There are many reasons to choose Heroku Data services, but keeping the services you use secure and up-to-date rank near the top. This foundation of trust is the most important commitment we make to our customers, and frequent and timely maintenances are one way we deliver on this promise.

We do everything we can to minimize downtime, which is typically between 10 – 60 seconds per maintenance. There are ways for you to minimize disruption too (see the tips and tricks below). The rest of the post explains how we think about Heroku Data maintenances, how we perform them, and when we perform them.

An Ounce of Prevention...

Hackers exploit known but unpatched vulnerabilities or out-of-date...

This blog post is adapted from a talk given by Ali Hamidi at Data Council SF '19 titled "Operating Multi-Tenant Kafka Services for Developers on Heroku."

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

Building a SaaS product, a system to handle sensor data from an internet-connected thermostat or car, or an e-commerce store often requires handling a large stream of product usage data, or events. Managing event streams lets you view, in near real-time, how users are interacting with your SaaS app or the products on your e-commerce store; this is interesting because it lets you spot anomalies and get immediate data-driven feedback on new features. While this type of stream visualization is useful to a point, pushing events into a data warehouse lets you ask deeper questions using SQL.

In this post, we’ll show you how to build a system using Apache Kafka on Heroku to manage and visualize...

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...