Cloud platforms have come a long way since Heroku first set out to empower developers. Today’s cloud native development demands even greater flexibility, openness, and scalability. A fun fact about Heroku is that we use trees to denote the generation of the platform technology stack (aka version). In the tradition of Aspen, Bamboo, and Cedar, we are introducing Fir, the latest Heroku technology stack built on open source standards and cloud native technologies.
When we launched Cedar, we introduced a new way of thinking about application development and popularized principles like stateless applications, automated builds, and other twelve-factor principles; encouraging developers to build applications that were portable, horizontally scalable, and resilient. This work extended beyond our own user base and shaped how the industry builds and deploys applications. These principles were adopted by ecosystems like the Spring community and would ultimately become core principles of the cloud-native movement, laying the foundation for the technologies that define the Cloud Native Landscape today.
Embracing and Creating Open Source Standards
Fir is built on a foundation of cloud native technologies and open source standards, ensuring portability, interoperability, and a vibrant ecosystem for your applications. By embracing technologies like the Open Container Initiative (OCI), Cloud Native Buildpacks (CNBs), OpenTelemetry, and Kubernetes (K8s), we're providing a platform that's not only powerful but also incredibly flexible.
By building on these open source foundations, Heroku avoids reinventing the wheel and aligns with open source standards. We can focus our energy on what we do best: creating a smooth and productive developer experience and bringing that attention to the cloud native ecosystem and enabling end user adoption.
Open Container Initiative & Cloud Native Buildpacks
Today, OCI images are the new cloud executables. By moving to OCI artifacts, all Fir apps will be using images with compatibility across different environments. This means you can build your application once, run it locally, and deploy it anywhere, without worrying about vendor lock-in or compatibility issues.
Building container images can be complex and difficult to manage especially at scale. This is why we created Cloud Native Buildpacks with Pivotal. To ensure its broad adoption and ongoing development, we donated the project to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, establishing it as a standardized way to build container images directly from source code without needing Dockerfiles. Earlier this year, we open sourced CNBs for all of our supported languages. We built these CNBs on years of experience with our existing buildpacks and running them at scale in production. With our language experts, you can focus on your code, and not the intricacies of containerization.
OpenTelemetry
Observability is crucial for modern applications, and OpenTelemetry provides a standardized way to collect and analyze telemetry data. Fir integrates with OpenTelemetry, not only allowing you to instrument your applications with upstream SDKs but also powering our own Heroku Metrics product. These runtime and network telemetry signals can also be easily integrated with your preferred OpenTelemetry-compatible monitoring and analysis tools. Whether you're using an open-source solution or a commercial provider, you can effortlessly integrate your observability pipeline with Fir.
Kubernetes
Fir is built on Kubernetes, the industry-standard container orchestration system. This allows us to offer more flexible dyno types and increased scaling limits to many hundreds of dynos per space, giving you greater control over your application’s resources and performance. We've abstracted away the complexities of Kubernetes, so you can enjoy its benefits without ever having to touch it directly. You get the same simple Heroku experience, now with the added power and scalability of Kubernetes.
By embracing these open source standards, Fir ensures your applications are future-proof, portable, and ready to integrate with the broader cloud-native ecosystem.
A Platform for the Full Stack Developer
At Heroku, we believe in empowering developers, which means the best choices are the ones you don't have to make. The modern day developer is overwhelmed with choices. It’s not good enough to be a full stack developer, it’s common to also be responsible for containerization, base image updates, and potentially operating the cluster the app runs in. Like Cedar, Fir is built on a core principle: maximize developer productivity by minimizing distractions.
What does this mean? Fir is still the Heroku you know and love. It’s rooted in the world renowned developer experience while built on a bedrock of security and stability. We achieve this by offering seamless functionality out of the box with the flexibility to customize as needed. In today's complex development landscape, minimizing cognitive load is crucial. This allows you to focus on what truly matters: delivering value to your customers.
Here are a few examples of how this principle comes to life in Fir:
- Streamlined deployments: Deploy your code with a single command, using Cloud Native Buildpacks to automatically handle the complexities of containerization.
- Simplified scaling: Scale your applications effortlessly with intuitive controls and intelligent defaults, powered by Kubernetes behind the scenes.
- Integrated observability: Gain valuable insights into your application's performance with OpenTelemetry, fully integrated into Fir and our Heroku Metrics product.
By embracing open source standards and adhering to this design principle, we create a platform that is both powerful and predictable. Fir gives you the freedom and flexibility you need to build modern, cloud-native applications, using the developer experience that Heroku is known for.
Looking Ahead
Fir is a platform about bringing Cloud Native to everyone and is built to be the foundation for the next decade and beyond.
This is just the beginning. Today, we’re starting with a pilot for Fir Private Spaces, analogous to our Cedar Generation Private Spaces offering. We have an exciting roadmap ahead, with plans to introduce:
- Enhanced networking features including exposing apps through AWS VPC PrivateLink and AWS Transit Gateway
- Expand Isolation & sandboxing use cases such as Fir for Multi-Tenancy
- Software supply chain security including Software Bill of Materials (SBOMs) generation and cryptographically signed build provenance
Open source technologies form many of the underpinnings of Fir, bringing increased innovation and reliability to the platform, and we’re committed to actively participating in those communities. Your feedback and contributions are invaluable as we continue to evolve and improve Fir, directly shaping the future of the platform. Please join in the conversation on our public roadmap.
Ready to experience the next generation of Heroku? Sign up for the Heroku Fir pilot today and start building your next application on a platform built for the future.