Modern web apps are increasingly making use of asynchronous, background workers for task processing needs. For many apps, workers are just as, if not even more important than the front end http stack. Ever since we launched DJ, we’ve been overwhelmed with requests from customers wanting access to several DJ workers per app. Based on the feedback, we have been coding away, making this happen, and today we’re proud to announce the release of Heroku Workers.

Workers as first-class citizens

The new Workers feature is based on Delayed Job, and will replace the current DJ add-on, which is retired. The major change here is that Workers are a first-class citizen on the Heroku platform with a command-line interface, just like dynos:

$ heroku workers 2 (sets the app to 2 workers)
$ heroku workers +2 (increments worker count by 2)
$ heroku workers (displays the current number of DJ workers)

In fact, Workers are exactly like dynos in terms their technology stack, resource limits and intelligent distribution throughout the dyno grid. Thus, they will also be priced like dynos at $0.05/hour.

Dozens of customers running hundreds of workers

During our beta period, we’ve already had dozens of our customers using hundreds of workers to process huge amounts of data, handle huge volumes of traffic, and grow their app seamlessly.

You can start using workers today – simply use the above commands to startup your workers! If you’re already using DJ, we’ve transitioned you to the workers, and you already have one running. Read more about this feature in the docs.