Heroku's Postgres database service, the origins of which date back to 2007, is one of the most battle-tested cloud database services around.

Over the last year, our growing data team has done an amazing job of dramatically increasing the scale, reliability, and durability of the service - now boasting 99.99% (measured) uptime and over 400 million write-transactions per day.

Until now, the service has only been available to Heroku customers, but today we are pleased to announce the launch of Heroku Postgres as a standalone database service. Included in this launch is a new web interface for managing databases, as well as rock-solid durability based on Continuous Protection technology....

Japanese version here (日本語版はこちら).

Today marks a very special occasion in the history of Heroku, as we are honored to announce that Yukihiro "Matz" Matsumoto, the creator of Ruby, has joined the Heroku team as Chief Architect, Ruby.

In 1993, a time when most programming languages were focussed on computational efficiency, Matz wanted to create a language focussed on developer experience, happiness, and productivity. This insight was years ahead of the trend toward agile software methodologies (the Agile Software Manifesto, for example, was published in 2001).

With this unique intention, Matz created a beautiful and elegant language that has steadily grown a passionate following,...

英語版はこちら（English version here）。

本日は、Herokuの歴史において非常に特別な日です ―― Rubyの作者、まつもとゆきひろ氏、Matzを、RubyのチーフアーキテクトとしてHerokuに迎えることになったのです。

ほとんどのプログラミング言語が計算効率を重視していた1993年、Matzは開発者の作業環境、満足度、生産性に重点を置いた言語を生み出したいと考えました。この考えはアジャイル（俊敏な）ソフトウェアメソドロジというトレンドに数年先立つものでした（たとえば2001年に発行されたAgile Software Manifesto）。

このユニークな考えに基づき、Matzは美しくエレガントな言語を生み出しました。この言語の熱心な支持者の数は着実に増加し、David Heinemeier Hansson氏のWebフレームワークRuby on Railsと言った後押しもあり、ここ最近で急速に広がってきました。現在Rubyはコラボレーティブな真のオープンソース環境を実現し、数百の貢献者の支援を受ける強力なコミュニティとなっています。

Matzは言語としてのRubyのデザインだけでなく最も幅広く利用されているRubyの公式実装（Matz’s Ruby Interpreter, MRI）を推し進めてきましたが、今後もHerokuで少数精鋭のRubyコアグループと共にこの活動を続けていくことになります。

Herokuは多言語プラットフォームですが（現在公式にサポートしている言語はRuby、Node.js、Clojure）、...

Super psyched to announce a major new version of Heroku, the Celadon Cedar stack, going into public beta today (previous stacks were Argent Aspen in...

Since launching Ruby support in 2007, we’ve been constantly expanding the platform to accommodate more application types and to make the platform more accessible to a broader audience of developers.

We are very pleased today to announce full support for applications written in the Logo programming language.

Going back to our roots with an in-browser editor, we believe that interactive programming and getting started quickly lend well to learning. Ruby is an excellent language for learning (check out Hackety Hack), and Logo is even better.

Logo is a fully-featured and beautifully designed functional Lisp-style programming language. It shares many properties with (and is an ancestor...

What if enterprise apps were built the way you’d build an agile Ruby app? What if they were a pleasure to work with, deploy, and manage? What if big companies could adopt the philosophies of Heroku and the Ruby community? What if your company actually preferred you use Heroku to build apps?

That’s the next level for Heroku. That’s where we want to go, so we’ve made a decision we’re excited to share: we have signed a definitive agreement to be acquired by salesforce.com. We expect the deal to close by January 31st.

Why Salesforce.com?

Salesforce.com is the original cloud company. They convinced the enterprise world to consume software as a service before...

This morning we are very excited to announce our new Add-on Provider Program, which allows anyone to easily build a Heroku add-on, making it available to all Heroku developers and customers to purchase with one click.

We first launched add-ons almost a year ago. Since then, they have been hugely successful, many add-ons being purchased thousands of times.

Hundreds of cloud service providers have contacted us wanting to build their own add-ons. We’ve spent the past nine months iterating with add-on providers to create an API that’s easy to use and easy to get started with. We’re excited to release it to you today!

API and Developer Kit

We have a full developer kit for...

It’s been a great first quarter for us, and it’s time for a brief update on where we are and where we’re headed.

Growth

Heroku’s growth has continued to be huge. 1,500 new apps were deployed to Heroku last week alone, and that number increases every week. Next week we will cross the 60,000 application mark.

As you can imagine, traffic is growing even more quickly, serving billions of requests per month. In fact, traffic has grown by 4x over the last four months:

Many are finding great value in the platform and paying for features and scale. Our customer count and revenue have similar growth curves.

Roadmap

Where is Heroku’s platform going next? How can you...

You, our customers, have given us great feedback that in some places our pricing isn’t aligned with the value we provide, and in other places our pricing is just confusing.

We want to be more transparent about how we’re thinking about pricing, so today we’re announcing our pricing philosophy, as well as the first of a series of changes: moving away from storage based pricing on our database offering.

Platform Value and Pricing Philosophy

You have told us loud and clear that the value you get from the platform is saved time and opportunity cost, shorter deployment cycles, increased agility, simplified ongoing maintenance and operations, and saved head count.

You’ve...

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...

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,...

When Adam, Orion, and I started Heroku two years ago, we had no idea how much new technology we would have to build to realize our vision of an instant platform for Ruby that just works.

Luckily, we were able to attract an amazing team to work on this problem with us, and the team has really shaped Heroku into the offering it is today. We’re currently by far the fastest and easiest deployment platform for Ruby, and we’ve gotten great feedback on our provisionless hosting architecture.

We have over 25,000 apps running on the platform today, and many of our users have been asking for pricing and paid services for some time now. So today we’re pleased to announce that we...

Last week I talked a bit about why instant deployment matters. A few people have since commented that it’s not instant deployment that matters to them, but rather deployment that just works every time.

Of course, what we’re really talking about is both. Part of achieving deployment that just works is decreasing complexity and removing steps – each a point of possible failure. We are working toward deployment that’s both instant and completely reliable, because we think those things are tightly linked.

We’ve rolled out some new content today explaining more about how our platform works, including some more detailed architectural information. We’re hoping...

How much better are two steps than three? Does it matter if something takes five minutes instead of twenty? When it comes to software deployment and provisioning, does instant really matter?

Recently, I was ranting on this subject to a user who had the misfortune of asking me about it in person.

“Truly instant provisioning and deployment is the ultimate goal,” I said. “10 seconds isn’t good enough. We have to –”,

“Look,” he interrupted, “I love what you guys are doing and don’t want you to stop, but why are you so obsessed with this?”

My immediate answer: because we’re obsessive people. A couple years ago we stumbled...

2008 was a very, very big year for Heroku. We launched the first version of the platform, picked up some world-class investors, expanded the team with some amazing talent (there are 10 of us now), spoke at a zillion conferences about Ruby, Rails, Sinatra, the web stack, and cloud computing, and have grown like crazy.

Private Beta

Most importantly, we’ve had an incredibly successful private beta. We launched it less than a year ago, and we have well over 20,000 apps running on Heroku today. This is one of the largest collections of Rails apps in the world, ranging from enterprise software to web 2.0 apps to iPhone app backends, and everything in between. This richly diverse...

If you’re coming to RailsConf this weekend, definitely come by and see us – we’ve got a lot going on:

Orion, Morten, James, and Adam are speaking about why Heroku means never thinking about hosting or servers again on Saturday at 1:50pm.

Adam is speaking about HTTP routing and Custom Nginx Modules on Saturday at 2:50pm.

And James is speaking about the Rails stack, Rack, and advanced Mongrel on Sunday at 10:45am.

Heroku’s got a big booth in the exhibit hall, where we’ll be hanging out, hacking, answering questions, and giving away swag.

We’re also going to be hosting Geoffrey Grosenbach recording podcast interviews, live from our couch. He’s got...

We are happy this morning to announce we’ve raised a $3 million round of funding, from Redpoint Ventures and some other great investors.

Adam, Orion, and I started Heroku with the goal of making software development much easier and more accessible. We’ve got big plans – what we’ve done so far is really just the first step. There is so much we’ve been dying to do, but we just haven’t had the capacity.

This investment will allow us to beef up our current offerings, expand into other parts of the development process, and build out the company to support our quickly growing developer community.

This deal has been in the works for a few months, and...

If you’re curious about our vision for Heroku, check out the latest episode of the Ruby on Rails Podcast. We spoke with Geoffrey Grosenbach about our plans for Heroku, the Rails ecosystem, and some good old fashioned economics.

What about gems, plugins, and different Rails versions?

We are definitely going to support gems and plugins. We are almost finished with a slick gem and plugin installer you can use for each app. In the meantime, you can install plugins by importing or uploading the files directly into vendor/plugins.

Currently, we only support the latest stable version of Rails. You can use a different version by uploading a frozen vendor/rails, but this may not work because of the 10MB storage limit constraint (rake rails:freeze:edge won’t work, by the way, because there are no outgoing network connections yet – we’ll discuss this in more detail in another post). We hope to be...

How long before I get in?

We are sending out tons of invites every day. We’d prefer not to have a waiting list, but doing it this way allows us to let people in only as we’re sure our infrastructure can handle the load. The number of people we let in each day keeps increasing, as our existing users give us feedback (thanks guys!) which helps us improve our product for the next batch of people coming in.

One of the areas we are most interested in is collaboration – this is, after all, a web application. We want to encourage existing users to invite their friends to become users and start collaborating with them, so we have given existing users the ability invite friends...

A couple of weeks ago we quietly started accepting signups for our private beta. We knew people would be excited about Heroku; I mean, we’re pretty excited about it. Word seems to have gotten out, as over the last several days well over 1,000 people have signed up.

We are inviting users off the waiting list all day, every day, as fast as we can. So we’re also receiving a constant stream now of feedback email. Some quotes:

OH – MY – GOD, Heroku! It’s absolutely great. In my opinion, it’s really a revolution in Rails development. – Chris

Wow. This is impressive, I like what I see. – Ben

This is exactly what I was looking for right now....