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...

Designing scalable, fault tolerant, and maintainable stream processing systems is not trivial. The Kafka Streams Java library paired with an Apache Kafka cluster simplifies the amount and complexity of the code you have to write for your stream processing system.

Unlike other stream processing systems, Kafka Streams frees you from having to worry about building and maintaining separate infrastructural dependencies alongside your Kafka clusters. However, you still need to worry about provisioning, orchestrating, and monitoring infrastructure for your Kafka Streams applications.

Heroku makes it easy for you to deploy, run, and scale your Kafka Streams applications by using supported...

Scott Raio is Co-Founder and CTO of Combatant Gentlemen], a design-to-delivery menswear e-commerce brand.

What microservices are you running in Heroku Private Spaces?

We’ve written an individual service for every business use case. For example, we have services for order processing, product catalog, account management, authentication, swatch display, POs, logistics, payments, etc.

With all these different services, we chose Heroku Private Spaces as a way to make service discovery easier. We’re currently running about 25 services, which is a relatively small number compared to Netflix or Twitter (who employ hundreds of services). But we’re growing, and we’re always evaluating our...

Based in Budapest, Hungary, Andras Fincza (Head of Engineering) and Rafael Ördög (Technical Lead) work for Emarsys, a global marketing automation platform. Read our Emarsys customer story to learn more about their migration experience on Heroku.

How did you introduce microservices at Emarsys?

We take an evolutionary approach to our architecture. Our marketing automation platform was originally designed as a monolithic system built in PHP and MySQL and running on in-house infrastructure. We were running two major services on our in-house infrastructure: one for HDS (historical data service) and the other for smart insights and analysis. However, it was hard to grow the platform...

Go-kit is a distributed programming toolkit for building microservices. It solves the common problems encountered while building distributed systems, so you can focus on your business logic. This article starts with a bit of background on microservices, then guidance on how to get started with Go-kit, including instructions on getting a basic service up and running on Heroku.

A Brief Intro to Microservices

Traditionally, web applications are built using a monolithic approach where the entire application is built, designed, deployed and maintained as a single unit. When working with a monolithic application various problems can arise over time: it’s easy for abstractions to leak across...