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...

Fun fact: the Heroku API consumes more endpoints than it serves. Our availability is heavily dependent on the availability of the services we interact with, which is the textbook definition of when to apply the circuit breaker pattern.

And so we did:

Circuit breakers really helped us keep the service stable despite third-party interruptions, as this graph of p95 HTTP queue latency shows.

Here I'll cover the benefits, challenges and lessons learned by introducing this pattern to a large scale production app.

A brief reminder that everything fails

Our API composes over 20 services – some public (S3, Twilio), some internal (run a process, map DNS record to an app) and some provided...

Developers want to spend less time setting up applications and start working with the code sooner. Setting up applications is error-prone, time consuming and interruptive to the development flow. Often, there are several steps to go from your code or other samples and templates that you find in repositories online, to a running application that you can continue to work on.

Today, we are excited to introduce the app.json manifest. app.json enables developers to define their applications' details, setup configurations and runtime environments in a structured way. Instead of providing step-by-step instructions, you can now add app.json files to your applications' source code. You...

Today we’re open sourcing the toolchain Heroku uses to design, document, and consume our APIs. We hope this shows how Heroku thinks about APIs and gives you new tools to create your own APIs.

Editor's note: This is a cross post from Blake Gentry, an engineer at Heroku.

This is a post about the recently announced Heroku Platform API JSON Schema and how I used that schema to write an auto-generated Go client for the API.

Heroku's API team has spent a large part of the past year designing a new version of the platform API. While this is the 3rd incarnation of the API, neither of the two previous versions were publicly documented. In fact, the only documentation on the old APIs that was ever published is the source code of the Heroku Rubygem, which powers the Heroku Toolbelt. That worked fairly well at the time for Heroku's Ruby-centric audience, but it was never...