In June we announced Heroku Shield with new high compliance features for Heroku Private Spaces. Heroku Shield enables businesses like AlignTech to deploy apps that handle protected healthcare information (PHI) in accordance with government regulations.

Today, we are proud to announce that Heroku Shield Services have been validated as PCI Level 1 Service Provider compliant. This designation helps our customers understand how Heroku's systems and human processes work together to safeguard customer data. It helps security and audit teams in choosing Heroku as a platform for running a company's most critical apps.

Two years ago, we introduced Heroku Private Spaces as a new platform abstraction that combines powerful network isolation features with the seamless developer experience of Heroku.

Today we are announcing Heroku Private Space Peering, a new capability to connect the isolated Private Space network to apps and services in Amazon VPCs controlled by you. Now you can build apps in Heroku that connect securely and privately to backend systems and workloads in AWS like a directory service, a search stack, a data warehouse, or a legacy SQL database.

Today we are happy to announce Heroku Shield, a new addition to our Heroku Enterprise line of products. Heroku Shield introduces new capabilities to Dynos, Postgres databases and Private Spaces that make Heroku suitable for high compliance environments such as healthcare apps regulated by the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). With Heroku Shield, the power and productivity of Heroku is now easily available to a whole new class of strictly regulated apps.

As the world becomes more cloud-centric, and more of our apps and business depend on its capabilities, the trust, control and management of cloud services is more important than ever. Since the first days of Heroku — and Platform-as-a-Service in general — many companies have struggled to balance the impact and success of the cloud with the control offered by traditional software and on-premise infrastructure. Too often that balance tips back towards software, with companies choosing to meet those requirements by building and running their own platforms, inevitably becoming frustrated by the resulting complexity, cost and poor experience.

Today Heroku is introducing Private Spaces, a new...

Apps have transformed how we do almost everything. The ubiquity of mobile devices with millions of available apps mean that today, anyone can pull up an app in seconds to check their car engine, turn on the lights at home or ride a scooter across town.

So far, the companies behind these apps have mostly been startups, many of which use Heroku to help them iterate quickly and stay focused on the customer experience instead of wasting time on infrastructure.

Today we’re proud to announce Heroku Enterprise, a new edition of Heroku that helps larger companies take advantage of the same technology recipe while meeting their unique needs for more advanced collaboration, better access controls...

Since day one, developers from all over the world have been deploying apps on Heroku, and we’re extremely proud of the strong global community we’ve built. Our European customers in particular have asked for the ability to deploy applications geographically close to their European customer base so they can offer a better user experience with more responsive apps. In 2013 we launched 1X and 2X dynos in Europe to meet this demand. Today we’re pleased to announce the general availability of Performance Dynos in our European region.

The availability of Performance Dynos in Europe provides the flexibility needed to build and run large-scale, high-performance apps. Performance Dynos are highly...

Two-factor authentication is a powerful and simple way to greatly enhance security for your Heroku account. It prevents an attacker from accessing your account using a stolen password. After a 4 month beta period, we are now happy to make two-factor authentication generally available.

Turning on two-factor authentication

You can enable and disable two-factor authentication for your Heroku account in the Manage Account section of Dashboard.

Before you turn it on, please read on here to understand the risks of account lock-out. You can also refer to the Dev Center docs for more details.

How two-factor authentication protects you

Without two-factor authentication, an attacker can gain...

One of our core beliefs at Heroku is that developers do their best work when the development process is as simple, elegant, and conducive to focus and flow as possible. We are grateful for how well many of our contributions to that cause have been received, and today we are making generally available a new set of features that have been inspired by those values.

Collectively, we call these new features Heroku DX—the next evolution in Heroku’s developer experience. Our goal with these new features—Heroku Button, Heroku Dashboard + Metrics and Heroku Postgres DbX—is to make it faster than ever for developers to build, launch and scale applications.

Heroku Button

Heroku is known for...

Today our partner, New Relic, released an update to the Ruby New Relic agent that addresses issues brought up by our customers. The new version corrects how New Relic reports performance metrics for applications running on Heroku. Queueing time is now reported as the total time from when a request enters the router until the application starts processing it. Previous versions of New Relic only reported queueing time in the router. The new approach will result in more accurate queueing metrics that allow you to better understand and tune the performance of your application.

Update, Feb 22:

New Relic has released a similar update for Python. Python developers should update to this latest...

Over the past couple of years Heroku customers have occasionally reported unexplained latency on Heroku. There are many causes of latency—some of them have nothing to do with Heroku—but until this week, we failed to see a common thread among these reports. We now know that our routing and load balancing mechanism on the Bamboo and Cedar stacks created latency issues for our Rails customers, which manifested themselves in several ways, including:

• Unexplainable, high latencies for some requests
• Mismatch between reported queuing and service time metrics and the observed reality
• Discrepancies between documented and observed behaviors

For applications running on the Bamboo stack, the root...

Editor's Note: The functionality described in this blog post has been replaced by Heroku Button. The Heroku Elements marketplace now lists hundreds of template apps that can be easily deployed. Check out Heroku Elements to find an app to deploy.

Learning a new language or framework can be both fun and rewarding. But tutorials only get you so far: one of the easiest ways to get started is by copying an existing sample app.

Today we're introducing template-based app creation for Java on Heroku. To try it out, go to www.heroku.com/java and click Create App on one of the four templates at the bottom of the page.

In seconds, you'll have your own copy of the app deployed and...

We're happy to announce the public beta of Grails application deployment on Heroku with support for Grails 1.3.7 and 2.0 provided by the open source Heroku Grails buildpack.

Grails is a high-productivity web application framework for the JVM based on the Groovy programming language and featuring many similarities with Rails. Since its inception in 2006, the framework has enjoyed broad adoption in the Java community as it combines the strengths of the JVM and richness of the Java platform with the productivity benefits of modern frameworks like Rails.

Today the Grails team announced Grails 2.0, the latest incarnation of the framework. It features numerous large improvements including...

Developers with experience in both Java and Ruby web development often ask the question: Why is web app development so complicated in Java, and so much simpler in Ruby, with Rails?

There are many ways to answer this question. But importantly, none of them should blame the Java language itself. The people behind Play! Framework proved this by creating a Java based web framework that is as elegant and productive as Rails for Ruby.

It is our pleasure to announce Play! on Heroku in public beta.

Play! on Heroku Quickstart

Download and install Play! version 1.2.3 or later. Then, create a new Play! app:

$ play new helloworld ~ _ _ ~ _ __ | | __ _ _ _| | ~ | '_ \| |/ _' | || |_| ~ |...