We recently sat down for a chat with Bill Curtis, a co-founder and the CTO of Sweet Tooth (Now Smile.io), a points and rewards app for online stores worldwide.

What has been your greatest challenge?

We’re serving way more data today than we ever have, so scaling is mission-critical. In the past, we’ve struggled with traffic spikes. For example, there are seasonal spikes, like Black Friday or Cyber Monday. There are also spikes from merchant activity, such as load testing stores or importing a large number of orders.

I recently tweeted our requests-per-hour graph. It showed that during the huge spikes for this year’s Black Friday and Cyber Monday, our product availability was seamless on...

Based in Tel Aviv, Israel, Vitali Margolin is the Head of R&D for Roomer. Vitali leads a team of seven developers who built and operate the travel marketplace www.roomertravel.com and the travel protection service www.life-happens.com, both running on Heroku.

What are you running on Heroku?

The four big projects are: the Roomer website, our administration app, our partner network and B2B website, and the Roomer API. The Roomer API is our highest load app. It can get up to 10k requests per minute from partner integrations such as Kayak. We have a few more technical products, including an app that does text recognition and automatically decodes confirmation emails, as well as a smart...

In 2013, Rafael Ördög put poker and code together, the result: Lean Poker, a competitive coding event that teaches continuous deployment and lean startup methodologies. Rafael is based in Budapest, Hungary.

What's Lean Poker?

Lean Poker is a coding workshop that is designed to teach people how to practice continuous deployment and lean startup methodologies. Companies can sponsor a free public event or hold an internal, team-building event for their own employees.

The basic starting code is really simple and teams can use the language of their choice. The challenge is not to understand an existing code base but to modify it—to build a new app. Teams must iterate their app quickly in...

Today we’re pleased to announce general availability of Heroku Redis with a number of new features and a more robust developer experience. By giving developers a different data management primitive, we’re helping them meet the needs of building modern, scalable applications. The classic example of using multiple data stores in an application is the e-commerce site that stores its valuable financial information in a relational database while the user session tokens are saved in a key-value store like Redis. This is one of the use cases where Redis has proven to be instrumental in solving problems like caching, queuing and session storage, just to name a few.

In addition to making Heroku...

Developers increasingly need a variety of datastores for their projects -- no one database can serve all the needs of a modern, scalable application. For example, an e-commerce app might store its valuable transaction data in a relational database while user session information is stored in a key-value store because it changes often and needs to be accessed quickly. This is a common pattern across many app types, and the need for a key-value store is especially acute. Today, we are pleased to announce the beta of Heroku Redis, joining Heroku Postgres as our second data service.

We have deep experience with Redis; internally at Heroku, we use Redis extensively as a queue, as a cache, and...