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Migrating Your Ruby Apps to the Latest Stack

Do you run Rails or pure Ruby applications on Heroku? If so, it’s important to be aware of upcoming end-of-life (EOL) dates for both your stack and your Ruby version. The Heroku-20 stack, built on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, will reach EOL for standard support in April 2025. Ruby 2.7 has already passed its EOL, meaning it’s no longer receiving critical security updates. Continuing to run your app with either an outdated Ruby version or an unsupported Heroku stack exposes your application to increasing security and stability risks. In this article, we’ll cover: What the Heroku-20 EOL means for your application.…

The Adventures of Rendezvous in Heroku’s New Architecture

This article was originally authored by Srinath Ananthakrishnan, an engineer on the Heroku Runtime Networking Team Summary This following story outlines a recent issue we saw with migrating one of our internal systems over to a new EC2 substrate and in the process breaking one of our customer’s use cases. We also outline how we went about discovering the root of the issue, how we fixed it, and how we enjoyed solving a complex problem that helped keep the Heroku customer experience as simple and straightforward as possible! History Heroku has been leveraging AWS and EC2 since the very early…

The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Ruby Object Allocations

Your app is slow. It does not spark joy. This post will use memory allocation profiling tools to discover performance hotspots, even when they're coming from inside a library. We will use this technique with a real-world application to identify a piece of optimizable code in Active Record that ultimately leads to a patch with a substantial impact on page speed. In addition to the talk, I've gone back and written a full technical recap of each section to revisit it any time you want without going through the video. I make heavy use of theatrics here, including a Japanese…

A Fast Car Needs Good Brakes: How We Added Client Rate Throttling to the Platform API Gem

When API requests are made one-after-the-other they'll quickly hit rate limits and when that happens: If you provide an API client that doesn't include rate limiting, you don't really have an API client. You've got an exception generator with a remote timer. — Richard Schneeman Stay Inside (@schneems) June 12, 2019 That tweet spawned a discussion that generated a quest to add rate throttling logic to the platform-api gem that Heroku maintains for talking to its API in Ruby. If the term "rate throttling" is new to you, read Rate limiting, rate throttling, and how they work together The Heroku…

Ruby 2.7.0 Holiday Release

When Heroku launched in 2007 there was only a single Ruby version that could be used on the platform. In 2012 Heroku began to support multiple Ruby versions. Since then, we've had a holiday tradition of releasing the new versions of Ruby on the same day they come out, which always happens on Christmas day (December 25th). If you're new to the community, you might be curious about where releasing a new minor version on Christmas comes from. To help answer that question, we interviewed Matz's, who works as the Chief Ruby Architect at Heroku in 2015. In his own…

Static Typing in Ruby with a Side of Sorbet

As an experiment to see how static typing could help improve our team’s Ruby experience, we introduced Sorbet into a greenfield codebase with a team of 4 developers. Our theory was that adding static type checking through Sorbet could help us catch bugs before they go into production, make refactoring easier, and improve the design of our code. The short answer is that yes, it did all of that! Read on to learn a little more about what it was like to build in a type safe Ruby. The Sorbet project’s logo Static typing vs dynamic typing Ruby is a…

Puma 4: Hammering Out H13s—A Debugging Story

For quite some time we've received reports from our larger customers about a mysterious H13 – Connection closed error showing up for Ruby applications. Curiously it only ever happened around the time they were deploying or scaling their dynos. Even more peculiar, it only happened to relatively high scale applications. We couldn't reproduce the behavior on an example app. This is a story about distributed coordination, the TCP API, and how we debugged and fixed a bug in Puma that only shows up at scale. Connection closed First of all, what even is an H13 error? From our error page…

Optimizing Database Performance in Rails

Setting up a database is a relatively straightforward process (Heroku has an add-on for that), but getting it to run well in production is sometimes another matter. As your application grows and your data grows along with it, you will likely find a number of performance bottlenecks specifically related to your database, and this post aims to help you diagnose and address those issues when they arise. As with all components of your infrastructure it’s important to have early visibility into the performance characteristics of your database. Watching this data as your application grows will give you a much better…

Saved by the Schema: Using JSON Schema to Document, Test, and Debug APIs

Heroku has many public API endpoints. Each of these endpoints needs to be tested so that we know how they work, and documented so that our customers (and other API consumers) know how they work. Follow along, and we’ll learn how Heroku uses JSON Schema to test and document our Platform API – and how it helped us uncover an unexpected bug, rooted in the way the Oj gem parses Big Decimals. JSON Schema files are like blueprints that define the structure and semantics of other JSON documents. When a JSON Schema file is applied to a JSON document, you…

Seven Ways to Fortify Your Application

This blog post is adapted from a talk given by Amy Unger at RailsConf 2018 titled "Knobs, buttons & switches: Operating your application at scale." We've all seen applications that keel over when a single, upstream service goes down. Despite our best intentions, sometimes an unexpected outage has us scrambling to make repairs. In this blog post, we'll take a look at some tools you can integrate into your application before disaster strikes. We'll talk about seven strategies that can help you shed load, fail gracefully, and protect struggling services. We'll also talk about the technical implementations of these techniques—particularly…

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