Radial hosts the majority of our client applications on Heroku. When recently meeting with a client to discuss their upcoming project, I was flooded with infrastructure questions — How were we going to scale? How will our database be backed up? What happens if our servers go down? My typical answer is to not worry and that Heroku takes care of everything. I realized I needed to share more about Heroku to quiet their infrastructure fears.
What is Heroku?
Heroku is a cloud platform as a service. With Heroku, you can deploy, configure, scale and manage your application. The service handles 8 billion requests per day, over 5 million apps created on the platform and has over 150 ad-on services.
You do not need to know every technical detail about how Heroku works. Just know that Heroku has been able to solve every infrastructure problem Radial has put in front of it. And many larger companies, like Macy’s, Zayo and Toyota, all trust Heroku to solve their infrastructure problems. But if you want to get technical, start here.
In the real world
Here’s some real world examples of why Heroku is awesome.
A client’s app started to go viral and there was a concern if we were going to be able to handle the flood of users. To solve this, we logged onto Heroku and scaled up our servers with one click. Literally it only takes one click to instantly add servers or additional features. Easy!
We have all heard horror stories like this one most recently at GitLabs, but one of our Radial employees actually witnessed someone accidentally deleting a production database (important!! This did not happen at Radial — we have processes to ensure this never happens!). The story goes, that after this “database deleter” got done with their panic induced puking, a call to Heroku had the production database back within 15 minutes. Their data was never lost.
Heroku gives users an ‘EASY’ button for performance. Slow web requests? Heroku give you options. You can upgrade the existing servers, add more servers, upgrade the database, or try a combination of all three. Usually Heroku resources cost significantly less than developer time.
Conclusion
Heroku has the phrase “build apps, not infrastructure.” And as cheesy as it sounds, Heroku is Radial’s solution that helps us do just that, “build apps, not infrastructure”.