Redis might sound like it’s just a key/value store, but its versatility makes it a valuable Swiss Army knife for your application. Caching, queueing, geolocation, and more: Redis does it all. We’ve built (and helped our customers build) a lot of apps around Redis over the years, so we wanted to share a few tips that will ensure you get the most out of Redis, whether you’re running it on your own box or using the Heroku Redis add-on.

Use a Connection Pooler

By using a connection pooler, you'll reduce the connection overhead and therefore speed up operations while reducing the number of connections you use.

Most Redis libraries will provide you with a specific connection pooler...

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 Life Happens, 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 pricing...

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 Key-Value Store 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...