Need to quickly catch up on this past quarter's announcements? Here are the top three topics to tune in on:

Heroku announced the general availability of continuous integration (CI) on May 18, 2017. This new feature creates copies of staging apps to run tests, then destroys the app and its add-ons. With Heroku CI, you will see an increase in the number of default ephemeral plan resources regularly provisioned on Heroku review and CI apps. Previously, these apps used the add-on plan configured for staging.

As developers adopt CI/CD workflows, temporary deployments are becoming increasingly common. When ephemeral apps and their associated add-ons are destroyed, these actions should not...

Heroku has always made it easy for you to extend your apps with add-ons. Starting today, partners can access the Platform API to build a more secure and cohesive developer experience between add-ons and Heroku.

Advancing the Add-on User Experience

Several add-ons are already using the new Platform API for Partners. Adept Scale, a long-time add-on in our marketplace that provides automated scaling of Heroku dynos, has updated its integration to offer a stronger security stance, with properly scoped access to each app it is added to. Existing customer integrations have been updated as of Friday May 12th. All new installs of Adept Scale will use the more secure, scoped Platform API.

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Today we’re announcing that the APIs for the Heroku Connect data synchronization service are now GA. These fully supported endpoints will help our users with the tasks they most need repeatable automation for: creating consistent configuration across development, staging, and production environments; managing connections across multiple Salesforce deployments; and integrating Heroku Connect status with their existing operational systems and alerts.

When we first released Heroku Connect, users were delighted with the simple point and click UI: they could suddenly integrate Salesforce data with Heroku Postgres in one enjoyable minute! But as users’ familiarity with the service has grown...

I spend most of my time at Heroku working on our support tools and services; help.heroku.com is one such example. Heroku's help application depends on the Platform API to, amongst other things, authenticate users, authorize or deny access, and fetch user data.

So, what happens to tools and services like help.heroku.com during a platform incident? They must remain available to both agents and customers—regardless of the status of the Platform API. There is simply no substitute for communication during an outage.

To ensure this is the case, we use api-maintenance-sim, an app we recently open-sourced, to regularly simulate Platform API incidents.

Simulating downtime

During a Platform...

If your application is successful, there may come a time where you’re on an unsupported version of a dependency. In the case of the Heroku Platform API, this dependency was a very old version of Active Record from many years ago. Due to the complexity involved in the upgrade, this core piece of infrastructure had been pegged at version 2.3.18, which was released in March 2013. We're happy to announce that we've overcome the challenge and are now running Active Record 4.2.4, the latest version, in production. In this post, we'll describe the technical challenges we faced in the upgrade process and take a look at how your organization could benefit from upgrading legacy software...