All posts tagged with architecture


Evolving the Backend Storage for Platform Metrics

engineering , Software Architect

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.

This post previously appeared on the Salesforce Architects blog.

Event-driven application architectures have proven to be effective for implementing enterprise solutions using loosely coupled services that interact by exchanging asynchronous events. Salesforce enables event-driven architectures (EDAs) with Platform Events and Change Data Capture (CDC) events as well as triggers and Apex callouts, which makes the Salesforce Platform a great way to build all of your digital customer experiences. This post is the first in a series that covers various EDA patterns, considerations for using them, and examples deployed on the Salesforce Platform.

Expanding the event-driven architecture of the...

This blog post is adapted from a talk given by Stella Cotton at RailsConf 2018 titled "So You’ve Got Yourself a Kafka."

Hey, everybody. We're gonna get started. I hope that you're here to listen to me talk about Kafka, 'cause that's the room that you are in. So, yeah. First things first, my name is Stella Cotton. I am an engineer at Heroku. And like I said, I'm gonna talk to you today about Kafka. You might have heard that Heroku offers Kafka as a service. We have got a bunch of hosted plans, from tiny plans to giant plans. We have an engineering team that's strictly dedicated to doing cool stuff to get Kafka running on Heroku in super high capacity....

Beyond Web and Worker: Evolution of the Modern Web App on Heroku

engineering , Director, Developer Advocacy

This is the first in a series of blog posts examining the evolution of web app architecture over the past 10 years. This post examines the forces that have driven the architectural changes and a high-level view of a new architecture. In future posts, we’ll zoom in to details of specific parts of the system.

The standard web application architecture suitable for many organizations has changed drastically in the past 10 years. Back in Heroku’s early days in 2008, a standard web application architecture consisted of a web process type to respond to HTTP requests, a database to persist data, and a worker process type plus Redis to manage a job queue.

Editor’s Note: One of the joys of building Heroku is hearing about the exciting applications our customers are crafting. SHIFT Commerce - a platform helping retailers optimize their e-commerce strategy - is a proud and active user of Heroku in building its technology stack. Today, we’re clearing the stage for Ryan Townsend, CTO of SHIFT, as he provides an overview of SHIFT’s journey into building microservices architecture with the support of Apache Kafka on Heroku.


Software architecture has been a continual debate since software first came into existence. The latest iteration of this long-running discussion is between monoliths and microservices – large self-contained applications vs...

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