Kyle Seaman is Director of Farm Technology for Freight Farms, producer of pre-assembled, IoT-enabled, hydroponic farms inside repurposed freight containers. Read the Freight Farms customer story to learn more about how Heroku has helped the company scale their business.

What is Freight Farms?

Our flagship product, The Leafy Green Machine (LGM), is a complete, commercial-ready, hydroponic growing system assembled inside a repurposed shipping container. Each of our 100+ farms is connected to an IoT network built on Heroku.

Tell us about your stack.

We’re running the open source version of the Parse server on Heroku. Our stack is mostly JavaScript: MongoDB along with a Node.js API. We...

Many of the compelling and engaging application experiences we enjoy every day are powered by event-based systems; requesting a ride and watching its progress, communicating with a friend or large group in real time, or connecting our increasingly intelligent devices to our phones and each other. Behind the scenes, similar architectures let developers connect separate services into single systems, or process huge data streams to generate real-time insights. Together, these event-driven architectures and systems are quickly becoming a powerful complement to the relational database and app server models that have been at the core of Internet applications for over twenty years.

At Heroku, we...

Encrypted communication is now the norm for applications on the Internet. At Heroku, part of our mission is to spread encryption by making it easy for developers to setup and use SSL on every application. Today we take a big step forward in that mission by making Heroku SSL generally available, allowing you to easily add SSL encryption to your applications with nothing more than a valid SSL certificate and custom domain.

Heroku SSL is free for custom domains on Hobby dynos and above and relies on the SNI (“Server Name Indication”) extension which is now supported by the vast majority of browsers and client libraries. The current SSL endpoint will remain available for the increasingly rare...

One of the interesting patterns that we’ve seen, as a result of managing one of the largest fleets of Postgres databases, is one or two tables growing at a rate that’s much larger and faster than the rest of the tables in the database. In terms of absolute numbers, a table that grows sufficiently large is on the order of hundreds of gigabytes to terabytes in size. Typically, the data in this table tracks events in an application or is analogous to an application log. Having a table of this size isn’t a problem in and of itself, but can lead to other issues; query performance can start to degrade and indexes can take much longer to update. Maintenance tasks, such as vacuum, can also become...

Austen Ito is a software engineer at leading online fashion brand Bonobos, based in New York. Read our Bonobos customer story for more information about how Heroku has helped their business.

What do you have running on Heroku?

We’re running just about everything on Heroku, including our Bonobos.com website, cross-app messaging services, an API for our ERP, as well as some internal tools. The only pieces that are not on Heroku are the Data Science and ERP components. We’re also using Desk.com for customer service queuing.

Walk us through your stack

We use a mix of Backbone and React in terms of JavaScript frameworks on the front end. Some of our legacy work is in Backbone and our newer...