How we built Heroku CI: our product intuition checked against what the market wants (we surveyed ~1000 developers to figure out the latter, and the results were surprising)

Two approaches to building any product are often in tension: designing from inspiration, and designing from information. On the pure inspiration side, you just build the product you dream of, and trust that it will be so awesome and useful, that it will succeed in the market. On the pure information side, you build exactly what the market is asking for, as best you can tell (think: surveys, top customer feature requests, consultants, customer panels).

Our initial design for Heroku CI (currently in public beta) was...

Back on August 11, 2016, Heroku experienced increased routing latency in the EU region of the common runtime. While the official follow-up report describes what happened and what we've done to avoid this in the future, we found the root cause to be puzzling enough to require a deep dive into Linux networking.

The following is a write-up by SRE member Lex Neva (what's SRE?) and routing engineer Fred Hebert (now Heroku alumni) of an interesting Linux networking "gotcha" they discovered while working on incident 930.

The Incident

Our monitoring systems paged us about a rise in latency levels across the board in the EU region of the Common Runtime. We quickly saw that the...

This post is going to help save you money if you're running a Rails server. It starts like this: you write an app. Let's say you're building the next hyper-targeted blogging platform for medium length posts. When you login, you see a paginated list of all of the articles you've written. You have a Post model and maybe for to do tags, you have a Tag model, and for comments, you have a Comment model. You write your view so that it renders the posts:

<% @posts.each do |post| %> <%= link_to(post, post.title) %> <%= teaser_for(post) %> <%= "#{post.comments.count} comments" <% end %> <%= pagination(@posts) %> 

See any problems with...

We are happy to announce the general availability of Automated Certificate Management (ACM) for all paid Heroku dynos. With ACM, the cumbersome and costly process of provisioning and managing SSL certificates is replaced with a simple experience that is free for all paid Dynos on Heroku’s Common Runtime. Creating secure web applications has never been more important, and with ACM and the Let’s Encrypt project, never easier.

ACM handles all aspects of SSL/TLS certificates for custom domains; you no longer have to purchase certificates, or worry about their expiration or renewal. ACM builds directly on our recent release of Heroku Free SSL to make encryption the default for web applications...

The most innovative apps augment our human senses, intuition, and logic with machine learning. Deep learning, modelled after the neural networks of the human brain, continues to grow as one of the most powerful types of machine learning. When applied to images, deep learning enables powerful computer vision features like visual search, product identification, and brand detection.

Today, we bring you the Einstein Vision add-on (beta), allowing Heroku developers to easily connect to and use Einstein Vision, a set of powerful new APIs for building AI-powered apps. With this release, Salesforce is making it easy for you to embed image recognition directly into your apps. Rather than building...