Choices are an important part of a healthy open source software community. That’s why we’re excited about Yarn, a new package manager that addresses many of the problems with Node’s default package manager, npm. While npm has done a fantastic job creating a large and vibrant JavaScript ecosystem, I want to share why Yarn is an important addition to the Node.js ecosystem, how it will improve your Node.js development experience, and how Heroku has incorporated it into the build process for your Heroku apps.

We began testing Yarn almost immediately after it was released, and began fully supporting it on December 16.

About Yarn

Yarn was released in October 2016 and made a big splash...

Heroku recently released [a managed Apache Kafka][1] offering. As a Node.js developer, I wanted to demystify Kafka by sharing a simple yet practical use case with the many Node.js developers who are curious how this technology might be useful. At Heroku we use Kafka internally for a number of uses including data pipelines. I thought that would be a good place to start.

When it comes to actual examples, Java and Scala get all the love in the Kafka world. Of course, these are powerful languages, but I wanted to explore Kafka from the perspective of Node.js. While there are no technical limitations to using Node.js with Kafka, I was unable to find many examples of their use together in...

Kyle Seaman is Director of Farm Technology for Freight Farms, producer of pre-assembled, IoT-enabled, hydroponic farms inside repurposed freight containers.

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 also use Heroku Postgres.

Xively is a core component of our stack. We use the Xively add-on to sync our Heroku apps...

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...

Scott Raio is Co-Founder and CTO of Combatant Gentlemen], a design-to-delivery menswear e-commerce brand.

What microservices are you running in Heroku Private Spaces?

We’ve written an individual service for every business use case. For example, we have services for order processing, product catalog, account management, authentication, swatch display, POs, logistics, payments, etc.

With all these different services, we chose Heroku Private Spaces as a way to make service discovery easier. We’re currently running about 25 services, which is a relatively small number compared to Netflix or Twitter (who employ hundreds of services). But we’re growing, and we’re always evaluating our...

Based in Budapest, Hungary, Andras Fincza (Head of Engineering) and Rafael Ördög (Technical Lead) work for Emarsys, a global marketing automation platform. Read our Emarsys customer story to learn more about their migration experience on Heroku.

How did you introduce microservices at Emarsys?

We take an evolutionary approach to our architecture. Our marketing automation platform was originally designed as a monolithic system built in PHP and MySQL and running on in-house infrastructure. We were running two major services on our in-house infrastructure: one for HDS (historical data service) and the other for smart insights and analysis. However, it was hard to grow the platform...

Darby Frey is Director of Platform Engineering at Belly, the leading loyalty marketing platform in the U.S. For more information, Read our Belly customer story to learn more about how Heroku has helped Belly scale their business.

How did you approach migrating to a microservices architecture?

Originally, we built the entire business on one Rails app. Then a couple years ago, we pivoted to a microservices approach. It is still a work in progress, but we’re migrating components of the monolithic app whenever it makes sense. For example, when we need to add or expand a feature, or if we need to scale something independently, then it makes sense to pull that out into a microservice. We don’...