Today we’re happy to announce Heroku’s Europe region, available in public beta. With more than 3 million apps running on our platform from developers all over the globe, it's not surprising that we've had high demand for Heroku in more regions of the world. After collaborating closely with customers during private beta, we're now ready to offer Heroku services in Europe to all customers as part of a public beta. The Europe region runs Heroku applications from datacenters located in Europe, offering improved performance for users in that region.
One Heroku, Two Continents
The Europe region offers all the features of the existing US region. Both regions run apps on infrastructure dedicated to each region, but are managed by the same unified Heroku interface you already know. This provides powerful global app management with isolated, geolocated infrastructure:
Faster Apps
The physical proximity of the Europe region to European end-users means reduced latency, often resulting in a dramatic improvement in app responsiveness to those users. We’ve observed performance improvements of 100ms per request or more for European end-users:
A Familiar Workflow
All Heroku users can now create and deploy apps to the Europe region:
$ heroku create --region eu
$ git push heroku master
Once the app is created, you can interact with it just like any other Heroku app.
Easy App Migration with Heroku Fork
To ease the process of migrating existing applications to the Europe region, we created heroku fork, a new addition to the Heroku CLI. Heroku fork copies an app's Heroku Postgres data and config vars, and re-provisions all its add-ons. If you have an existing app you’d like to run in the Europe region, check that you’ve got the most recent Heroku toolbelt installed and use Heroku fork to create a running copy of your app in the new region:
$ heroku fork --region eu
Creating fork myapp-332... done
Copying slug... done
Adding newrelic:professional... done
Copying config vars... done
Fork complete, view it at http://myapp-332.herokuapp.com/
Note: heroku fork will not move any domains or scale your app past a single dyno, so you're free to decide when your app will be made available to your customers. For more information about this powerful new feature, see the Dev Center article on heroku fork.
Add-ons
More than 60 add-ons are currently available in the Europe region, with more on the way. To ensure that your app has fast access to its data wherever it’s deployed, Heroku automatically provisions latency-sensitive add-ons in your app’s region. Many add-ons are already available to apps in the Europe region, including:
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Heroku Postgres
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Memcachier
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openredis
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New Relic
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Websolr
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Scheduler
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Deploy Hooks
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SendGrid
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Airbrake
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Papertrail
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ClearDB
To discover which add-ons are available in the Europe region, search for 'europe' on the addons homepage or use the new --region flag in the heroku CLI:
$ heroku update
$ heroku addons:list --region eu
Customer Success
Several Heroku customers have already deployed their production Heroku apps to the Europe region for improved performance. For example, top Swedish television network TV4 is currently running its video on demand service TV4 Play out of Heroku’s Europe region. TV4 CTO Per Åström says:
Deploying our app closer to our users in Heroku's Europe region gave us a 150ms improvement in web performance. Based on this win for our users, we’re moving all of our apps to the Europe region.
Digital agencies and other customers delivering user-facing mobile and social apps have also benefited from improved performance in the Europe region. For example, app development company Betapond COO Conor Ryan says:
Deploying our Facebook apps live to the Heroku cloud in the EU was pain-free and as easy as staging. We're delighted to see an average of 11% improvement in page load times since making the switch. Consumers don't tolerate waiting, particularly on mobile devices, so Heroku's EU contribution to a snappy user experience is a big boost for Betapond and our customers.
Safe Harbor Compliance
This section was updated August 2014.
To give our customers the highest level of confidence about the protection of their data, Heroku has certified with the U.S.-EU Safe Harbor Framework and the U.S.-Swiss Safe Harbor Framework as set forth by the U.S. Department of Commerce and the European Union. This ensures that companies who have a European customer base can build apps on Heroku that comply with EU's data protection laws. Your application does not need to be deployed in the EU region to be in compliance. The certification covers both the EU and US region. Check our privacy statement and our entry on export.gov for more information about the scope.
We Want Your Feedback
If you have comments or questions about the Heroku Europe region, email us at eu-beta@heroku.com. To receive email updates about the Heroku Europe region as it progresses to general availability, subscribe to the beta mailing list below.