Scott Truitt

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Hackers exploit known but unpatched vulnerabilities or out-of-date software. Minimizing the time between when a patch or update becomes available and when it gets deployed is the most effective means of limiting damage. There’s nothing worse than seeing your company’s high-profile breach at the top of Hacker News and the Wall Street Journal.

This business and reputation risk is real. Like you, we’re faced with the same choice. We believe it’s best to budget some prevention time upfront for patching and updating data services. Otherwise, an incident may cost us (and you) a larger amount of remediation time and effort, to say nothing of the potential damage done to our (and your) brand, business, and customers.

That’s why we invest significant engineering, security, and operations effort into creating a proactive security posture that keeps your stack up-to-date through frequent, scheduled maintenances.