Event-driven architectures are on the rise, in response to fast-moving data and constellations of inter-connected systems. In order to support this trend, last year we released Apache Kafka on Heroku - a gracefully integrated, fully managed, and carefully optimized element of Heroku's platform that is the culmination of years of experience of running many hundreds of Kafka clusters in production and contributing code to the Kafka ecosystem.

Today, we are excited to announce additional plans and pricing in our Kafka offering in order to make Apache Kafka more accessible, and to better support development, testing, and low volume production needs.

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...

Today we are happy to announce early access to Heroku Kafka. We think Kafka is interesting and exciting because it provides a powerful and scalable set of primitives for reasoning about, building, and scaling systems that can handle high volumes and velocities of data. Heroku Kafka makes Kafka more accessible, reliable, and easy to integrate into your applications.

What is Kafka?

Apache Kafka is a distributed commit log for fast, fault-tolerant communication between producers and consumers using message based topics. Kafka provides the messaging backbone for building a new generation of distributed applications capable of handling billions of events and millions of transactions.

At...

At Heroku, we’re focused on delivering thoughtfully designed systems to improve developer productivity and experience. We firmly believe that improving the development and operations experience helps developers to build and run better apps. This improvement allows developers to focus more on functionality, and businesses to focus more on the value of their applications.

Today we are pleased to announce two new features, both in public beta, that support this mission: a new Heroku Dashboard and Heroku Metrics. These new systems bring developers powerful new clarity and simplicity around application management, execution, and optimization.

New Heroku Dashboard: Managing applications,...

WebSocket support was introduced as a Labs feature last year, and we went through extensive testing and a number of technical iterations to improve performance and to provide a predictable compliance target. Thanks to great interaction with the community and early feature users, we now have a fast and robust solution available in production.

Why WebSockets

WebSockets provide bi-directional and full-duplex channels, allowing you to create applications with support for streaming, flexible protocols, and persistent connections.

Getting Started with New Apps

If you are creating a new application on Heroku, there is no need to enable WebSockets or to configure your application to use the...