Today, we're excited to introduce Go as the newest officially supported language on Heroku. Over the last 2 years we’ve fallen in love with Go, an expressive, concise, clean, and efficient language with built-in concurrency, making it easy to write and maintain network services, microservices and high-traffic API endpoints.

Now when writing Go you can leverage Heroku’s great developer experience and platform to quickly build apps your users can depend on. This includes the familiar git push heroku master, review apps, metrics within your dashboard, and much more. As you'd expect, Heroku doesn't introduce any changes to your Go application runtime or dependencies. Your code is...

Today we’re excited to announce public beta support for HTTP session affinity, a feature that makes building real-time applications easier than ever. Session affinity improves end user experience in certain types of applications and architectures where you require some level of extra state within your application code, because it ensures related requests get routed to the same instance of your code. This improves performance reducing the need to go and get the needed state for a specific user.

At high level, here's how it works: When you enable session affinity on your application, the Heroku router will set a special cookie on every HTTP request. This cookie will allow our routing...

These days, apps are more composed than built. Long past are the days of spinning up your own Elasticsearch cluster to add search to your application. Instead we borrow from previous projects, and adapt a template as a good foundation. It’s a great improvement – but the process of keeping up to date with the right services, tools, and templates can be a time consuming task at best, and an overwhelming flood of new information at worst.

Today we're excited to announce Heroku Elements, a new marketplace that brings all of the pieces within our Heroku ecosystem together in one place. It’s a simpler way to discover and select the best components to build apps fast.

In a nutshell, Heroku...

At Heroku, most of us love living in the CLI. Of course, we're absolutely dedicated to providing a great developer experience whether it’s in the dashboard or at the terminal, but we also believe a mastery of the command line interface offers great productivity to you as a developer. A well designed CLI coupled with other small sharp Linux tools provide primitives to build powerful productivity. Today we're introducing an exciting new foundation for the Heroku CLI – an entirely rebuilt plug-in architecture.

This new plug-in infrastructure lays the groundwork for extending the power of the CLI, letting you be more productive than ever before. Want to know if your app is production...

In a world where microservices continue to grow, offering better agility for iterating quickly, many of the tools you use in building applications must adapt. Microservices bring together challenges in a variety of ways for the services you consume – logging and monitoring tools now need a broader perspective than that of a single app, data services may be shared either for reporting or direct access to data.

Heroku has been on the forefront of creating a developer tools add-ons ecosystem that lets you focus on building your app by grabbing the service you need off the shelf. Today, the Heroku platform is becoming even more powerful with add-on sharing – a new feature for composing...

As part of Salesforce’s Dreamforce conference, Salesforce is hosting its second major hackathon on October 10-12 in San Francisco. The format for this year’s hackathon has been expanded to include specific categories for not just Heroku, but also some of our favorite open source projects. With over ten prizes of more than $10,000 each, this is a great opportunity to build something cool, take advantage of some of the latest Heroku features, and help your favorite open source projects.

Heroku Category

Heroku has long focused on helping you build apps. In looking at the data we have on the over 5 billion requests Heroku serves each day, the percentage coming from mobile devices has grown...

The key to any startup is focus -- focusing in multiple directions is really no focus at all. Following this premise we understand the decision by CloudBees to double down on their continuous integration offering of Jenkins, and to discontinue their platform as a service product. Continuous integration is already playing an important role in application development and deployment and will only continue to grow in the future. Many of us are fans of Jenkins, and in fact we have many Heroku customers today taking advantage of Jenkins and other CI services.

We’re also pleased to see CloudBees suggest that users migrate their PaaS services to providers like Heroku, and we’d like to welcome...

Today we’re announcing the general availability of the new PHP support on Heroku. The key features, in case you missed them when we outlined them in the beta announcement, include:

• New modern runtimes in HipHop VM
• Packaging and first class frameworks
• Heroku XL support for large scale enterprise apps

We’re very happy to make this generally available for all users. Since our public beta weeks ago we’ve seen a variety of users trying many of these modern frameworks such as Laravel and Symfony, as well as work towards improving the development experience by running our own buildpack locally.

In addition to all of the above which was available at the public beta, we’ve improved our PHP...

PHP developers are makers at heart. The core strength of PHP has always been in creating a tight feedback cycle between developers and their audiences. That strength is the reason why PHP powers so many of the world’s biggest and best web properties such as Facebook and Etsy. But as developers of those and similar apps know, PHP hasn’t always enjoyed some of the runtime, management or infrastructure elements its peer communities like Ruby on Rails, Python with Django, and Node have had for some time.

As one of the web’s largest PHP shops, Facebook has been an advocate and innovator for the language, but it’s been hard for PHP developers beyond Facebook’s walls to take advantage of that...

Yesterday the OpenSSL Project released an update to address the CVE-2014-0160 vulnerability, nicknamed “Heartbleed.” This serious vulnerability affects a substantial number of applications and services running on the internet, including Heroku.

All Heroku users should update their passwords as a precautionary measure. If you are currently running the SSL Endpoint add-on, you should re-key and reissue your certificate and update it as it may have been exposed. As of Tuesday, April 8 at 15:55 UTC, all Heroku certificates, infrastructure, and Heroku Postgres have been updated and are no longer vulnerable. Continue reading for further details on each affected vector.

Vulnerability Details

Anytime a new language comes out it’s fun to immediately download it and give it a try. Yesterday Facebook announced Hack, a programming language they developed for HHVM which interoperates seamlessly with PHP. Facebook itself is already running on Hack, and it looks to deliver some exciting improvements from its PHP influence, we thought we’d make it a bit easier for you to run your own apps on Hack by working with them to create a Heroku buildpack. To highlight a few of the awesome things about Hack:

• Many PHP files are already valid Hack, so you can just start with an existing PHP project
• Gradual typing, which lets dynamic and statically typed code play well together
• More language...

Many of our customers have recently asked about our connection limit settings on our new Heroku Postgres tiers. Previously we allowed for 500 connections across all production databases, however now there is some variance in the number of connections allowed with only the larger plans offering 500. In individual conversations with customers we’ve detailed the reasoning behind this, and feel its worth sharing this more broadly here now.

For some initial background, our connection limit updates are actually aimed to be an improvement for anyone running a Heroku Postgres database, by both providing some guidelines as well as setting some expectations around what a database instance is...

At Heroku we have long considered PostgreSQL to be a powerful and reliable open-source database for keeping data safe and accessible for serious applications with demanding workflows and use cases.

Over the years we’ve invested heavily in continuing to improve it, whether it’s by employing Postgres major contibutors, employing driver maintainers, funding core development, or being part of language communites such as Ruby and Python to help spread the good news that is Postgres. It’s that interaction with the developer and database communities that help us inform and influence the future of Postgres.

This work over the years has continued to advance Postgres to be a better database for...

Today we're excited to announce an evolution of what it means to be a database as a service provider. Along with new features such as the ability to roll back your database to an arbitrary point in time and high availability, we now provide an entirely new level of operational expertise that's built right in. This new level of service allows you to feel at ease while taking advantage of your database in ways you never expected. All of this is rolled into new tiers which make it as easy as ever to choose what’s right for you.

We are introducing Heroku Postgres 2.0 today, the result of these improvements. Let's dig in a little further on what's available today.

Operational...

Several weeks ago we added support for Postgres 9.3 in public beta the day it was released to the community. We've had many customers use it so far and it has proven to be robust and reliable. Early adopters have started to take advantage of the great new features in this version including:

• New JSON functions and operators
• Foreign data wrappers
• And more

Today we're excited to release Postgres 9.3 in General Availability and setting it as the default version when provisioning a new Heroku Postgres database. Defaulting to the latest version of Postgres ensures our customers can make use of the latest features and performance improvements available.

If you haven’t upgraded to take...

There are two axes of database monitoring. One axis is immediate insight. You can see what is happening right now, getting just-in-time visibility to solve problems and observe production behavior as it happens. The other axis is historical monitoring. This provides long-term persistence and reporting on the most important metrics over time, helping you make better decisions and understand trends.

With Heroku Postgres, you can get immediate insight with the pg-extras CLI plugin. Furthermore, we provide key metrics about your database right in your logs already for all applications.

For storage and reporting of your most important metrics, you can quickly set up rich historical reporting...

Heroku Postgres is Heroku’s database-as-a-service product. With Heroku Postgres, you can easily provision and scale a Postgres database for your Heroku application, or as a stand-alone service. Recently, we’ve blogged about PostgreSQL 9.3 on Heroku and how you can use Heroku Postgres dataclips to build awesome business dashboards with your data. In this post, we talk about how Heroku Postgres delivers continuous protection for your business data using WAL-E, an open source application for archiving PostgreSQL WAL (Write Ahead Log) files quickly, continuously and with a low operational burden.

About Continuous Protection

In order to protect customer data and be resilient to failure...

As of today PostgreSQL 9.3 is available on Heroku Postgres as a public beta. This new version of Postgres brings you even more useful features so you can be as powerful as ever. Whether its richer JSON functionality, materialized views, or richer join support in lateral joins this version has a little something for everyone.

Provision your Postgres 9.3 database by running heroku addons:add heroku-postgresql:crane --version=9.3 and get started working with it today, or check out some of our favorite features included in this new version below.

Foreign Tables

Foreign data wrappers (FDWs), which allow you to query from within Postgres to an external datasource, have been available for a...

The Heroku Postgres team is hitting the road in coming months and we'd love to connect with you. If you'd like to connect with us at any of the events below drop us a line postgres@heroku.com or @HerokuPostgres

Postgres Open

The first opportunity to connect with us is in September at Postgres Open. If you've already got your tickets for Postgres Open join us for drinks and/or pizza at Clark Ale House on Tuesday September 17, and make sure to check out talks by me and Peter Geoghegan at the conference.

If you don't already have your ticket for Postgres Open but are interested in going, we've got a chance for you to win a ticket from us for free.

Win a ticket to...

The same JavaScript engine that powers the web today is now available in your database.

This is one more step in evolving a data platform to meet all of your data needs. With a key/value store inside Postgres you gained agility in working with your schema. This agility was further improved with the JSON data type in Postgres 9.2. With geospatial support you removed the need for relying on additional tools for building location based apps. And today we're continuing to expand, going beyond SQL bringing the full power of the V8 JavaScript engine to your Heroku Postgres database. This offering is available immediately in public beta on all production tier databases.

More on V8

V8 is a...

With each new release, Postgres brings new powerful functionality to your fingertips – Postgres 9.3 is shaping up to be no different. Postgres 9.3 will include richer JSON operators for the JSON datatype, SQL-standard LATERAL subquery support, materialized views, and of course much more. Postgres 9.3 Beta was made available earlier this week and we’re excited to announce a public alpha of it ourselves.

You can get started immediately with the alpha today by provisioning a Postgres 9.3 database on our production tier:

$ heroku addons:add heroku-postgresql:crane --version=9.3 ... Use `heroku pg:wait` to track status. ! WARNING: Postgres 9.3 is in alpha. alpha releases have ! a higher risk...

When building your application there's a lot to worry about, from choice of framework and stack to designing the application itself, to questions of when to worry about scalability. Your database shouldn't have to be one extra layer of concern. You should be able to put data in, trust it will stay safe, and finally get data back out – in a performant manner. Yet, with all the moving parts in your application, understanding issues in your database can be a huge pain. Today we're releasing pg-extras, a heroku toolbelt plugin, to provide additional insights into your database and to make working with your database easier.

Get started by installing the plugin for the heroku...

Smartphones have changed the world – everyone has a device in their pocket that’s constantly connected to the internet and knows where you are. Combined with the rise of digital mapping it has become commonplace to build applications that use GIS (Geographical Information Systems) to digitally represent our physical reality and our location in it. Storing and manipulating geospatial data has become an essential part of application development. If you are building a mobile app it’s becoming table stakes that you take advantage of location.

Today we’re releasing PostGIS 2.0 into public beta as an extension to Heroku Postgres. Now all Heroku Postgres customers will be able to store and...

Over a year ago we began working with the community as to how we could help to make Postgres better. Much of this came to fruition with PostgreSQL version 9.2 and three months ago we released support of Postgres 9.2 into GA. We've now seen many users begin taking advantage of the powerful features in this version including:

• Better visibility with pg_stat_statements
• URL support
• JSON datatype
• and more

In these three months the 9.2 PostgreSQL version has had time to bake including several minor updates fixing a variety of bugs. Today as a result of all of this we're making 9.2 the default version when you provision a Heroku Postgres database.

In addition to making 9.2 our new...

Heroku Postgres Databases have been patched

Data is one of the most valuable assets of any company. As a database-as-a-service provider, one of our biggest responsibilities is ensuring your data is kept safe. A few weeks ago, one of the worst security vulnerabilities to date in PostgreSQL was discovered. To address this issue, Heroku deployed a point release upgrade across the entire Heroku Postgres service earlier this week. This resulted in a period of database unavailability, typically with a duration of less than one minute. Every database running on Heroku Postgres is now appropriately patched and is unaffected by the vulnerability.

PostgreSQL Vulnerability Details

The PostgreSQL...

The value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of users connected to the system, according to Metcalfe’s law. Jacob Kaplan-Moss, co-creator of Django, highlights this as a value in creating communities or as he puts it, “ecosystems”. In his talk at Waza last week on building ecosystems, he went on to highlight three key principles of creating ecosystems:

1. APIs to support extensibility
2. Conservatism as a value
3. Empowering the community

Whether building a platform or a framework, these key principles ring true. Check out his talk or read more on creating ecosystems below:

APIs to support extensibility

You don’t choose to become an ecosystem, but you can choose to do...

Matz, the creator of Ruby, spoke at Waza for the 20th anniversary of the language and the release of Ruby 2.0. If you weren't in the sold out crowd, not to worry. Information should flow free and experiences should be shared; in line with those concepts you can watch Matz's talk right here, then read about what's new in this version of Ruby and how to run it on Heroku.

With slides available on speakerdeck

Keep reading for more information on Ruby 2.0 or check out our first batch of videos from Waza 2013. To stay up to date as we post new videos, follow us @heroku.

Compatibility

Iterating quickly means happier developers and happier customers. We optimize our platform to...

Great coders know their technology intimately. And they know how to choose it. Truly awesome application developers know more. They know the human side of technology. They know technique. They focus on their method—their practice.

In 2000 Heroku co-founder and CTO Adam Wiggins saw this more clearly than ever before. He read The Pragmatic Programmer by Andy Hunt and Dave Thomas. The book, as Adam explains in this thought-provoking (and method-shifting) Waza talk, showed him that his work could not only be about technology. It HAD to be about technique.

Heroku Co-founder, CTO and general badass, Adam Wiggins

Adam discusses techniques—historical ones such as agile development and the...

In planning Waza 2013 we went back to reflect on last year’s speakers. And we want to make the talks readily available to anybody who could not make it last year—or who wants a refresher. Check back soon for more talks from Waza 2012. And we hope to see you in person at Waza 2013 coming up FAST on Feb. 28 in San Francisco.

In a world of evolving languages, frameworks and development patterns, we developers must continually improve our craft. Innovative developers already have jumped on board many of these shifts. We’ve seen this with the adoption of more agile frameworks (such as Rails, Django, and Play). We’ve seen it too with a shift towards asynchronous programming patterns such as in...

An organization's data is its most valuable asset. Unfortunately, that data is usually trapped inside a database with few ways to access it by a privileged handful of people. Too often reports are manually generated and their results pasted into emails; dashboards get built but rapidly become outdated and never answer the right questions.

We have so many great tools for collaborating around our source code, why is data still in the dark ages? At Heroku Postgres, we believe that your data should flow like water. Only the most up-to-date data should be available any time you have a decision to make. Instead of being trapped in disparate systems, you should be able to move data smoothly...

Hosting your data on one of the largest fleets of databases in the world comes with certain advantages. One of those benefits is that we can aggregate the collective pain points that face our users and work within the Postgres community to help find solutions to them.

In the previous year we worked very closely with the broader Postgres community to build features, fix bugs, and resolve pain points. You've already seen some of the results of that work in the form of extension support on Heroku and query cancellation. With the 9.2 release we're delighted to say that with your help, we've been able to bring you a whole host of new power and simplicity in your database.

Effective...

Git and Github revolutionized software development by letting you fork your source repository with a single click. Wouldn't it be great to be able to do the same thing with your database?

In the same way you can fork your code you can now fork your data. Fork changes the way you can work with your data, making it a snap to provision a clone of your production database. The technology is simple, safe, and robust, and thanks to Heroku Postgres' cloud architecture, places no load on your primary database. Today, we’re announcing the release of this functionality into General Availability.

Forking your data opens up whole new ways of developing software. We've seen our users...

Today we’re releasing the ability to follow your Heroku Postgres Database into General Availability: this lets you easily create multiple read-only asynchronous replicas of your database, known as followers.

After an extended beta period during which over 3,000 followers were created, many of which help power core Heroku systems, we’re excited to make the ability to safely and easily scale out access to your data available to all Heroku Postgres users.

Followers enable some great use cases:

• Easy read traffic scaling
• Fast upgrades
• Higher availability

One use case that has historically been challenging in database management is setting up a read replica, often referred to as a read slave....

In past months we've released the public beta of our dev, basic, crane and kappa plans. We've received positive feedback from everyone using the new database plans.

Based on this strong positive response and adoption during the beta, we're officially moving these plans to general availability starting today.

In conjunction with the GA of our starter tier, we're deprecating our shared database plans. The new dev and basic plans offer many improvements including Postgres 9.1 with schemaless SQL, data clips, direct psql access, and a web management interface.

Beginning August 8, 2012, we will begin migrating shared database users over to the new starter tier. Users may...

Earlier this month we released the public beta of an improved SSL solution, SSL Endpoint. We've received positive feedback from everyone using the new SSL solution.

Based on this strong positive response and adoption during the beta, we're officially moving SSL Endpoint to general availability starting today. It is now the recommended option for any app which needs SSL on a custom domain.

In conjunction with SSL Endpoint's GA status, we're consolidating and simplifying our SSL product lineup by deprecating all of the older SSL add-ons: SNI, Hostname SSL, and IP SSL. SSL Endpoint is easier to use, more robust, faster to provision, and offers more features (such as ...

SSL is a crucial part of any web app with a login session. As Firesheep demonstrated, HTTPS everywhere is the path forward for modern web apps. Heroku follows this with our own login-protected apps, from the management interface to the Dev Center.

Announcing Better SSL For Your App

Today, we're announcing two new features to make it as easy as possible for you to secure your app running on Heroku with SSL.

First, all apps now have piggyback SSL by default. Prepend https to the hostname for any Heroku app (https://yourapp.herokuapp.com for Cedar and https://yourapp.heroku.com for Aspen/Bamboo) and you'll piggyback on the *.herokuapp.com SSL certificate. No special configuration...