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Cloud Infrastructure

Dawn of the Dead Ends: Fixing a Memory Leak in Apache Kafka

At Heroku, we're always working towards increased operational stability with the services we offer. As we recently launched the beta of Apache Kafka on Heroku, we've been running a number of clusters on behalf of our beta customers.

Over the course of the beta, we have thoroughly exercised Kafka through a wide range of cases, which is an important part of bringing a fast-moving open-source project to market as a managed service. This breadth of exposure led us to the discovery of a memory leak in Kafka, having a bit of an adventure debugging it, and then contributing a …

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 …

See Python, See Python Go, Go Python Go

Andrey Petrov is the author of urllib3, the creator of Briefmetrics and ssh-chat, and a former Googler and YCombinator alum. He’s here to tell us of a dangerous expedition his requests undertook, which sent them from Python, through the land of C, to a place called Go (and back again).

Today we're going to make a Python library that is actually the Go webserver, for which we can write handlers in Python. It makes Python servers really fast, and—more importantly—it’s a bit fun and experimental. This post is a more detailed overview of my PyCon 2016 talk of …

Container-Ready Rails 5

Rails 5 will be the easiest release ever to get running on Heroku. You can get it going in just five lines:

$ rails new myapp -d postgresql
$ cd myapp
$ git init . ; git add . ; git commit -m first
$ heroku create
$ git push heroku master

These five lines (and a view or two) are all you need to get a Rails 5 app working on Heroku — there are no special gems you need to install, or flags you must toggle. Let's take a peek under the hood, and explore the interfaces baked …

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 …

Heroku Private Spaces Now Generally Available

Today Heroku is announcing that Heroku Private Spaces is generally available. Introduced in beta in September, Private Spaces is a new Heroku runtime designed from the ground up to meet the trust and control requirements of the most demanding applications. This new architecture enables Private Spaces to deliver the best of both worlds: the easy and powerful Heroku developer experience, combined with the network and trust controls historically only available in on-premise, behind-the-firewall deployments. Made available as part of Heroku Enterprise, Private Spaces makes cloud-based PaaS ready for the most critical enterprise applications.

Heroku Spaces are designed to fit in …

Managing apps and users with fine-grained access controls

In February, we announced Heroku Enterprise, with collaboration and management capabilities for building and running your app portfolio in a governable and secure way on Heroku. We also introduced fine-grained access controls with app privileges as a beta feature. Today, we are pleased to announce general availability of this feature: Heroku Enterprise accounts are now automatically enabled for fine-grained access controls. We’re very happy to deliver this feature that many of our largest customers have requested.

“Enterprises need greater visibility around applications and scalability, and Heroku Enterprise adds those features to the core Heroku value proposition,” said Matthew Francis, …

Why Microservices, Decomposing Big Projects, Matter

All successful applications grow more complex over time, and that complexity creates challenges in development. There are two essential strategies to manage this problem: a team can keep everything together (create a monolith) or a team can divide a project into smaller pieces (create microservices).

The monolith at its most extreme is a single code base that contains all of an application’s logic and to which all programmers involved contribute. This approach is perhaps the most natural, and organic growth often tends towards this model. It’s also, in many ways, the easiest to reason about and operate. A single codebase …

Introducing the app.json Application Manifest

Developers want to spend less time setting up applications and start working with the code sooner. Setting up applications is error-prone, time consuming and interruptive to the development flow. Often, there are several steps to go from your code or other samples and templates that you find in repositories online, to a running application that you can continue to work on.

Today, we are excited to introduce the app.json manifest. app.json enables developers to define their applications' details, setup configurations and runtime environments in a structured way. Instead of providing step-by-step instructions, you can now add app.json files to …

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