Unless you’re a big company with lots of marketing dollars, rarely does a product launch start with a bang. It’s a gradual process – first you show a few close friends and family members, then some coworkers from your previous job, then some friends of friends. The word starts to spread as you and your partners furiously hack away, trying to make the product stable enough to stand up to a pummeling from the general public. So there’s no big kickoff; just a quiet emergence. And if your product offers something of real value, awareness in your target market will grow steadily and strongly over time.

So it is with Heroku. James, Orion, and I have spent the last several months developing what we think fills an important niche in the Rails world: a hosted development environment that is dead-simple to get started with. How many people have gotten excited about learning Rails, only to be stymied by the complexity of installing local development tools – before they even get the chance to write a “Hello, World” program? Or how often have you thrown together a small app for personal use, something that would be really useful to a few friends – but it’s too much bother to deploy it onto a public-facing webserver? These are some of the problems that Heroku will be able to solve in the very near future. (We have grander plans for the long term, but we’ll save that discussion for another day.)

This blog will serve as a changelog for our product. As we deploy new features and other changes we’ll post here. Incidentally, this is as much to coordinate between ourselves as it is to communicate with our users.

If you don’t have an account on Heroku yet (as of this writing, only a handful of people do), sign up on our waiting list. We hope to be able to start slowly sending out invitations within the next week or two.

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. I’ve started teaching myself ruby on rails, and it’ll be fantastic to be able to have something online to mess around with. – Micah

I am really excited about this project. It may become my de facto rails development environment. – Tony

Boy this looks awesome! When you see it, you go… “Well, of course! Why didn’t I think of that?” – Dirk

Wow what an awesome idea. – Bill

There have been some nice blog posts too, including Peter Cooper’s Ruby Inside.

We are glad to hear so many of you are so excited. Thanks to all of our users for your enthusiasm and feedback. We can’t wait to see how you feel about all the features we have planned…

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 directly. So if you want to get an account faster, ask a friend for an invite.

If you are on the waiting list, we haven’t forgotten about you. We will get to you soon, and we really appreciate your patience.

I found a bug, what do I do?
What kind of feedback do you want?

Whether you actively found a bug, something just doesn’t seem to work or doesn’t work as expected, you can’t do something you want to do, or you have feature requests, please please please tell us! The whole purpose of this limited beta is to get your feedback and use it to make Heroku awesome and rock solid.

What about my existing tools and editor?
Do you support subversion?
Can you make your editor better?

We are hardcore vi, TextMate, and subversion fans. We will not consider Heroku completely usable until editing and version control either works as well as those tools, or there is a way to continue to use those tools with our service.

The existing Heroku editor absolutely works for making Rails applications. We know because we use it. So we also know that it kind of blows, as real developer editors go (so far we do think we’ve beat Notepad, though perhaps just slightly). It is getting better all the time, and we have some specific reasons we want to make a browser-based editor, which we’ll talk about in another post soon.

In the meantime, there are a couple of things you can do:

Import & Export

If you want to edit locally and deploy to Heroku, you can make liberal use of the import and export features. Setup your whole app locally, then just import it into Heroku. Your archive will replace the existing code base. If you make changes on Heroku and want to continue working locally, just export the app.

Snapshots

Snapshots allow you to take a named snapshot of your app’s code and data at any point. You can take as many snapshots as you want for version control purposes. Take a backup snapshot before you import, or take a snapshot before you try some crazy edits.

Can I import my huge complicated app?
What about MySQL versus PostgreSQL?

Yes, you can import your huge complicated app. It may or may not work. If it doesn’t work, please tell us about it. Also, there is currently a 10MB limit for the storage footprint of each app. If your uploaded app is larger, you will see an overlimit message.

We are using PostgreSQL internally for several really important reasons, but we do plan to fully support MySQL database dumps, both in and out. We are almost done with this feature, so look for it soon.

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 expanding our features in this area shortly.

Are my application and data secure?
I can execute arbitrary shell commands!

This is a brand new, limited beta, so we are not making any promises about security. That being said, we have worked hard to provide a secure environment, and we believe your application and data are completely secure.

Because we are providing a platform for executing ruby code, you have full access to system commands. While you don’t have an actual shell, you do have the ability to run shell commands via ruby. This is a feature, not a bug. We don’t believe you should need to run shell commands for any purpose, but giving our users a full ruby environment is important to us. Being able to run arbitrary shell commands is not a security threat the way the system is architected.

Can I have multiple environments, staging and production?
Can I run an app with the environment set to production?

Yes, we plan to offer multiple instances of your app and allow you to set the environment type for each. For now, however, each application has only one instance, and is always in development mode.

What about testing?

Testing is very very important to us and we plan to fully support it (we haven’t yet decided if this will be the standard Test::Unit or RSpec – email us if you have thoughts on the topic). We have several great tools and features planned for testing. For now, however, a testing database is not provided, so tests can’t be run. This is coming soon.

Hosting, performance, paid accounts?

We plan to offer multiple paid account types, with varying levels of features and performance. We will also always offer a free account. For right now, we are only offering one-size-fits-all free accounts.

We’ve been working our tails off over the past few weeks to process all the feedback you guys have been sending (or that we’ve gleaned from the system logs). I think that this photo of the trashcan under Orion’s desk tells the story pretty well:

He bought that case of Rockstar at Costco last week, and consumed it all as part of our mad dash to squash bugs exposed by our sudden surge of users. Bad for Orion’s health, but good for Heroku’s backend stability. :)

One major area we’ve been dealing with in this past week is the issue of failed mongrel starts. That is, exceptions that occur while the Rails framework is booting, rather than on a page request. These sorts of exceptions often happen with imported apps, because certain types of plugins or gem dependencies may not work out of the box with Heroku yet, or you might just have some odd stuff in your environment.rb that isn’t compatible with the version of Rails we’re running.

Up until recently, this was producing an unhelpful HTTP 502 bad gateway page. Now, you’ll see the contents of your mongrel.log so that you can diagnose the issue.

If you were paying close attention, you might have noticed a “Restart” button that existed for a few days. We’ve removed that in favor of automatically restarting whenever you save a file that needs a restart (like routes.rb or environment.rb). So far this seems to work pretty well – but as always, let us know if you find a case where it doesn’t work as expected.

Yesterday, DHH said:

“I’d love for Rails to be easy as pie to run in a shared hosting environment, though. I’d love for Rails to be easy as pie to run in any environment. In that ‘more people could have fun learning Rails and deploying their first hobby application’ kind of way.”

We humbly suggest that Heroku is one possible solution to the latter part of statement. Our vision for the long term is much grander than just a learning/hobby tool; but our beta product, as it stands today, can already fill this need quite nicely.

Heroku now has a mailing list on Google Groups. Stop by and introduce yourself, but first read the welcome post.

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 we’re just so excited to have both the financial resources and partners like Redpoint to help us realize our vision.

In the meantime, our private beta is really rocking. We now have over 10,000 developers building apps on the platform, with over 12,000 apps built so far. This enormous amount of activity is really helping us to hone Heroku into a smooth and sharp tool, and we look forward to opening up the beta in the coming months.

We can’t wait to unveil some of the stuff we’ve got in the pipeline. Stay tuned!

	Quote (Adam to investors): “I’m not coming to any board meetings earlier than 3pm.”
	Quote (James to investors): “Who’s the CEO? Well, I lost rock-paper-scissors, so I guess that’s me.”
	Quote (Orion to investors): “Can I get some of that in quarters? My laundry is really starting to pile up.”

More coverage: VentureBeat, TechCrunch

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 several awesome interviews lined up:

Friday, Lunch — Ryan Singer of 37signals
Friday, 3:40pm — GitHub Founders
Saturday, Lunch — Phusion Passenger (mod_rails)
Saturday, 3:40pm — Adam Keys interviews Geoffrey

Come by and check it out.

Rubyconf is upon us, and most of engineering team will be present in Orlando this week.

If you’re attending, or maybe just nearby, this would be a great opportunity to say hi and/or ask those burning questions you’ve got about Heroku. Whether you’re wondering if Heroku will be a good fit for your needs, or have questions about a currently hosted app, we’re happy to make time for you. Just email us here and we’ll find a time/place to talk.

Last but not least, don’t forget to catch Adam and Blake presenting on Lighweight Web Services with Sinatra and Restclient on Friday at 1:15pm.

See you there!

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 environment has been perfect for testing the platform.

What We Learned

Going from zero to 20,000 apps has been no small feat, and we’ve had plenty of growing pains. We also learned what our users want from a commercial version of the platform, and surprisingly to us, we discovered that there aren’t just a bunch of features we need to add, but some we need to remove as well (platform features often involve trade-offs).

Having made that discovery, we knew we needed to create a second version of the platform, to pursue exactly those requirements, designed from the ground up (with our hard earned knowledge) for commercial production use.

We started this new version 4 months ago, in a separate cluster, along with its own private beta, which we’ve let about 1,000 apps into so far.

Heroku Garden

Thousands of people use and love the first version of our platform, particularly the web-based editor, as it’s the best place to get started with Rails. We are going to keep this version free, and move it completely over to herokugarden.com. We’ll post more details about this transition shortly.

Commercial Platform

The second version of our platform is almost ready for release, as the results of the beta are showing excellent reliability and performance.

This second version will form the foundation of our commercial offering (the commercial version will still accommodate free usage). You will be hearing more about this over the next couple of months as we bring it out of private beta.

We have some really exciting stuff in store for you – 2009 is going to be even bigger.

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 are officially out of beta and available for commercial use.

Detailed pricing information is now available.

Dynos

As discussed previously, our system is built around a dyno grid that allows us to deploy your app just by pushing your code, and to scale it up and down instantly. Your app runs inside this grid in any number of dynos.

The number of dynos you run directly affects the concurrency and therefore the performance of your app, so our pricing is based around this same concept. The first dyno for an app is always free, and additional dynos will be billed at $0.05 per dyno-hour.

Play with the dyno slider on our pricing page to estimate your bill.

You can scale your dynos up and down instantly at any time via the web interface, our API, or our command-line gem.

Database

At the database layer, we have two categories of options. We offer a shared database cluster in three storage sizes. The smallest size is free, and you can upgrade/downgrade between options instantly at any time.

For more serious needs, we also offer three dedicated database plans, ranging from small to large in compute and storage levels. These can also be changed at any time, but resizing requires a few moments of downtime.

Add-ons

We’re also officially launching some add-on features. Some of these features, like backups and more frequent cron tasks are paid features. Others, like custom domains and SSL are free, but require you to enter your billing information as an abuse protection measure (more info).

There is a lot more to come – you can get a preview by checking out the beta features in the add-ons section.

Free Service

It’s important to us to continue to provide a free service tier, useful enough to get started with Heroku. This is still available, and is the default for new apps with a single free dyno and free shared database.

This free tier is well suited for rapid-prototyping, staging, and testing purposes, as well as actually running lightweight apps.

Pricing and paid-features are being rolled out in phases across our user base. It may take a few days for commercial service to be activated for all accounts.

The official press release is available here.

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.

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!)

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.

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 plan for our next releases or influence our direction? When we launch new features, what’s the best way to think about how they fit into our overall strategy?

Here’s how we think about our roadmap and decide on big new areas to work on: it’s all about use cases.

We started with the simplest use case: making it drop-dead easy for developers to deploy applications, and have grown into more complex ones (like multi-tier complex composite apps). We continue to try and expand the number of use cases that we provide a complete solution for.

Here’s a brief look at our historical roadmap from the perspective of expanding use cases:

Provisionless Deployment. Instant deployment with the now famous “git push heroku master” is at the heart of Heroku, enabling the basic use case: a frictionless application platform that just works.

Caching and Instant Scaling. We introduced high-speed HTTP caching built into every app, and added dynos which can be scaled up and down instantly, enabling large scale and variable scale apps.

Asynchronous Patterns. We added background processing with Delayed::Job, followed shortly by workers which can be scaled up and down just like dynos, enabling many use cases around modern asynchronous architecture.

Platform Extensibility. We launched the Add-ons system, a way to extend Heroku apps with core functionality like full-text search or memcache, and to consume external services like New Relic, Zerigo, or Sendgrid. Use cases here are literally endless. Add-ons allow the growing ecosystem of startups and established companies building cloud services to add new features to our platform – many more than we could do on our own.

Flexible Runtime. We recently introduced deployment stacks, which enable choice between multiple runtime environments.

What’s Next?

Over the next days, weeks, and months, we will release new features that continue to expand the number of use cases supported by Heroku, whether for startups or large enterprises.

You can be sure that each time we build a feature we will be maniacally focused on simplicity and developer productivity, and will always try to maintain the cohesiveness and quality of the platform.

From our core focus on developer productivity and frictionless deployment, we’ll be expanding the footprint to include areas like realtime and event-driven apps, more complex multi-tier applications, and a broader platform for deploying advanced applications. Stay tuned, and let us know where you’d like to see us go.

We can’t be happier to announce that we recently closed a $10 million Series B round of investment led by Ignition Partners. We’re planning to use the money to further expand our platform, turbo-charge partner programs for add-on providers and consultancies, and accelerate our go-to-market programs.

The growth and excitement that we’ve seen at Heroku, particularly in 2010, has been incredibly energizing for all of us. We talk a lot about numbers – the 60,000-plus apps running on our platform gets quoted a lot recently – but even more motivating are the creative forces that the platform is unleashing.

Developers and companies are building and running some amazing apps with our platform (check out the United Nations app ProtectedPlanet.net for one of my recent favorites). Ruby on Rails consultants are growing their businesses and creating happier customers. Technology vendors are building some very cool extensions to our platform as part of the Add-on system.

In other words, creating an open, efficient, and reliable platform that upends the status quo is not just about technology: it’s about resources and support for developers, making it easy for partners to use the platform for their own customers, and enabling technology partners to build businesses by extending the platform itself.

It’s also about having a great team. We can’t be prouder of the team we’re building at Heroku (if you might be interested in joining, please check out jobs.heroku.com), and the team just got stronger: John Connors of Ignition has joind our board. John is a super-smart, super-seasoned executive with a wealth of experience (including stints as CIO and CFO at Microsoft) that we’ve already begun to draw on as we plan what’s next for Heroku.

We’d like to take this moment to thank all of you for your support. We’ll take full advantage of the additional resources and expertise joining us today to serve you in the future.

Official news release here.

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 building add-ons, including a provisioning API, single-sign on for tight integration into the Heroku user experience, tools for local development and testing of API calls, and a smooth, well established process for building, integrating, and testing add-ons that has been used by many of our existing providers.

Resource Center

We have also built a Resource Center for providers that contains an overview of the program, detailed how-to guides, sample code, reference materials, and best practices for building and operating a cloud service.

Program Benefits

The provider program is an excellent opportunity to build a business around a cloud service, with an easy distribution channel to all Heroku developers and customers.

Some of the benefits of the program include:

• Make your service available to all of our developers and customers
• Create a detailed listing in our Add-ons Catalog
• Allow customers to activate your add-on instantly with one-click
• Manage billing, payments, and upgrades easily through our system
• Use our development kit for local testing of API calls
• Operate your cloud service with our documented best practices
• Alpha and beta test your add-on with our established process
• Get feedback from our large group of private beta testers

We’re Serious about Providers

We believe that the ability to consume external services from within Heroku is a critical part of being an application platform, so we have invested heavily in our add-ons system and now our provider program, and will continue to do so.

Heroku is dedicated to building a neutral marketplace of cloud services. We will encourage competition, base our policies on objective metrics everywhere possible, and help to accelerate merit-based adoption of third party add-ons.

With dozens of providers already working on new add-ons and hundreds getting started today, we are very excited about providing a high-quality, self-service program for providers.

If you have any questions about the new program or need help getting started, please feel free to contact the add-ons team.

Customer Feedback

Our primary interest in add-ons is the tremendous value they can deliver to Heroku users. We want to hear as much feedback as possible from our users and customers about add-ons. We are building some great tools to make it easy for customers to share feedback and requests with us and with our providers.

Have a review of a particular provider? Have a service you would like to see an add-on for? Let us know!

Official press release here.

It’s no secret that Heroku’s getting pretty big. Heck, we advertise the number of apps running on the platform right there on the homepage (over 88,000, when I last looked). We’ve got tens of thousands of developers, and you all have been doing some amazing work — the success stories we’ve posted are only the tip of the iceberg. With that in mind, we thought it was high time we started to get all of you together. So, on November 3rd, we’re going to hold the first official Heroku Users Group meeting. Join us at our office at 7pm to meet other Heroku users and engineers, hear war stories from the front lines, learn tips and tricks, and ask those burning questions that you’ve been holding on to for months.

We’re still working out the details, but rest assured it’ll be great. We’ll bring the knowledge (and the food, and whatever else is needed). You just need to let us know that you’re coming.

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 Gmail, Basecamp, or Facebook existed. They created one of the world’s first platforms-as-a-service and helped popularize the term. They get it.

Heroku always aspires to be trusted by more customers with their data and applications. Salesforce.com has achieved a level of trust and credibility unparalleled in the cloud. They are trusted today by the largest companies on the planet to store their most sensitive data. And their sales and support organizations are second to none.

We have long been fans of salesforce.com due to the unusual philosophies they share with us:

No software, no private cloud
There is so much value provided to customers when they consume services rather than buying software and running it themselves. Salesforce.com is religious about not selling software for private cloud use, and so are we.

Abstraction = Value
Don’t make users, customers, or developers do anything they don’t have to. Let them focus 100% on their data and their applications. Most products are more hands on and less abstract than Heroku. Salesforce.com however, is even farther down the abstraction curve than we are.

Multi-Tenancy
Multi-tenancy enables continuous upgrades and improvements, maintainability, and scale. Multi-tenancy is an architectural decision key to how both Heroku and salesforce.com have achieved success.

Salesforce.com Loves Heroku

Salesforce.com loves our developers and the community and culture they have brought to our platform. They love our maniacal focus on the developer experience. They love that we are a 100% open platform, enabling openness and choice everywhere we possibly can. They love that we support the tools and languages and architectures of the next generation of web apps.

Salesforce.com aspires deeply to these same goals and sees Heroku as leading the way. Together we can bring an open platform for modern apps to enterprise customers.

To hear this in the words of salesforce.com, see founder Parker Harris’s blog post: What I Love About Heroku.

Independence

Salesforce.com loves who we are and wants to preserve our brand, product, our values, and our roadmap. Though we’re joining forces, Heroku will remain independent.

This means the whole Heroku team, the founders, our technology and services, our free offerings for developers, our exciting roadmap, existing customer signup process, and most importantly our philosophies will remain intact and unchanged.

Our focus on design and user experience will stay as sharp as ever; we will stay purple. The Heroku you know will continue to grow.

Our roadmap stays the same, but we can do more of it, faster. Joining forces with salesforce.com gives us an enormous amount of fuel to keep building the platform toward the vision we’ve always had.

Ruby

This deal is a victory and validation for all of our early adopters, our passionate users and customers, and for the Ruby community as a whole. The combination of salesforce.com’s trust and credibility with Heroku’s developer-focussed platform will be an incredible force pushing Ruby into the mainstream.

Heroku has been designed from the beginning to support multiple languages, but Ruby will always be our first love.

As we’ve talked about before, over the long run we want to constantly support more use cases and allow developers to choose the right tool for the job, like we did with our experimental Node.js support. Joining forces with salesforce.com doesn’t change this; we will add other languages when and where we feel it advances those goals.

Amazon and Ecosystem

Our relationship with Amazon Web Services will remain unchanged. We are huge fans of Amazon’s EC2 and the fast growing ecosystem of cloud services within it, and have no plans to leave. We are likely to add additional infrastructure providers over time to support a variety of customer use cases, and as above, we will follow the same path and decision making process we always have.

Great for Developers and Customers

Heroku will always be focused on developers above all else. Salesforce.com deeply understands why that is valuable and is making an enormous bet that we will continue to make developers happy. Not only does Salesforce.com want us to continue on unchanged, but they hope through this merger some of Heroku’s philosophies will rub off on them.

With salesforce.com’s trust and credibility, it will soon be a no-brainer to convince your company to use Heroku for your important projects.

With salesforce.com’s huge reach, we will be able to grow the ecosystem faster. This means more add-on providers with more great cloud service options for developers.

For customers, this means we will soon provide better sales processes for larger organizations, add more trust and security for data and applications, achieve more IT policy compliance, and provide more premium support options.

Great for Add-on Providers

The salesforce.com brand plus accelerated growth of the developer base, the types of applications on the platform, and the number and size of customers all bring huge opportunity for add-on providers.

Our Commitment

The founders and the whole team at Heroku are 100% committed to the long term vision we have shared since the beginning. This is Heroku going to the next level; a chance to further our vision, to take things to a larger scale, and to reach a wider audience than ever before with our product and our message about next-generation deployment.

We couldn’t be more amped!

The Heroku Team

Official press release here.