This is the first post in a two-part series about accessibility. Part two shares our design and development process addressing one aspect of accessibility in the Heroku product.

Equality as a Salesforce Value

We at Salesforce firmly believe that access to information and the ability to contribute to our digital environment should be recognized as basic human rights, not a nice-to-have features.

Globally, hundreds of millions of people have physical, speech, cognitive, and neurological disabilities, and while in practice accessibility is about designing for users with disabilities, it also benefits everyone. Most of us have experienced conditions that impair our ability to get work done...

There are many reasons to choose Heroku Data services, but keeping the services you use secure and up-to-date rank near the top. This foundation of trust is the most important commitment we make to our customers, and frequent and timely maintenances are one way we deliver on this promise.

We do everything we can to minimize downtime, which is typically between 10 – 60 seconds per maintenance. There are ways for you to minimize disruption too (see the tips and tricks below). The rest of the post explains how we think about Heroku Data maintenances, how we perform them, and when we perform them.

An Ounce of Prevention...

Hackers exploit known but unpatched vulnerabilities or out-of-date...

Every organization needs to be data-driven in order to be successful. Whether you're tracking an application's performance, incoming support tickets, or revenue rates, different components of any company depend on metrics that inform the health of the business.

At Heroku, we're hackers to the core, but that doesn't mean we're all programmers. We build on top of our own platform for everything we do, and one of the products we often use is Heroku Dataclips. If you haven't heard of them before, Heroku Dataclips allow you to create SQL queries in a web GUI that run on your Heroku Postgres database. The unique dataclip URL can then be shared internally or externally,...

For quite some time we've received reports from our larger customers about a mysterious H13 - Connection closed error showing up for Ruby applications. Curiously it only ever happened around the time they were deploying or scaling their dynos. Even more peculiar, it only happened to relatively high scale applications. We couldn't reproduce the behavior on an example app. This is a story about distributed coordination, the TCP API, and how we debugged and fixed a bug in Puma that only shows up at scale.

Connection closed

First of all, what even is an H13 error? From our error page documentation:

This error is thrown when a process in your web dyno accepts a connection, but then...

This blog post is adapted from a talk given by Ali Hamidi at Data Council SF '19 titled "Operating Multi-Tenant Kafka Services for Developers on Heroku."