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Running the Bonobos Stack on Heroku: Interview with Austen Ito

Austen Ito is a software engineer at leading online fashion brand Bonobos, based in New York. Read our Bonobos customer story for more information about how Heroku has helped their business.

What do you have running on Heroku?

We’re running just about everything on Heroku, including our Bonobos.com website, cross-app messaging services, an API for our ERP, as well as some internal tools. The only pieces that are not on Heroku are the Data Science and ERP components. We’re also using Desk.com for customer service queuing.

Walk us through your…

Postgres 9.5 General Availability

Starting today, Postgres 9.5 is now the new default version for all new Heroku Postgres databases. We’ve had hundreds of customers using early beta versions of 9.5 and the feedback has been positive. For many customers, the new UPSERT functionality was the last feature that prevented many of them from moving from other relational databases to Postgres. The engineering staff at Heroku and the Postgres community at large has spent years bringing UPSERT to fruition and the customer feedback is a testament to that hard work. If you want to try out the new version, getting it is as…

Cyber Monday, No Sweat: Why Sweet Tooth Chose PaaS

We recently sat down for a chat with Bill Curtis, a co-founder and the CTO of Sweet Tooth (Now Smile.io ), a points and rewards app for online stores worldwide.

What has been your greatest challenge?

We’re serving way more data today than we ever have, so scaling is mission-critical. In the past, we’ve struggled with traffic spikes. For example, there are seasonal spikes, like Black Friday or Cyber Monday. There are also spikes from merchant activity, such as load testing stores or importing a large number of orders.

I recently tweeted…

Django 1.9’s Improvements for Postgres

A big update to the beloved Python web framework known as Django was released recently: Django 1.9 . This release contains a long list of improvements for everything from the graphical styling of the admin to the ability to run your test suite in parallel.

Our favorite improvements to the framework were, of course, all about our favorite database: Postgres. Here are some of the highlights from the official release notes (highly recommended reading).

Renamed PostgreSQL Back-end

Django's fantastic built-in Postgres database back-end received a nice name change. Previously known as django.db.backends.postgresql_psycopg2, the back-end…

Here’s Postgres 9.5: Now Available on Heroku

Heroku has long been committed to making PostgreSQL one of the best relational databases in the world. We’re also committed to giving you the ability to try the latest release as soon as it’s available. Today, we’re pleased to announce the public beta of Postgres 9.5 on Heroku.

PostgreSQL 9.5 brings a bevy of super exciting new features with the most prominent being the new UPSERT functionality. UPSERT gives you the expected behavior of an insert, or, if there is a conflict, an update, and is performant without the risk of race conditions for your data. UPSERT…

PostgreSQL 9.4 General Availability

We’re pleased to announce PostgreSQL 9.4 in general availability for Heroku Postgres. After announcing the beta earlier this year, we’ve had many developers provision databases against this new version. Throughout the beta period, developers raved about the new data type along with the performance enhancements to materialized views. This uptake by early adopters demonstrates an interest in everything that the new version of PostgreSQL provides, from features to performance.

New Features and Performance Updates

One of the most notable new features of 9.4 is the JSONB data type . While the…

PG Backups Levels Up

Performing a backup is one of those tasks that ensures your application can recover from database or hardware failures should they ever occur. Over four year ago, we recognized this as a best practice and came out with PGBackups, an add-on that reduces the risk and complexity of taking database backups. Today, we’re pleased to announce two big improvements: enhanced reliability, and the ability to schedule backups.

Better By Default

One of the main drivers for the upgrade was the occasional backup stall experienced by users. In some cases, PGBackups would encounter…

Event-driven Data Sync

Heroku Connect is a service offered by Heroku which performs 2-way data synchronization between Salesforce and a Heroku Postgres database .

When we first built Heroku Connect, we decided to use polling to determine when data had changed on either side. Polling isn't pretty, but its simple and reliable, and those are "top line" features for Heroku Connect. But polling incurs two significant costs: high latency and wasted resources. The more you poll the more you waste API calls and database queries checking when there are no data changes. But if you lengthen your polling…

Faster Database forking

Did you know that Heroku databases can be forked? Forking a database creates a byte-for-byte copy that can be used for testing and development. It is a useful tool that allows teams to be agile with their data.

Today, forking databases is becoming faster. Fast forking reduces the time to create a fork by hours for high transaction database. To quickly fork a database, simply add the –fast flag:

$ heroku addons:add heroku-postgresql:crane –fork BLUE –fast

Fast forks behave differently from regular forks. They take less time to create, but the data will be somewhat out-of-date (as much…

Heroku Postgres Followers Patched

On November 18th, a replication bug was found in Postgres that affected the most recent versions of every Postgres release. The corruption that this bug may introduce could go undetected, and it manifests itself as a follower potentially having an inconsistent view of the data. For example, data could be present in the primary and not on the follower, or data deleted or updated on the primary and not from the follower. The likelihood of triggering this bug is higher for write-heavy workloads, such as many OLTP applications seen at Heroku.

We always recommend placing applications in maintenance…

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