Big things are happening at Heroku, so we felt it was time for an overall update. I’m happy to say that not only has the platform doubled in size over the last 12 months to well over 35,000 live apps, but usage has become more serious and far more intense. Tons of business-critical apps are now live on Heroku, and rely on us for dependable, secure, scalable service, 24/7.

We are seeing some really cool and complex composite apps now that the platform has expanded and become more flexible. The app scale we’re seeing has jumped too, with many apps now each individually exceeding hundreds of millions of requests per month.

All of this is largely due to our passionate users and...

Our good friends at Shopify recently released a developer platform which makes it crazy easy to build custom functionality into an e-commerce store using a standalone Rails app. There are already some great apps available in their app store, many of which are running on Heroku.

Check out the excellent getting started video by James MacAulay. It shows just how slick the Shopify API is – these guys are really taking e-commerce to the next level. (And bonus points for use of config vars to store API keys!)

RailsConf starts tomorrow and Heroku will be there in full force. Here’s our line up:

Monday, 1:30pm — A Hat Full of Tricks with Sinatra

Our very own Blake Mizerany, the creator of Sinatra, is giving a tutorial on Sinatra. Ryan Tomayko will be on hand as well.

Tuesday, 1:50pm — The Future of Deployment: A Killer Panel

Join me as I moderate a panel on deployment, with a truly killer group: Marc-André Cournoyer (creator of Thin), Christian Neukirchen (creator of Rack), Ryan Tomayko (Rack core team, creator of Rack::Cache, Sinatra core team), Blake Mizerany (creator of Sinatra), and Adam Wiggins (Heroku cofounder, creator of RestClient, Rush, and many others).

Wednesday,...

When Adam, Orion, and I started Heroku two years ago, we had no idea how much new technology we would have to build to realize our vision of an instant platform for Ruby that just works.

Luckily, we were able to attract an amazing team to work on this problem with us, and the team has really shaped Heroku into the offering it is today. We’re currently by far the fastest and easiest deployment platform for Ruby, and we’ve gotten great feedback on our provisionless hosting architecture.

We have over 25,000 apps running on the platform today, and many of our users have been asking for pricing and paid services for some time now. So today we’re pleased to announce that we...

2008 was a very, very big year for Heroku. We launched the first version of the platform, picked up some world-class investors, expanded the team with some amazing talent (there are 10 of us now), spoke at a zillion conferences about Ruby, Rails, Sinatra, the web stack, and cloud computing, and have grown like crazy.

Private Beta

Most importantly, we’ve had an incredibly successful private beta. We launched it less than a year ago, and we have well over 20,000 apps running on Heroku today. This is one of the largest collections of Rails apps in the world, ranging from enterprise software to web 2.0 apps to iPhone app backends, and everything in between. This richly diverse...