One of our most important goals at Heroku is to be boring. Don’t get us wrong, we certainly hope that you’re excited about the Heroku developer experience — as heavy users of Heroku ourselves, we certainly are! But, even more so, we hope that you don’t have to spend all that much time thinking about Heroku. We want you to be able to spend your time thinking about the awesome, mission-critical things you’re building with Heroku, rather than worrying about the security, reliability, or performance of the underlying infrastructure they run on.

In May 2023, we announced our limited release of two new Heroku Private Spaces regions: India (Mumbai) and Canada (Montreal). This month, we’re announcing the full general availability of those two regions, along with new Heroku Private Spaces regions for the United Kingdom (London) and Singapore. This expansion enables customers to maintain greater control over where their data is stored and processed. These four new regions fully support Heroku Private Spaces, Heroku Shield Private Spaces, Heroku Postgres, Apache Kafka on Heroku, Heroku Key-Value Store, Heroku Connect, and most Heroku Add-ons.

Private Spaces provide a dedicated virtual network environment for running Heroku...

Heroku is excited to announce the addition of a third availability zone (AZ) for our Private Spaces product offering. Three availability zones make Private Space apps more resilient to outages. We’ve prioritized this improvement as part of our focus on mission-critical features to make the Heroku Platform even more reliable. The changeover to three availability zones is fully managed by Heroku. Heroku handles all maintenance, upgrades, and management of Private Spaces, so our customers can focus on delivering value to their users without worrying about the underlying infrastructure.

What are availability zones and how does Heroku use them?

All AWS regions have multiple availability...

This article was originally authored by Srinath Ananthakrishnan, an engineer on the Heroku Runtime Networking Team

Summary

This following story outlines a recent issue we saw with migrating one of our internal systems over to a new EC2 substrate and in the process breaking one of our customer’s use cases. We also outline how we went about discovering the root of the issue, how we fixed it, and how we enjoyed solving a complex problem that helped keep the Heroku customer experience as simple and straightforward as possible!

History

Heroku has been leveraging AWS and EC2 since the very early days. All these years, the Common Runtime has been running on EC2 Classic and while there have...

Security is always top of mind for Heroku customers; COVID-19 has further increased the urgency for enterprises and developers to deliver more mission-critical applications with sensitive and regulated data.

Given the needs of our customers, including those in regulated industries like Health & Life Sciences and Financial Services, we are thrilled to announce that Heroku Private Spaces and Shield customers can now deploy a new Postgres, Redis, or Apache Kafka service with a key created and managed in their private AWS KMS account. With BYOK, enterprises gain full data custody and data access control without taking on the burden of managing any aspect of the data service itself.

This...