As outlined in a previous blog post, Heroku Data services undergo routine maintenances for security and patching. In this post, we describe the process used to minimize downtime for Heroku Postgres and Heroku Redis premium ‘High Availability’ plans and how we optimized the process to perform up to 75% faster.

Data Services Architecture

High availability plans for Postgres and Redis are designed to have two database instances running at the same time. One is a writeable primary database server and the other is a read-only hidden standby. Since the standby is hidden, customers cannot access it during normal operations.

Before starting a planned maintenance, we do our best to ensure...

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Hackers exploit known but unpatched vulnerabilities or out-of-date...

Every organization needs to be data-driven in order to be successful. Whether you're tracking an application's performance, incoming support tickets, or revenue rates, different components of any company depend on metrics that inform the health of the business.

At Heroku, we're hackers to the core, but that doesn't mean we're all programmers. We build on top of our own platform for everything we do, and one of the products we often use is Heroku Dataclips. If you haven't heard of them before, Heroku Dataclips allow you to create SQL queries in a web GUI that run on your Heroku Postgres database. The unique dataclip URL can then be shared internally or externally,...

Today, we're thrilled to announce Heroku Postgres via PrivateLink, a new integration that enables customers to seamlessly and securely connect Heroku Postgres databases in Private Spaces to resources in one or more Amazon VPCs. Heroku Postgres via PrivateLink connections are secure and stable by default because traffic to and from Heroku Postgres stays on the Amazon private network; once a PrivateLink is set up, there is no brittle networking configuration to manage. As always, security and trust are top of mind with everything we do at Heroku.

The ability to configure Heroku Postgres via PrivateLink is already enabled on all private Postgres plans. It's also included at no...

The data we store holds value, but refining data into meaning remains a difficult task. Over the last few months, we've taken a step back to figure out what we can do to help our users cross that divide, and rebuilt Heroku Dataclips from scratch with that goal in mind. The result is an experience that makes accessing and working with your data easier than ever, enabling anyone on your team familiar with SQL to take advantage of your most valuable asset without the need for specialized tools or knowledge of the database.

Dataclips is a flexible, lightweight way to query your data in Heroku Postgres and share the results. At Heroku, we use them regularly across all of our departments....