A quick overview of Heroku

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David Scruggs
@davescruggs
Principal Solution Engineer, Salesforce
Introduction to the Heroku Platform

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 David Scruggs
 Salesforce
 I need to restart my blog
 dscruggs@salesforce.com
 @davescruggs
 I started off doing robotics work in the early 1990’s, then moved to
startups through the rest of the 90’s.Afterwards, I’ve been a
technical specialist in Java, .NET, and Cloud technologies for the
past 15 years.
My Bio

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 See website for more info and directions
 atlanta.cloudsaturday.com
Continue the conversation…

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Safe harbor statement under the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995:
This presentation may contain forward-looking statements that involve risks, uncertainties, and assumptions. If any such uncertainties materialize
or if any of the assumptions proves incorrect, the results of salesforce.com, inc. could differ materially from the results expressed or implied by the
forward-looking statements we make. All statements other than statements of historical fact could be deemed forward-looking, including any
projections of product or service availability, subscriber growth, earnings, revenues, or other financial items and any statements regarding
strategies or plans of management for future operations, statements of belief, any statements concerning new, planned, or upgraded services or
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completed and any possible mergers and acquisitions, the immature market in which we operate, our relatively limited operating history, our ability
to expand, retain, and motivate our employees and manage our growth, new releases of our service and successful customer deployment, our
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may not be delivered on time or at all. Customers who purchase our services should make the purchase decisions based upon features that are
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Safe Harbor

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A proven
system with
a manifesto,
a methodology,
a collection of
experiences
Having the
goals
scalability,
maintainability,
portability
And uses
declarative setup
clean contracts
minimum
divergence
Heroku is an opinionated PaaS based on a 12-Factor
philosophy that is

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Codebase:
• One codebase tracked
in revision control,
many deploys
Dependencies:
• Explicitly declare and
isolate dependencies
Config:
• Store config in the
environment
Backing Services:
• Treat backing services
as attached resources
Build, release, run:
• Strictly separate build
and run stages
Processes:
• Execute the app as
one or more stateless
processes
Port binding:
• Export services via port
binding
Concurrency:
• Scale out via the
process model
Disposability:
• Maximize robustness
with fast startup and
graceful shutdown
Dev/prod parity:
• Keep development,
staging, and production
as similar as possible
Logs:
• Treat logs as event
streams
Admin processes:
• Run
admin/management
tasks as one-off
processes
12 Factor Philosophy

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Dynos:
Run virtually any
language at scale
Database:
Enterprise Postgres as
a service
Add-ons:
Marketplace for
logging, data and more
What is Heroku? A Proven Service to Build, Run and Scale Apps

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 Supported Languages
• Ruby
• Node.js
• Java
• Python
• PHP
Buildpacks
• Dart
• GO!
• Scala
• Clojure
• Erlang
• Perl
• and more…
 Data stores
• Postgres
• Redis
• Mongo
• CouchDB
• Hadoop
• MySQL
• Elasticsearch
• Neo4j
 Heroku supports modern software development

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Fork
Follow
Continuous Protection
Multi-Ingress
High Availability
Rollback
Dataclips
Automated Health Checks
Heroku Postgres Database Experience

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DbX
DB Operations
Core Postgres
Cloud Infrastructure
Performanceanalysis
Data clips
Forking
Web & command lineinterfaces
Data rollback
Followers
Optimizedconfiguration
Continuousprotection
Highavailability
Encryptionat rest
Custom SLAs
Automatedmonitoring
OS and databasepatching
Heroku Postgres DbX – Beyond advanced DB operations
Open source
Object-relationaldatabase
SQL: 2011 standard
Integrate with ORCL/ MS-SQL
Migrate from ORCL/ MS-SQL

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Heroku Elements: Add on Catalog

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 Over 150 Add Ons, 900 Buildpacks,
and 1700 buttons
 Easily plug new functionality into your
app
 Pick and choose technologies, try
new features easily
 Data Stores / Search / Caching
 Logging /Analytics / Monitoring
 Email and SMS
 Workers and Queuing
 Media
 Payments
 Utilities
Heroku Elements

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Elastic Load Balancing
ControlSurfaceAPIs
Developer
Code
• Java
• Ruby
• Node.js
• Clojure …
Deploy
• GIT
Manage
• Heroku CLI
• Scaling
• Monitoring
User
• Web browser Access
• API access
HTTP(S)
REST
HerokuArchitecture

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• A Dyno is a single process of any type running on the Heroku platform.
• This can include web processes, worker processes (such as timed jobs
and queuing systems), and any process types declared in the app’s
Procfile.
What is a Dyno ?

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• The number of Dynos allocated for your app can be increased or decreased at any time - without any server provisioning.
Elasticity :
• The routing mesh tracks the location of all web Dynos and routes HTTP traffic to them accordingly.
Intelligent routing :
• Each Dyno process is monitored for responsiveness. Misbehaving Dynos are taken down and new Dynos are launched in their place.
Process management :
• Dynos are distributed across a distributed execution environment known as the Dyno manifold. An app configured with two web Dynos is
running 2 processes but each process runs in a separate physical location. If a machine goes down, your app stays up.
Distribution and redundancy :
• Every Dyno is completely isolated in its own sub-virtualized container, with many benefits for security, resource guarantees and overall
robustness.
Isolation :
Dyno Features

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• Slugs are compressed packages optimized for lightning fast distribution across the Dyno grid
• When you ‘git push’ to Heroku, the slug compiler transforms your repository into a slug
• Compilation
• Create a fresh checkout from the master branch
• Download, build and install dependencies (gemfile, pom.xml, package.json,…)
• Remove unused files
• git directory, log, tmp, local build dependencies such as .gem files, .slugignore
• Write into the slug
• Also when config var or add-on is changed
• Package into the final slug archive
• Slug size
• Small < 15MB
• Medium ~ 30MB
• Weighty 40MB+
• Consider removing unneeded dependencies, use .slugignore to remove unneeded files
• Maximum slug size == 100MB
The Slug compiler

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• Web
• Only process accessible over http(s)
• Worker
• Background processes
• Clock
• Run at scheduled intervals
• Processes can scale independently
• Process diversity gives you more granular control
over where to add resources
Process Types

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Command Line at your desktop, in the web console …
…or while you’re having lunch
• Realtime up/downscaling, in seconds
• Automatic load balancing
• Share nothing ! Use memchache, REST principles .. in
your code
• Single web Dyno apps idle out eventually
Dyno Scaling

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Heroscale.com
• “The hardest question to answer”
• Almost always app specific
• Increasing Dyno A could kill Dyno B
• Are you bottlenecking on code or in the DB layer ?
• A bit like “just throw hardware at the problem”
• Heroku does provide metrics via logging
• Queue depth (how many requests waiting)
• Wait Time (for how long)
• Requests ‘wait’ in the routing mesh
• You could script grep | if/then | heroku scale logic
• Add-ons exist but might not give the granularity you need
How To Auto-scale ?

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• Dyno manifold
• offers an isolated execution environment for Dyno’s in the process formation and Dyno’s run as one-off
admin processes
• LXC (Linux Containers)
• Open source, lightweight virtual system
• Resource and process table isolation
• Not a VM like KVM, Xen, …
• chroot
• Filesystem isolation
• Ephemeral Filesystem
• gets fresh copy of most recently deployed code
• can be used as ‘scratchpad’ but files are not visible to other Dyno’s (even in the same app)
• discarded when Dyno’s stop / restart
• Advantages over Server based deployment
• Isolated Dyno’s don’t compete for resources (CPU, Mem,..) and can not starve other Dyno’s
• Overloaded apps can not ‘block’ the administrators out because of completely unresponsive servers
Dyno Isolation

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• The routing mesh will take care of routing Http request to your Dyno(s)
• The heroku.com HTTP stack
• Requests enter through Nginx (SSL and Gzip)
• Varnish = reverse proxy cache
• Cached for GET requests, uses your caching headers
• POST is bypassed
• 30 second timeout
• HTTP 1.0 compliant
• No long polling or chunked responses
• One connection at a time
• The herokuapp.com HTTP stack
• Request enter through load balancer with HTTP and SSL termination
• Direct path to your Dyno’s
• Allows for chunked responses, long polling
• HTTP 1.1 compliant
• No implicit caching - Use rack-cache or memcache add-on
• 30 second to return first reponse data, then a 55 second rolling window timeout
• Async or multithreaded apps can handle multiple connections
• Response compression needs to be done in your application
Http Routing

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• Can you beat the forces of entropy that affect any running app :
• OS upgrades, kernel patches, infrastructure software upgrades
• Disks filling up
• Dependent or sub-processes crashing
• Hardware failure
• Heroku is Erosion-resistant
• Dyno manifold automatically monitors your processes
• Crashed processes are automatically restarted
• Heroku ops team keep OS and other underlying components up to date without having
to bring down any running app.
• PostgreSQL, database.com are fully managed and monitored without intervention from
the app owner
• Dyno’s are restarted every 24 hours, so design for this
Erosion Resistance

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• Heroku Shared PostgreSQL
• ‘’Traditional’ RDBMS
• Configured by default and automatically
• Suitable for development and staging
• Heroku Dedicated PostgreSQL
• Multiple packages to choose from
• Direct database connectivity (psql / libpq)
• Instant provisioning and customer driven migrations
• PostgreSQL 8.4.4 & 9.x support
• Stored Procedures
• Improved backup,restore, import through pgbackups add-on.
Database Storage

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• Database.com
• Identity & access management
• Built-in Backup & DR
• Social API
• Data API
• Developer libraries for Ruby, Java, iOS, PHP, …
• Mobile apps
• Add-ons for pretty much every scenario
• Amazon RDS
• Redis-to-go (High performance, in memory key-value store)
• ClearDB (Cloud based MySQL)
• Cloudant (CouchDB, document based storage engine)
• MongoLab, MongoHQ (MongoDB document based storage)
• Amazon S3 (File Storage)
Database Storage

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• Logs are a stream of time-ordered events aggregated from the output streams of all your
app’s running processes, system components, and backing services. Heroku’s Logplex
routes all log streams into a single channel for comprehensive logging.
• App Logs
• System Logs
• API Logs
• Your app logs by writing to stdout / stderr
• Logs are available from CLI or consumed by add-ons such as NewRelic
$ heroku logs --source heroku --ps router
2010-09-16T15:13:46-07:00 heroku[router]: GET myapp.heroku.com/posts queue=0 wait=0ms service=1ms bytes=975
$ heroku logs -s app
2010-09-16T15:13:46-07:00 app[web.1]: Processing PostController#list (for 208.39.138.12 at 2010-09-16 15:13:46) [GET]
2010-09-16T15:13:47-07:00 app[worker.1]: 2 jobs processed at 16.6761 j/s, 0 failed ...
$ heroku logs -s app -p worker.1
2010-09-16T15:13:47-07:00 app[worker.1]: 2 jobs processed at 16.6761 j/s, 0 failed ...
Monitoring and Logging

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3rd party : NewRelic add-on
• 24x7 Transaction Analysis and Breakdown Component-level views of
individual transactions
• Real User Analysis and Breakdown In-depth, page-by-page analysis
• Database Analysis and Breakdown Deep visibility into SQL statements
and EXPLAINS
• Error Detection and Analysis Drill down into server errors
• Reporting and Optimization Capacity, Scalability, Long-Term Perf, and
SLA reports
• Proactive Alerting Immediate notification of potential issues
Monitoring and Logging

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• set up a new app
 heroku create
• first push to the new app
 git push heroku
• change something, push it again
 git push heroku
• Scale
 heroku ps:scale web=??
Deploying to Heroku

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• They cover all of the supported languages.
Getting Started Guides (https://devcenter.heroku.com/start)
• High level metrics to monitor your applications
Dashboard (https://dashboard.heroku.com)
• A great resource for learning about the platform, and how to effectively use it.
Dev Center (https://devcenter.heroku.com)
• a good paradigm for building scaleable, portable apps in the cloud.
12 Factor App (http://12factor.net)
• An expert at Heroku.
• Schedule meetings with your assigned TAM, to get detailed advice on best practices and help with scaling, load testing, and architecture.
Technical Account Manger
Developer Tools

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DEMO
Let’s get started

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 How would I build an app from scratch?
rails new <app name>
cd <app name>
start your killer app
heroku create
git push heroku master
iterate
So, we just deployed a pre-building application

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 Bring your favorite language - https://devcenter.heroku.com/start
Choose the language that is:
 Most productive for your team
 Most effective in the problem domain
That’s for a Rails App

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 https://www.heroku.com/cx
Deploy a mobile Loyalty app

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Questions?

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