Heroku

Tech: Sending email with Gmail

Mon, 09 Nov 2009 21:18:29 GMT

These days, it seems like almost all apps need to send email. And everyone has a gmail account. So why not have your app send email through Gmail? It’s fairly easy with just a few steps.

Heroku currently runs Ruby 1.8.6. This means you need to provide your own SMTP TLS library. Luckily, Adam has made that super easy with a quick little Rails plugin. Simply install the library, set a few config variables, and you’re good to go. Best of all, this simple plugin will work on any provider. Use it even if you’re not on Heroku. It’s just a fast way to make sure your SMTP connection to Gmail is setup correctly.

1. Install the plugin

$ script/plugin install git://github.com/adamwiggins/gmail_smtp.git

2. Setup your environment variables on your local dev machine for testing

$ export GMAIL_SMTP_USER=username@gmail.com
$ export GMAIL_SMTP_PASSWORD=yourpassword

3. Try sending mail with ActionMailer.

Normal process here. You don’t need to config ActionMailer anywhere, this plugin will do it for you. In fact, if you have a config file setting up ActionMailer, remove it!

4. Set your variables on Heroku

$ heroku config GMAIL_SMTP_USER=username@gmail.com
$ heroku config GMAIL_SMTP_PASSWORD=yourpassword

5. That’s it!

You’re running with Gmail and Heroku.

For those looking for something a little more industrial, we have a great option in our add-on catalog with SendGrid. No limits on from address, 200 emails/day free, and some amazing features in the higher levels such as bounce tracking and full stats.

Add-ons Launch

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 19:44:20 GMT

Heroku has focused since day one on making the end-to-end application experience as easy as possible. From our git focused workflow to the automated management of deployed applications, we’ve worked hard to give developers the flexibility to build amazing apps. Today we’re excited to announce a major extension of this flexibility with Add-ons.

For those who just want to see it in action, here’s a 3 minute overview:

Add-ons

Add-ons are a way to extend your application. They can provide core functionality (like full-text search or cron), add features to the platform (like deploy hooks or backup bundles), and integrate with amazing third party services (like Zerigo, Sendgrid, or New Relic).

Detailed information for the initially available add-ons is available at addons.heroku.com.

Add-on Catalog

All available add-ons can be viewed in the add-on catalog. We have a combination of Heroku developed and 3rd party add-ons that cover a wide range of needs, and more coming all the time. You’ll also see some marked “beta” (open to anyone but not yet 100% production), some marked “private beta” (by request only – contact us at beta@heroku.com if you want to be considered for inclusion), and finally some marked “soon” (a sneak peak of some upcoming add-ons). We promise, this is just a glimpse of many many more to come.

Adding an Add-on

Adding an add-on is incredibly easy. You have the choice to either use our command line interface or the catalog. Simply click the add button, choose which app you want to add to, and you’re done.

You will see the add-on being installed into your app in real time.

Managing Add-ons

All of an app’s add-ons can now be managed in one place – the add-on menu shown above. From the My Apps section, choose an app and then click the “Add-ons” button in the upper right corner.

Select an add-on from the menu to view its interface, manage its configuration, or remove it.

Lots more add-ons to come – stay tuned!

Official press release can be found here.

Heroku Directions

Thu, 22 Oct 2009 21:38:09 GMT

It’s great to be a part of Heroku and to get the welcome from James and team as well as from the various customers, partners, and developers I’ve spoken with over the past few weeks. Heroku, the Ruby community at large, and the “cloud” market in general are growing and evolving quickly. As you can tell, we have a lot of exciting applications being deployed on our platform and are constantly working to improve and expand our offerings. I wanted to use my first blog post with the company to talk specifically about areas where we are going to be super focused over the coming months:

1) Making Heroku’s growing ecosystem work for you.

We’ve seen great traction with partners (formal and informal) who’ve built various extensions or additions to our platform, and we’ve also seen a surprising amount of our business come from consultancies who are doing application development for their customers and are recommending Heroku as the deployment platform as choice. We’re going to make it easier for our customers, prospects, and users to take advantage of our partner’s offerings, and to enable our partners to more easily grow their own businesses by working with Heroku. We’ll have some announcements on this front coming over the next weeks and months.

2) Continue strengthening Heroku’s position as both the most productive platform to run your Ruby applications and the most trusted, reliable, and operationally transparent service.

Some of the world’s largest companies trust us with their applications, and some of the most exciting and fastest growing sites do so as well – we have numerous customer applications serving hundreds of millions of pages a month on Heroku. We are continuing to invest substantially in our own operational infrastructure as well as our support processes, tools, and services that we provide to customers. As our platform continues its tremendous growth we will continue to deliver and improve upon (there’s always room for improvement) our stability and reliability.

Transparency is one area that we’ve specifically looked to make improvements, and I’m happy to say that we recently launched status.heroku.com to make it easy and simple for you to check on the status of our service, and to see in the cases where there was an issue how we deal with it and what the impact is. I’m also very gratified that we have a very robust beta process thanks to an energetic group of customers investing their time and energy using beta features and giving us great, concrete feedback.

3) Expanding the number of applications and scenarios where you can see real business value in building and running your application on Heroku.

We see customers using us not just for easy and rapid deployment, but more importantly for the efficiency and smoothness of ongoing operation of their applications. We hear more and more that customers are saving not just time, but real, hard dollars due to the automation and efficiencies in our platform. There is a lot more we can do here, and some of them are super secret, while still more are just gleams in Adam, Orion, and James’s eyes right now (you can only imagine…).

A couple of important platform features that you’ll be seeing shortly are fully production-ready and cloud-aware application monitoring and memcached services. These have both been used extensively through our beta process. We can’t wait to get them out to you, and to continue regularly adding to the portfolio of services you have to choose from as you deploy on Heroku.

Finally, as this is my first post at Heroku, I want to thank our customers, users, and evangelists for your enthusiasm, your feedback, and your business; I hope you won’t hesitate to contact me or us when you have questions, feedback, or yes, even gripes. My email is byron at heroku dot com, and our contact page gives you easy places to get in touch.

Heroku Casts: Maintenance Mode

Mon, 19 Oct 2009 23:21:43 GMT

Today we’re launching an exciting new feature – maintenance mode.

We strive to make your deployment and management experience as seamless as possible, for both the developers and the end users. Part of any management task is performing routine maintenance tasks, from database migrations to more complex site upgrades. When you’re in the midst of doing these maintenance tasks, wouldn’t it be great to show your users a nice maintenance page, instead of a broken site? With the Heroku maintenance mode, now you can.

This quick 3:30 video shows you how to use maintenance mode, and even how to customize it for your own look and feel:

Announcing Huge Growth and New CEO

Thu, 15 Oct 2009 05:16:30 GMT

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 jumped too, with many apps now each individually exceeding hundreds of millions of requests per month.

All of this is largely due to our passionate users and supporters who beta test our platform, contribute great content to the community, and evangelize us in blogs and tweets. Huge thanks to all of you!

The team has been plenty busy scaling the platform and building more new features than ever. But with all this growth, I’ve had less and less time for my personal contribution: driving the whole team crazy with my insane hairsplitting perfectionism.

Adam, Orion, and I agreed that with all this great stuff happening we needed to expand the team, so today we’re pleased to announce that Byron Sebastian has joined us as CEO. Don’t be fooled by Byron’s extensive experience building commercial platforms (Amazon.com, Crossgain, BEA, SourceLabs, EMC); he’s a passionate engineer at heart.

Byron is a great fit with the unique culture of the Ruby community and the Heroku team, and brings a ton of great experience into the company. We’re thrilled for him to help us take Heroku to the next level.

With Byron onboard, Adam, Orion, and I will be able to spend even more time on the product. For me especially, this means I’ll be able to let my OCD run amuck and focus even more maniacally on Heroku’s trademark smooth user experience (I can see the team groaning and rolling their eyes as I type this).

We’ve been working hard on some awesome new additions to the platform we’ll be rolling out over the coming weeks. Exciting times ahead – stay tuned!

Official press releases are available here and here.

Heroku Casts: Setting Up Custom Domains

Wed, 07 Oct 2009 18:44:17 GMT

Today is a twofer on the screencast front.

Setting up custom domains & DNS is one of those necessary evils that no one likes, and is way more confusing than it should be. Adding insult to injury, there’s not one solution for all cases. At a high level, the process is fairly easy. First, you need to point your domain to Heroku with your DNS provider (such as GoDaddy). Once your domain is pointed to Heroku, you then need to tell Heroku so we can start serving traffic to your domain.

DNS is the means by which computers translate what you type in pretty human language (e.g. heroku.com) into computer terms (75.101.163.44). To figure out how to configure DNS & Heroku, you first need to ask yourself – Do I want email (support@mydomain.com) or not? No email is easier to manage in the long run, though neither is hard.

Setting up Custom Domains without email

This is the easiest configuration. It uses something called “CNAMES” in DNS, which are just aliases. This means you are telling DNS to just ask us, Heroku, what the right IP address is. If we ever change the DNS settings, your domain is automatically updated. On the downside, using this arrangement means that you can’t get email. It’s a long and geeky discussion on why – if you’re interested in a blog post or screencast on the details, let me know in the comments!

Seting up Custom Domains WITH email

Screencast #2 shows you how to use A records for the root domain, and setup your MX records (Mail eXchange, which tell mail clients where to send email) so that you can use custom domains and email.

Other screencasts you want to see? Let me know in the comments.

Heroku Casts: Creating Your First App

Tue, 06 Oct 2009 22:24:48 GMT

We’re introducing a series of screencasts going over how Heroku works, how to use it, and some common ways to make your experience better.

To kick this off, I’ve put together a quick <5 minute overview of creating your first Heroku application.

Follow all our videos on our vimeo page

If you’ve got ideas on other screencasts you’d like to see, let us know in the comments!

Gemcutter's Adventure on Heroku

Mon, 05 Oct 2009 14:02:36 GMT

Hi there, I’m the creator of a new RubyGem hosting site, Gemcutter. I also happen to be one of the newest hires at Heroku, but I promise, I decided the project was going to be hosted on Heroku long before starting to work here. Heroku’s been kind enough to pitch in getting the site deployed and ready for the whole Ruby community to enjoy.

There’s nothing more fitting than for the next generation of RubyGem hosts to be supported by a truly next generation web application hosting platform. The project has the following goals:

Provide a better API for dealing with gems
Create more transparent and accessible project pages
Enable the community to improve and enhance the site

Recently, the site’s redesign was launched, and we will soon be moving over to http://rubygems.org. Over 23,000 gems are hosted through Amazon S3, and new ones are showing up every day.

Contributors have recently started to add some really neat features such as prerelease gem support and subscribing to RSS feeds for updates about your gems. Some features slated for the near future are full text searching of READMEs for gems, Ruby 1.9 and JRuby compatibility, and allowing gem authors to delete their own gems if they need to.

Gemcutter will be used by default for gem installs when using the Heroku gem manifest starting next week. This should result in faster deploys since the installs will be taking place over the EC2/S3 LAN.

A deeper explanation of how Heroku’s architecture and add-ons has affected Gemcutter’s internal design will be coming soon. The Heroku platform has really helped address some serious issues regarding scalability that wouldn’t have been brought up if we were hosted somewhere else. For now, you can check out how easy it to store files in S3, run background jobs, and use HTTP caching to really speed up your application. And if you haven’t yet, check out gemcutter.org!

We're Hiring!

Mon, 28 Sep 2009 22:40:47 GMT

Thanks to the continued support of the fantastic Ruby community, Heroku is rapidly growing.

We’re determined to keep improving our service for our ever expanding user base, and to that end we’re looking for a few fresh faces to join our world-class team in San Francisco.

First up, we’re hiring our first full-time Heroku Evangelist. This lucky person should have a serious passion for Ruby and cloud computing, along with the enthusiasm and ability to communicate to our audience how Heroku can make their lives easier. There will be lots of presentations to make, conferences to visit, and ample room to engage our developer community – including open source projects.

Second, we’re looking for a Ruby Cloud Platform Support Engineer to work with our amazing customers to make their Heroku experience as awesome as possible. We’re looking for someone with solid Ruby coding chops who really gets a kick of out helping customers solve real problems.

If either of these positions sound like just the thing for you, head on over to our jobs site to read more and apply.

The best camera is...

Fri, 25 Sep 2009 18:25:54 GMT

We periodically like to highlight some of the great applications people are building on Heroku. This week, a new web site and iPhone app for shutterbugs launched, and it’s getting great press and feedback around the web.

Chase Jarvis, a professional photographer, has been singing the praises of the iPhone camera as creative outlet. As he points out, the best camera is the one you have with you. To back that claim up, he’s launched a new project combining an iPhone application and community website.

When I saw that this was running on Heroku, I knew I had to find out more. I reached out to the developers behind this project: Übermind. I dropped the mad geniuses over there a quick email, to find out how and why they are using Heroku.

Ben Sharpe, their Senior Web Services Architect responded:

“When it came down to production deployment, we investigated several alternatives — but we felt that Heroku was the best balance between features, ease of use and value.”

And these guys are getting some traction:

“In the first day we absorbed 5000+ new users and 150k impressions while updating the code throughout the day.”

It looks like that’s just the beginning, with users and traffic shooting up today too. As of Sept 25h, the iphone app is already #11 on the Top Paid App list!

They’re serving up both the iphone backend and web site with a Crane DB + 16 dynos. Go check it out!

Our travels continue

Thu, 10 Sep 2009 18:53:55 GMT

In our ongoing efforts to spread the Heroku word worldwide, our North American tour continues with a bunch of new venues coming up.

Each time we meet with people, we’re blown away with the new applications people are creating on Heroku. For example, last month FlightCaster launched an amazing app for predicting flight delays using Heroku, Clojure, S3, Hadoop and some general amazing tech. We’d love to hear from you on what you’re creating, and find out how to make some awesome stuff.

Blake Mizerany continues his travel schedule talking about Heroku, Sinatra, Ruby development and scaling. If you’re in the area, make sure to stop by!

Boston.rb – Sept 8, 2009
altrug, Atalanta, GA – Sept 9, 2009
Windy City Rails Conference, Chicago, IL – Sept 12, 2009
Montreal on Rails – Sept 15, 2009
Austin on Rails – Sept 22, 2009
CAOS at SIUE, Edwardsville, IL – Sept 24, 2009
San Diego meetup – October 1, 2009
Aloha on Rails – October 3rd – October 6, 2009

BizConf Bound

Tue, 18 Aug 2009 21:27:24 GMT

Heroku has a special place in our heart for consultants and web development firms. They’re some of our best supporters and users. That’s why were excited to be heading out to BizConf this Thursday and Friday.

From the BizConf website:

It’s simple: energetic, enthused folks who want to learn more about how to actually do business today. This conference won’t consist of get-rich-quick talks or motivational speeches, but rather in-depth presentations, discussions and workshops on how to communicate, manage and network more dynamically and effectively.

If you’re going to be at BizConf, find me or drop me an email to arrange something. I’ll have some t-shirts to give out, and I’d love to hear how your business is doing and what Heroku can do to help.

Heroku Sass

Tue, 18 Aug 2009 01:39:09 GMT

No, we’re not talking back. Instead, we’re excited to announce that you can now use Sass on Heroku.

We’re big believers in elegance here, and Sass is a way to bring elegance to your CSS and page layout. Due to our read-only filesystem Sass hasn’t worked well on Heroku. Thanks to the efforts of one of our awesome engineers, there’s now a beta plugin available that enables you to use Sass & Heroku frictionlessly.

To use the plugin, install Sass as you normally would – include the HAML gem in your gem manifest. Then, script/plugin install the sass_on_heroku plugin:

$ script/plugin install git://github.com/heroku/sass_on_heroku.git

The plugin compiles Sass files to tmp/ and serves them from there. We’re able to do this magic by adding Rack middleware on top of your Rails app that quickly detects requests for Sass CSS files, and serve them with proper caching headers.

The plugin is in beta. We’d love to hear from you if you run into any issues.

Bringing Heroku to the East Coast

Tue, 04 Aug 2009 02:18:29 GMT

With Morten out on the European tour, we didn’t want those here in the US to feel left out. Last week we attended a great BBQ and roundtable with Seattle.rb. Starting next week, we’ll be heading out to the east coast, and want to meet more of you.

Blake Mizerany will be talking with local meetup groups all along the east coast about Heroku, Sinatra, and Ruby development. We’re excited to hear how you’re using Heroku today, and what you’d like to see from us in the future.

We’re currently bookending the trip with two bigger groups: kicking it off with NYC.rb on August 11th, and ending the tour at Boston.rb on September 8th.

Have a meetup group, on the east coast or elsewhere? We would love to speak with your group as well, as part of this tour or the next. Please drop us a line letting us know where and when, and we’ll see you shortly.

Europe Here We Come

Fri, 31 Jul 2009 06:52:58 GMT

Since the beginning of our private beta Heroku has been used by developers all over the world. Recently, we’ve been delighted to see a particularly strong interest from Rubyists in Europe looking to take advantage of the deployment and scalability benefits of our platform.

On their trips to Erlang Factory in London and Kings of Code in Amsterdam, Blake and Orion saw immense interest from both individual hackers and established companies.

In August I’ll be making the trip to several European Ruby user group meetings to catch up with even more users, and hopefully gain a better understanding of what they’d like to see from Heroku in the future.

If you’re in or around any of the listed cities on the meetup dates, please consider stopping by. I’ll likely have some time around each of these events, so feel free to contact me if you have a particular project you’d like to discuss.

Schedule:

8/3 – Aarhus, Denmark
8/4 – Dublin, Ireland
8/5 – Copenhagen, Denmark
8/6 – Berlin, Germany
8/10 – Amsterdam, Netherlands

Build your live video apps with Justin.tv and Heroku

Mon, 27 Jul 2009 22:05:05 GMT

You probably already know all about our friends and fellow Y Combinator alumni at Justin.tv. For the last couple of years, they’ve been driving an explosion of live video content on the web, streaming thousands of channels featuring events and people from all over the world.

Today, things are about to get even more interesting as Justin.tv launches an extensive API that allows you to build your own live video apps using Justin.tv’s existing content and their technology platform. Whether you’re looking to enhance your own lifecasting project, or add video-based customer service to your company’s website, the Justin.tv API enables a whole new generation of exciting mashups blending live video with other content sources.

An exciting new API needs useful examples, of course, and not only have the guys over at Justin.tv built some really cool ones, they’ve also chosen to host some of them – like Hot Or Not Live – on Heroku. We’re psyched to see this, because we think that the combination of instant, provisionless deployment and easy scalability makes Heroku the ideal spot to launch your Justin.tv app and watch it take off.

To get started, check out the sample code for Hot or Not Live as well as the official API docs wiki.

We hope you’ll have lots of fun with the API, and please remember to tell us all about the cool stuff you’re building with Justin.tv and Heroku. We’d love to hear from you.

Background Jobs with DJ on Heroku

Wed, 15 Jul 2009 18:05:39 GMT

Our goal for the Heroku platform has been to create a totally smooth and seamless experience for getting your Ruby web application online. Web apps revolve around one or more dynamic web processes: what Rubyists often call a mongrel, and what we call a dyno. When it comes to dynos, we think we’ve really nailed it, and nothing makes that more tangible than the ease of scaling your app with the dyno slider.

But most serious web apps have a second aspect: one that gets less attention, but one that is often just as important as the web process. Like the dark side of the moon, this second half of your application is not directly visible to users, but without it the app would not be whole. This aspect of the application is often referred to as background jobs. The processes which handle background jobs are called workers.

A worker is used for any heavy lifting your app needs to do. Some examples include: sending email, accessing a remote API (like posting something to Twitter), fetching posts from an RSS feed, converting an image thumbnail, or rendering a PDF. Anything that will take more than 100ms should go in a worker process, not your web process.

Ad-hoc Background Jobs

There are many ways to create worker processes that run asynchronously from your web requests. Examples include forking a web process, or running a cron job every minute to check for work. Those ad-hoc techniques work ok in some situations, but they not highly maintainable or scalable. At Heroku, we don’t want to do something unless we can do it right. We want our workers to be as smooth, powerful, scalable, and easy to use as our dynos.

Background Jobs Done Right

Worker processes on Heroku run completely independently of your dynos. They can be scaled out horizontally across our grid of instances to any size, independent of the number of dynos you’re running. (Some apps need more concurrency for the web front, some for the background workers – scaling the two should be orthogonal.)

One way to describe a mongrel or dyno is as a share-nothing process that consumes web requests. Likewise, a worker can be described as a share-nothing process that consumes jobs from a work queue.

Work Queues

Work queues are currently an area of academic debate among thought leaders in the Ruby community. Work queues consist of two parts: a queueing system and a message bus. The message bus may be an implementation of a messaging standard, or a custom protocol.

Some examples of queueing systems include: Delayed::Job, Workling, BJ, and Starling.

Some examples of message buses include: RabbitMQ (implementing the AMQP protocol), Beanstalkd, Amazon SQS, and Kestrel.

These are some great tools, many of which are in production use by major Ruby sites. For example, Twitter uses Kestrel, while Scribd uses loops and ActiveMQ. But when the largest Rails sites in the world don’t have a consensus on the best tool for the job, what should the rest of us be using?

Luckily, there’s an excellent solution for medium-sized apps that has been quietly gaining momentum in the Rails world. That solution is Delayed::Job.

Delayed Job

DJ is an easy-as-pie plugin for Rails written by Tobias Lütke. (It can be used with Sinatra, too). It uses the database as a message bus instead of an external daemon. Using the database as the message bus isn’t as high-speed or featureful as a dedicated daemon like RabbitMQ, but it’s easier to set up, and more than enough for most sites – including Github.

John Nunemaker has an excellent tutorial on DJ, and I’ve previously illustrated the steps for building a queue-backed feed reader. So there’s plenty of material to get you going with this plugin.

DJ on Heroku

We’re pleased to announce the first iteration of support for background jobs on Heroku, in the form of DJ support. This has been in heavy beta use by a large group of Heroku beta users (thanks guys!) for the last four months, so we feel very confident that this is a solid solution, ready for real production use today.

Our first publicly-priced offering is a single DJ worker, at $15/mo. You can activate it for your app through the usual add-on interface:

$ heroku addons:add dj
Adding dj to myapp...done.

Follow the instructions for installing the DJ plugin and creating the delayed_jobs table, and you’ll be up and running in minutes. (That’s the smooth, seamless experience you’ve come to expect from Heroku.)

More to Come

If you need something beyond the publicly-priced single worker DJ, contact us. Multi-worker setup, and a more powerful message bus (RabbitMQ) are things we already have in late alpha / early beta status. If you’ve got an app that you think can put these technologies to the test, we’d love to hear from you.

And the winner is... Michael Ansel!

Mon, 13 Jul 2009 22:45:31 GMT

Congratulations to Michael who’s the winner of our Heroku+Twilio Developer contest. Michael got seriously busy, and submitted not one but two projects for the contest!

The first is a handy app that tells students, faculty, employees, and visitors at Duke University which places on campus are currently open. Simply call in, and it’ll read you back a list of open restaurants, libraries etc. There’s even a keypad-based search option. Seriously cool stuff! You can try it on the Twilio sandbox by calling (866) 583-6913 and entering 4456-8772 when prompted for a PIN.

If that wasn’t enough, Michael also hammered out a suite of Ruby development tools for Twilio, including a TwiML Response libary, a TwiMl parser and a web based call simulator. All very impressive work, and available for you to use on Github.

Michael, we hope you’ll enjoy your spiffy new Netbook and $300 in Heroku platform credit. You truly deserve it! Last but not least, a big thanks goes out to everyone who played in the contest – keep building cool stuff!

Develop a Voice App with Twilio + Heroku, Win a Netbook

Mon, 06 Jul 2009 19:18:08 GMT

Not too long ago building telephony apps, such as interactive voice response systems, was far out of reach for most web developers. Now, an exciting crop of new startups is rapidly changing that, making it easy to incorporate voice capabilities into any web app, or even build standalone voice apps.

Twilio is emerging as one the leading companies in this area, offering a a REST API for building voice apps.

The model is simple: sign up for a number with Twilio. When a call comes in, Twilio makes an HTTP request to URL of your choice, containing information about the phone call. The processing logic resides entirely inside your web app, and instructions are passed back and forth using XML.

To help kick off this new era of voice-enabled applications, Heroku is co-sponsoring this week’s edition of Twilio’s Developer Contest. The rules are simple – develop a Twilio app in Ruby, deploy it to Heroku and submit your entry by midnight on July 13th. The lucky winner gets a netbook and $300 in Heroku platform credit to spend on dynos, database, or add-ons. This page has all the info you need, including links to example code on Github and a screencast showing how it works. We look forward to seeing the entries!

Railslab Interview

Wed, 01 Jul 2009 21:07:21 GMT

Railslab is a great site by our friends over at New Relic that contains a wealth of knowledge on Rails scaling and application performance.

A couple of weeks ago they asked Ryan and Adam to stop by for a discussion of the vision behind Heroku, and the philosophy that drives the design and buildout of our scalable, provisionless hosting platform.

The interview is now available for your viewing pleasure in three parts. In the first part Adam goes into detail about the core vision behind the concept of instant deployment, and how Heroku is committed to making the deployment of Ruby web apps a seamless extension of an agile development workflow.

In the second part Ryan and Adam discuss how scalability and performance really emerge from a strong focus on understanding and implementing the correct solution to common application design problems. This goes straight to the essence of what we like to call stack curation. By providing a fully managed, state-of-the-art application stack we aim to replace the hurdles of tedious configuration and maintenance that often keep developers from doing things the right way with the first truly provisionless hosting environment. With Heroku, we’re not just looking to make correct design possible – we’re looking to make it so easy that it’d be downright shameful not to :)

Finally, the guys discuss some of the tools & services they use in their daily work, and what they think is important to have in your arsenal to really inform your development work – especially in a cloud computing environment.

Whether you’re just curious about Heroku, or an existing user there’s a lot of great information about our platform in these interviews, and we hope you’ll check them out. Big thanks to the guys over at New Relic for yanking Ryan & Adam away from their respective keyboards long enough to get this on tape!