku Enterprise Accounts

Today we are thrilled to announce the general availability (GA) release of Heroku Enterprise Accounts. All Enterprise Teams associated with a company are nested under an Enterprise Account which delivers a higher level of visibility and accountability. With an Enterprise Account, executives and admins can ensure trust and improved agility with simple fast management of teams, users and expenses, so application development teams can stay focused on the development process.

With applications sitting at the core of almost all businesses, collaborative environments that make it possible for users to efficiently work together without security concerns are essential to the …

Equality Through Accessibility

This is the first post in a two-part series about accessibility. Part two shares our design and development process addressing one aspect of accessibility in the Heroku product.

Equality as a Salesforce Value

We at Salesforce firmly believe that access to information and the ability to contribute to our digital environment should be recognized as basic human rights, not a nice-to-have features.

Globally, hundreds of millions of people have physical, speech, cognitive, and neurological disabilities, and while in practice accessibility is about designing for users with disabilities, it also benefits everyone. Most of us have experienced conditions that impair our …

How Heroku Operates its Multi-Tenant Apache Kafka Services

This blog post is adapted from a talk given by Ali Hamidi at Data Council SF ’19 titled “Operating Multi-Tenant Kafka Services for Developers on Heroku.”

https://www.youtube.com/embed/-AtHKoTNR1k

Thousands of developers use Heroku’s Apache Kafka service to process millions of transactions on our platform—and many of them do so through our multi-tenant Kafka service. Operating Kafka clusters at this scale requires careful planning to ensure capacity and uptime across a wide range of customer use cases. With significant automation and test suites, we’re able to do this without a massive operations team.

In this post, we’re going to talk …

A Dialog with Your Data Using the New Dataclips

The data we store holds value, but refining data into meaning remains a difficult task. Over the last few months, we've taken a step back to figure out what we can do to help our users cross that divide, and rebuilt Heroku Dataclips from scratch with that goal in mind. The result is an experience that makes accessing and working with your data easier than ever, enabling anyone on your team familiar with SQL to take advantage of your most valuable asset without the need for specialized tools or knowledge of the database.

Dataclips is a flexible, lightweight way to …

PWA Tutorial: Turn Your Website Into a Progressive Web App

Progressive web apps (or PWAs) enable websites to function more like native mobile apps in exchange for some flexibility. You get cross-platform native mobile app functionality (or close to it) without all the overhead of app store approvals and tons of platform-specific native code.

Users can install a progressive web app to their home screen and launch it just like a native app. However, the app is launched into a pseudo-app frame that has some restrictions and only allows access to pages that are sub-paths of the initial path of the progressive web app. They also must be served over …

Building a Service-oriented Architecture with Rails and Kafka

This blog post is adapted from a talk given by Stella Cotton at RailsConf 2018 titled “So You’ve Got Yourself a Kafka.”

https://www.youtube.com/embed/Rzl4O1oaVy8

In recent years, designing software as a collection of services, rather than a single, monolithic codebase, has become a popular way to build applications. In this post, we’ll learn the basics of Kafka and how its event-driven process can be used to power your Rails services. We’ll also talk about practical considerations and operational challenges that your event-driven Rails services might face around monitoring and scaling.

What is Kafka?

Suppose you want to know more …

VPN Support for Heroku Private Spaces

Today we're excited to announce Site-to-Site Virtual Private Network (VPN) support for Heroku Private Spaces. Heroku customers can now establish secure, site-to-site IPsec connections between Private Spaces on Heroku and their offices, datacenters and deployments on non-AWS clouds.

VPN is a powerful, proven and widely-adopted technology for securely combining multiple networks (or adding individual hosts to a network) over encrypted links that span the public Internet. VPN is well-understood and in use by most enterprise IT departments, and is supported on all major cloud providers and by a range of hardware and software-based systems.

VPN support complements Private Space …

Internal Routing for Private Space Apps

Today we’re announcing a powerful new network control for apps running in Heroku Private Spaces: Internal Routing. Apps with Internal Routing work exactly the same as other Heroku apps, except the web process type is published to an endpoint that’s routable only within the Private Space and on VPC and VPN peered networks (see the Private Space VPN support companion post). Apps with Internal Routing are impossible to access directly from the public internet, improving security and simplifying management and compliance checks for web sites, APIs and services that must not be publicly accessible.

Internal Routing unlocks several …

Beyond Web and Worker: Evolution of the Modern Web App on Heroku

This is the first in a series of blog posts examining the evolution of web app architecture over the past 10 years. This post examines the forces that have driven the architectural changes and a high-level view of a new architecture. In future posts, we’ll zoom in to details of specific parts of the system.

The standard web application architecture suitable for many organizations has changed drastically in the past 10 years. Back in Heroku’s early days in 2008, a standard web application architecture consisted of a web process type to respond to HTTP requests, a database to persist data, …

Deconstructing Monolithic Apps with SHIFT Commerce

Editor’s Note: One of the joys of building Heroku is hearing about the exciting applications our customers are crafting. SHIFT Commerce – a platform helping retailers optimize their e-commerce strategy – is a proud and active user of Heroku in building its technology stack. Today, we’re clearing the stage for Ryan Townsend, CTO of SHIFT, as he provides an overview of SHIFT’s journey into building microservices architecture with the support of Apache Kafka on Heroku.

Software architecture has been a continual debate since software first came into existence. The latest iteration of this long-running discussion is between monoliths and …

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