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 customers rightly demand the same fit and finish, not to mention performance and responsiveness, as they get with the apps they use every day. Increasingly, these apps are built on both real-time and relational data — sensitive, protected, regulated, and highly-personalized data. Nothing is more important than keeping that data safe and secure.
Build Real-Time Apps with Secure Data, More Easily than Ever
Before Apache Kafka on Heroku Shield, organizations building HIPAA-compliant apps and experiences with events and streams needed advanced knowledge of operating, configuring, and updating their Kafka clusters, as well as validating security and compliance. Apache Kafka on Heroku Shield allows enterprises to easily work with real-time data in a secure, trusted and compliant environment.
The service fully automates Day 1 and Day 2 operations: provisioning, management, availability, and resiliency. Security patches are handled automatically, and you can upgrade your clusters, in place, for new Apache Kafka versions with a single command. Service resiliency is also automated; unavailable brokers are automatically replaced, and the service will re-establish failed elements of the cluster. We provide tuned configurations and plans for your broker and zookeeper nodes that handle a wide range of use cases out of the box, from testing and managing low volume production event streams, to handling a massive velocity and volume of events.
Apache Kafka on Heroku Shield is built upon the same foundation we use to protect our platform. Security is the goal and end-result of our excellence in engineering, and our compliance program is used to verify and get full-credit for the controls we both need in the shared responsibility security model.
Apache Kafka on Heroku is available in all 6 Heroku Shield Private Spaces regions: Dublin, Frankfurt, Sydney, Tokyo, Virginia, and Oregon. PCI compliance for Apache Kafka on Heroku Shield is expected in the spring of 2020.
Creating your Kafka clusters is as simple as adding the service to a Heroku app:
$ heroku addons:create heroku-kafka:shield-standard-0 -a sushi-app
About Heroku Shield
Heroku Shield, first released in June 2017, was built to bring the power and productivity of Heroku to a whole new class of strictly-regulated apps. The outcome is a simple, elegant user experience that abstracts away compliance complexity while freeing development teams to use the tools and services they love.
Heroku Shield Postgres, also released in June 2017, guarantees that data is always encrypted in transit and at rest. Heroku also captures a high volume of security monitoring events for Shield dynos and databases which helps meet regulatory requirements without imposing any extra burden on developers.
Heroku Shield Connect, first released in June 2018, enables the high performance, fully-automated, and bi-directional data synchronization between Salesforce and Heroku Shield Postgres — all in a matter of a few clicks.
About Apache Kafka on Heroku
Heroku’s fully-managed service provides all the power, resilience, and scalability of Kafka without the complexity and challenges of operating your own clusters. Available in low-cost, shared multi-tenant plans or in dedicated private clusters, Apache Kafka on Heroku is fully-integrated with the Heroku platform, managed data services, and third-party ecosystem of services.
Feedback Welcome
We hope you enjoy using this new feature as much as we enjoyed building it, and we can't wait to see what you do with it. Existing Heroku Shield customers can get started today. For more information, see the Dev Center articles for Heroku Shield or Apache Kafka on Heroku, or contact Heroku. Please send any feedback our way.
Want to learn more about Apache Kafka on Heroku Shield? Contact sales