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!

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. (The shopify.com homepage also now lives here.)

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!)

Since we returned from a fun and successful Railsconf in Vegas, we have been in full swing completing the rollout of our paid services. The response has been enormous so far, and paid services are now available to all users.

If you’ve checked out the pricing page, you’ve undoubtedly noticed our line-up of a la carte add-ons. We’re really excited about add-ons becoming a key part of our platform, allowing us to seamlessly deliver popular application services and components with the built-in scalability and ease of use you’ve come to expect from Heroku.

We’ve had a solid first batch of add-ons in beta for a while, and today we’re happy to announce the first graduate: Wildcard Domains, which allows your app to respond on *.yourdomain.com. Since we started supporting custom domains on Heroku this has been high on the list of requested features, and now it’s here! To add it to your app for $5/month, simply go to your app’s Resources page and select turn it on. Enjoy!

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 Wiggins (Heroku cofounder, creator of RestClient, Rush, and many others).

Wednesday, 10:45am — Rails Metal, Rack, and Sinatra

Adam will be giving a great talk on the latest and greatest about Rack, Rails Metal, multiple Rack endpoints, and even a bit of Sinatra. The patterns and methods he’ll discuss are the latest in scalable architecture best practices for Ruby apps.

Wednesday, 2:50pm — Heroku: Guided Tour and Q & A

Most of the Heroku team will be on hand to walk you through the Heroku platform, show off some new features, and answer questions.

Thursday, 9:25am — HTTP’s Best-Kept Secret: Caching

Ryan Tomayko will be giving a talk on what’s probably the most important issue in Rails right now: HTTP caching. This extremely powerful, transparent, and easy to implement technology is badly misunderstood and misused today. Ryan has been on the front lines for a long time, and is truly an expert; you’re bound to come out of this talk with a new, inspired perspective on HTTP caching.

Exhibit Hall — Heroku Booth

Once again we’ve got a big booth in the exhibit hall, where we’ll be demoing new features, answering questions, and giving out schwag. The Heroku team heavyweights will be available to answer your questions and help you sort out issues with your individual apps, or to just do some hacking. We’ll also be giving out t-shirts, stickers, and free credits for Heroku paid-services.

It’s been a bit of a blur here at Heroku HQ in the past couple of weeks. However, amidst all the launch activity we did notice a screencast so sweet we thought we’d share it with you. It really covers the whole platform exceptionally well, and we particularly dig how it manages to show off both Rails and Rack app deployment.

Big ups to Remi for putting this together, and way to shame us for not getting any official screencasts together for the new and improved Heroku. :)