Over the past four years, the Heroku Runtime team has transitioned from occasional, manual deployments to continuous, automated deployments. Changes are now rolled out globally within a few hours of merging any change—without any human intervention. It's been an overwhelmingly positive experience for us. This post describes why we decided to make the change, how we did it, and what we learned along the way.

Where We...

We are thrilled to announce that Apache Kafka on Heroku Shield is now generally available and certified for handling PHI, PII, and HIPAA-compliant data. Our newest managed data service unifies Heroku Shield, a set of Heroku platform services that offer additional security features needed for building high compliance applications, with Apache Kafka on Heroku, our fully-managed service based on the leading open-source solution for handling event streams.

Organizations of all sizes face relentless pressure to bring better apps and experiences to market, and those with a strong focus on data security like Health and Life Sciences (HLS) organizations need to balance safety and agility. Their...

Today we are thrilled to announce the general availability (GA) release of Heroku Enterprise Accounts. All Enterprise Teams associated with a company are nested under an Enterprise Account which delivers a higher level of visibility and accountability. With an Enterprise Account, executives and admins can ensure trust and improved agility with simple fast management of teams, users and expenses, so application development teams can stay focused on the development process.

With applications sitting at the core of almost all businesses, collaborative environments that make it possible for users to efficiently work together without security concerns are essential to the success of any...

As outlined in a previous blog post, Heroku Data services undergo routine maintenances for security and patching. In this post, we describe the process used to minimize downtime for Heroku Postgres and Heroku Key-Value Store premium ‘High Availability’ plans and how we optimized the process to perform up to 75% faster.

Data Services Architecture

High availability plans for Postgres and Redis are designed to have two database instances running at the same time. One is a writeable primary database server and the other is a read-only hidden standby. Since the standby is hidden, customers cannot access it during normal operations.

Before starting a planned maintenance, we do our best to...

This is the second post in a two-part series about accessibility. The first post shares why designing for accessibility is important to us and why we encourage you to incorporate it into your software design process.

Heroku’s first accessibility initiative was to reach Level AA for luminance contrast ratio as defined by the internationally recognized best practices of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0. This ratio guarantees the legibility of text against its background, in order to ensure all users can perceive Heroku’s user interfaces equally.

This benefits people with color-vision deficiencies (like Deuteranopia or Protanopia which affect 7 to 12% of men), age-related...