Chapter 1

How Heroku Works

WHAT’S IN THIS CHAPTER?

  • How the stacks stack up
  • Understanding dynos and the dyno manifold
  • Understanding dyno isolation
  • Exploring the process model
  • Understanding erosion resistance
  • Managing version control
  • Understanding the slug compiler
  • Routing HTTP requests

Heroku is a polyglot, cloud-based development and application-delivery platform. It helps developers focus on building apps by removing the need for servers, system administration, and stack maintenance. The Heroku platform is a multi-tenant architecture built on virtual machines in Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2). Application management and scaling is done either through a command-line interface or online and on mobile devices, wherever you happen to be, via the API. Apps built on Heroku benefit from Heroku’s managed stack and self-healing architecture, ensuring that they do not require system administrators to manage the underlying platform in order to keep them secure and reliable. Automated failover, disaster recovery, and bit rot prevention are built in to the platform.

The Heroku platform offers capabilities for near-immediate deployment for both development and production apps. Heroku greatly assists agile development methodologies and allows for seamless continuous deployment. Configurable access security enables individual members of the development or scrum team to push changes. Overhead to set up and manage software development life-cycle support environments is no longer a ...

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