Platform Updates

What if enterprise apps were built the way you’d build an agile Ruby app? What if they were a pleasure to work with, deploy, and manage? What if big companies could adopt the philosophies of Heroku and the Ruby community? What if your company actually preferred you use Heroku to build apps?

That’s the next level for Heroku. That’s where we want to go, so we’ve made a decision we’re excited to share: we have signed a definitive agreement to be acquired by salesforce.com. We expect the deal to close by January 31st.

Why Salesforce.com?

Salesforce.com is the original cloud company.…

It’s no secret that Heroku’s getting pretty big. Heck, we advertise the number of apps running on the platform right there on the homepage (over 88,000, when I last looked). We’ve got tens of thousands of developers, and you all have been doing some amazing work — the success stories we’ve posted are only the tip of the iceberg. With that in mind, we thought it was high time we started to get all of you together. So, on November 3rd, we’re going to hold the first official Heroku Users Group meeting. Join us at our office at 7pm to…

This morning we are very excited to announce our new Add-on Provider Program , which allows anyone to easily build a Heroku add-on, making it available to all Heroku developers and customers to purchase with one click.

We first launched add-ons almost a year ago. Since then, they have been hugely successful, many add-ons being purchased thousands of times.

Hundreds of cloud service providers have contacted us wanting to build their own add-ons. We’ve spent the past nine months iterating with add-on providers to create an API that’s easy to use…

We can’t be happier to announce that we recently closed a $10 million Series B round of investment led by Ignition Partners. We’re planning to use the money to further expand our platform , turbo-charge partner programs for add-on providers and consultancies, and accelerate our go-to-market programs.

The growth and excitement that we’ve seen at Heroku, particularly in 2010, has been incredibly energizing for all of us. We talk a lot about numbers – the 60,000-plus apps running on our platform gets quoted a lot recently – but even more motivating are the creative forces that the platform…

It’s been a great first quarter for us, and it’s time for a brief update on where we are and where we’re headed.

Growth

Heroku’s growth has continued to be huge. 1,500 new apps were deployed to Heroku last week alone, and that number increases every week. Next week we will cross the 60,000 application mark.

As you can imagine, traffic is growing even more quickly, serving billions of requests per month. In fact, traffic has grown by 4x over the last four months:

Many are finding great value in the platform and paying for features and scale. Our customer count and…

Big things are happening at Heroku, so we felt it was time for an overall update. I’m happy to say that not only has the platform doubled in size over the last 12 months to well over 35,000 live apps, but usage has become more serious and far more intense. Tons of business-critical apps are now live on Heroku, and rely on us for dependable, secure, scalable service, 24/7.

We are seeing some really cool and complex composite apps now that the platform has expanded and become more flexible. The app scale we’re seeing has…

Our good friends at Shopify recently released a developer platform which makes it crazy easy to build custom functionality into an e-commerce store using a standalone Rails app. There are already some great apps available in their app store , many of which are running on Heroku.

Check out the excellent getting started video by James MacAulay. It shows just how slick the Shopify API is – these guys are really taking e-commerce to the next level. (And bonus points for use of config vars to store API keys!)

RailsConf starts tomorrow and Heroku will be there in full force. Here’s our line up:

Monday, 1:30pm — A Hat Full of Tricks with Sinatra

Our very own Blake Mizerany, the creator of Sinatra, is giving a tutorial on Sinatra. Ryan Tomayko will be on hand as well.

Tuesday, 1:50pm — The Future of Deployment: A Killer Panel

Join me as I moderate a panel on deployment, with a truly killer group: Marc-André Cournoyer (creator of Thin), Christian Neukirchen (creator of Rack), Ryan Tomayko (Rack core team, creator of Rack::Cache, Sinatra core team), Blake Mizerany (creator of Sinatra), and Adam…