One of our core beliefs at Heroku is that developers do their best work when the development process is as simple, elegant, and conducive to focus and flow as possible. We are grateful for how well many of our contributions to that cause have been received, and today we are making generally available a new set of features that have been inspired by those values.
Collectively, we call these new features Heroku DX—the next evolution in Heroku’s developer experience. Our goal with these new features—Heroku Button, Heroku Dashboard + Metrics and Heroku Postgres DbX—is to make it faster than ever for developers to build, launch and scale applications.
Heroku Button
Heroku is known for making it easy to get started on a new app. Many tutorials and sample apps contain step-by-step guides for deploying to Heroku because it is one of the easiest platforms to start on. But we wanted to make it even easier. We wanted step 2 to be: “There is no step 2”.
Heroku Button makes this a reality. With a single click you can set up a new app from sample code, complete with environment configuration, Add-ons and the first deploy. Any public GitHub project can be Heroku Button enabled simply by adding an app.json file with some additional metadata. During the beta, we saw over 400 Heroku Buttons created, including examples from Dropbox, Twilio, Uber and Coinbase. As part of general availability, we are launching a real-time view into the Heroku Button community at buttons.heroku.com, which is continually updated with the newest and most popular buttons.
Heroku Dashboard + Metrics
At the center of Heroku DX is an entirely new web Dashboard redesigned from the ground up for improved developer experience. Under the hood, the new Dashboard is written in Ember.js, allowing for faster and smoother interactions. At the surface, a new visual design makes navigating your collection of apps and associated resources and properties simpler. New interaction patterns, such as drag and drop app assignment, simplify previously complex tasks. As a modern web app, the new Dashboard is fully responsive, and works across devices and screen sizes, making it easy to manage and scale your Heroku apps wherever you go.
A new Activity section in Dashboard makes it dramatically easier for developers to collaborate. Every activity on every app shows up in the Dashboard so everyone on the team knows what’s going on. You can even inspect the build output from team members’ builds and help them troubleshoot problems right there in the Dashboard.
With Heroku DX, we are also introducing a significant enhancement to the runtime management of your apps with a new Metrics section in Dashboard that gives you a refreshingly simple and straightforward view on your application’s performance.
Heroku Metrics surfaces the key runtime attributes of your application, including Response Time, Requests / Sec, and CPU, and adds an intelligence layer that automatically surfaces the key recommendations and performance changes. Unified across a single time axis, the relationship between applications metrics is made clear, allowing you to easily see their interactions. The new Metrics feature is available for any application that has been scaled to more than one running dyno.
Heroku Postgres DbX
At the center of many applications running on Heroku is Heroku Postgres, and as part of the Heroku DX launch we are releasing one of our most significant upgrades ever to our Postgres Database-as-a-Service. These new Postgres features—or Heroku Postgres DbX—are designed to advance the experience of developing and managing databases in a way that is similar to how Dashboard enhances the other related parts of your developer experience. At the core of Postgres DbX is a new lineup of database plans, which on average offer 2-3X performance of our previous plans while keeping the same price. Premium plans and above also automatically gain encryption at rest, simplifying many compliance requirements.
Heroku Postgres’ most prominent addition is Performance Analytics. Understanding the operating and behavior of a relational database—in a way that is clear and actionable—typically requires an uncommon set of tools, skills and patience. Performance Analytics reveals one of the key benefits of the “as-a-Service” model as applied to databases; a complex pipeline of configuration, logs, processing and visualization is reduced to a simple and immediate web experience for the developer.
Learn More
The Dev Center provides detailed technical information on all of the features launched today. You can also learn more by registering for an online session we’ll be delivering on October 8].