Search overlay panel for performing site-wide searches

Boost Performance & Scale with Postgres Advanced. Join Pilot Now!

App Architecture

Kafka Streams on Heroku

Designing scalable, fault tolerant, and maintainable stream processing systems is not trivial. The Kafka Streams Java library paired with an Apache Kafka cluster simplifies the amount and complexity of the code you have to write for your stream processing system.

Unlike other stream processing systems, Kafka Streams frees you from having to worry about building and maintaining separate infrastructural dependencies alongside your Kafka clusters. However, you still need to worry about provisioning, orchestrating, and monitoring infrastructure for your Kafka Streams applications.

Heroku makes it easy for you to deploy, run, and scale your Kafka Streams applications by using supported buildpacks …

Announcing the New Heroku CLI: Performance and Readability Enhancements

Today we are announcing the newest version of the Heroku CLI. We know how much time you spend in the CLI as developers and how much pride you take in being able to get things done quickly. Our new CLI has big improvements in performance as well as enhanced readability for humans and machines.

Tuned for Performance

CLI response time is made up of two parts: the API response time and the performance of the CLI itself, and the latter is where we’ve made big improvements. While a typical Unix user should experience responses that are around half a …

Powering the real food revolution with IoT, MQTT, and Heroku: an Interview with Freight Farms

Kyle Seaman is Director of Farm Technology for Freight Farms, producer of pre-assembled, IoT-enabled, hydroponic farms inside repurposed freight containers.

What is Freight Farms?

Our flagship product, The Leafy Green Machine (LGM), is a complete, commercial-ready, hydroponic growing system assembled inside a repurposed shipping container. Each of our 100+ farms is connected to an IoT network built on Heroku.

Tell us about your stack.

We’re running the open source version of the Parse server on Heroku. Our stack is mostly JavaScript: MongoDB along with a Node.js API. We also use Heroku Postgres.

Xively is a core component of …

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 API With Streams & 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 …

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 …

Real-Time Rails: Implementing WebSockets in Rails 5 with Action Cable

It's been one year since Action Cable debuted at RailsConf 2015, and Sophie DeBenedetto is here to answer the question in the minds of many developers: what is it really like to implement "the highlight of Rails 5"? Sophie is a web developer and an instructor at the Flatiron School. Her first love is Ruby on Rails, although she has developed projects with and written about Rails, Ember and Phoenix.

Recent years have seen the rise of "the real-time web." Web apps we use every day rely on real-time features—the sort of features that let you see new posts magically …

Session Affinity now Generally Available

Today we are announcing that Session Affinity routing is now generally available as a fully supported part of the Heroku Platform. When Session Affinity is enabled for an app, requests from a given browser will always be routed to the same Dyno. Under the hood, the Heroku Router will add a cookie to all incoming requests from new clients; this cookie allows subsequent requests from that client to return to the same Dyno. With specific clients bound to specific Dynos, apps that depend on ‘sticky sessions’ can still take advantage of Heroku’s flexible scaling.

We introduced Session Affinity in Heroku …

Django Channels: How to Build Real-Time Web Apps With Python

Today, we're thrilled to host Jacob Kaplan-Moss. Jacob's a former Herokai and long-time core contributor to Django, and he's here to share an in-depth look at something that he believes will define the future of the framework.

Django Channels allows Python developers to build real-time, asynchronous web apps with Python and JavaScript. It augments Django’s robust response-request architecture with asynchronous protocol handling, including WebSockets support. In this Django Channels tutorial, we’ll show you how to build a real-time chat app with Django, Channels, Redis, and Heroku Dynos.

What are Django Channels?

When Django was created, almost 20 years ago, …

Subscribe to the full-text RSS feed for App Architecture.