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Developer Tools

Dawn of the Dead Ends: Fixing a Memory Leak in Apache Kafka

At Heroku, we're always working towards increased operational stability with the services we offer. As we recently launched the beta of Apache Kafka on Heroku , we've been running a number of clusters on behalf of our beta customers.

Over the course of the beta, we have thoroughly exercised Kafka through a wide range of cases, which is an important part of bringing a fast-moving open-source project to market as a managed service. This breadth of exposure led us to the discovery of a memory leak in Kafka, having a bit of an adventure debugging it, and then…

Threshold Alerting for Application Metrics Now Generally Available

Today we're announcing two new features that will help you better manage and run apps on Heroku: Threshold Alerting and Hobby dyno metrics. Threshold Alerting provides the ability to set notification thresholds for key performance and health indicators of your app. We’ve also extended basic Application Metrics to Hobby dynos to provide basic health monitoring and application guidance. Together these features allow you to stay focused on building functionality by letting the platform handle your app monitoring.

Threshold Alerting

There are many ways to measure the health of an application. The new alerting feature…

See Python, See Python Go, Go Python Go

Andrey Petrov is the author of urllib3 , the creator of Briefmetrics and ssh-chat , and a former Googler and YCombinator alum. He’s here to tell us of a dangerous expedition his requests undertook, which sent them from Python, through the land of C, to a place called Go (and back again).

Today we're going to make a Python library that is actually the Go webserver, for which we can write handlers in Python. It makes Python servers really fast, and—more importantly—it’s a bit fun and experimental. This post is a more detailed overview of…

Heroku Connect APIs Now GA

Today we’re announcing that the APIs for the Heroku Connect data synchronization service are now GA. These fully supported endpoints will help our users with the tasks they most need repeatable automation for: creating consistent configuration across development, staging, and production environments; managing connections across multiple Salesforce deployments; and integrating Heroku Connect status with their existing operational systems and alerts.

When we first released Heroku Connect, users were delighted with the simple point and click UI: they could suddenly integrate Salesforce data with Heroku Postgres in one enjoyable minute! But as users’ familiarity with the service…

Real-Time Rails: Implementing WebSockets in Rails 5 with Action Cable

It's been one year since Action Cable debuted at RailsConf 2015, and Sophie DeBenedetto is here to answer the question in the minds of many developers: what is it really like to implement "the highlight of Rails 5"? Sophie is a web developer and an instructor at the Flatiron School. Her first love is Ruby on Rails, although she has developed projects with and written about Rails, Ember and Phoenix.

Recent years have seen the rise of "the real-time web." Web apps we use every day rely on real-time features—the sort of features that let you…

Django Channels: How to Build Real-Time Web Apps With Python

Today, we're thrilled to host Jacob Kaplan-Moss . Jacob's a former Herokai and long-time core contributor to Django, and he's here to share an in-depth look at something that he believes will define the future of the framework.

Django Channels allows Python developers to build real-time, asynchronous web apps with Python and JavaScript. It augments Django’s robust response-request architecture with asynchronous protocol handling, including WebSockets support. In this Django Channels tutorial, we’ll show you how to build a real-time chat app with Django, Channels, Redis, and Heroku Dynos.

What are Django Channels?…

Incident Preparation: Simulating Third-Party Downtime

I spend most of my time at Heroku working on our support tools and services; help.heroku.com is one such example. Heroku’s help application depends on the Platform API to, amongst other things, authenticate users, authorize or deny access, and fetch user data.

So, what happens to tools and services like help.heroku.com during a platform incident? They must remain available to both agents and customers—regardless of the status of the Platform API. There is simply no substitute for communication during an outage.

To ensure this is the case, we use api-maintenance-sim , an app we recently open-sourced, to regularly simulate Platform API incidents.

…

How Lean Poker Teaches Continuous Deployment on Heroku

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…

Upgrading to Rails 5 Beta – The Hard Way

Rails 5 has been brewing for more than a year. To take advantage of new features, and stay on the supported path, you'll need to upgrade. In this post, we'll look at the upgrade process for a production Rails app, codetriage.com . The codebase is open source so you can follow along . Special thanks to Prathamesh for his help with this blog post.

How Stable is the Beta?

In Rails a beta means the API is not yet stable, and features will come and go. A Release Candidate (RC) means no new features; the…

50% and Counting: PHP 7 Takes Off

A year and half ago, we launched support for PHP on Heroku , built from the ground up with modern features designed to give developers a more elegant and productive experience on the platform. Last week, we made PHP 7 available on top of a new, reworked version of our PHP support, and our users are adopting PHP 7’s exciting new features and stellar performance improvements quickly—we’re already seeing PHP 7 being used in the majority of PHP deploys on Heroku.

Under the hood, much of the logic that handles a deploy has changed, but not the fundamental…

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