Heroku Announces Major New Version, "Celadon Cedar"; Includes New Process Model, Full Node.js Support

SAN FRANCISCO, May 31, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- Heroku, the leading open Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), has unveiled a major new release, "Celadon Cedar." The new version of Heroku has been used by hundreds of developers and customers in alpha and private beta and is now in public beta for the first time.

Celadon Cedar enables more powerful and complex apps with the following capabilities:

• New process model, including support for heterogeneous workers (background processes)
• Procfile for managing and defining process types, giving fine-grained control over processes
• Procfiles can be used outside of Heroku with the new open source Foreman project
• All processes running on Heroku are now called dynos, which are fully managed and run by the Heroku platform
• Updated HTTP stack including full HTTP 1.1 support with key features including long polling and chunked response

Unprecedented app visibility is provided by:

• Logplex: complete, consolidated logs for your apps as well as the infrastructure running your apps
• Command-line access to real-time, filterable application logs
• Heroku ps: visibility into real-time state of all dynotypes in your app
• Heroku Releases: a feature for instant roll-back and full audit trail of app versions

Multi-Language features are:

• Automatic language detection upon deploy
• Full Node.js support
• Ruby 1.9.2 support
• Ability to configure language support via Procfile

Erosion-resistant features for reliability, security, and durability include:

• Dyno manifold for scaling and distributing processes
• Full isolation of processes for security and performance
• Unlimited scaling of apps to N dynos
• LXC used as a container for all dynos running on Celadon Cedar

"Over the past three years, we've worked with tens of thousands of developers who are building for the cloud.  This new version of the Heroku platform is the culmination of what we've learned, and is a major step forward in realizing our vision to serve the millions more developers who will soon be moving to cloud app platforms," said Adam Wiggins, co-founder, Heroku. "The response from the hundreds of developers who have been using Cedar during our private beta has been incredible, and we couldn't be more excited to put it into the hands of developers worldwide."

In contrast to the complexity and limitations of running apps on other cloud platforms, Heroku's new release offers both the power of being able to run any number of arbitrary process types as well as the abstraction and automation of the platform that developers have come to love. Heroku has also introduced unprecedented visibility into the operation of apps and the underlying infrastructure in the platform itself, enabling developers to much more effectively discover and diagnose application behaviors. With erosion-resistance, applications just keep running, even years later, as Heroku automatically takes care of patches, security issues, and failures. Administrative tasks are isolated from running applications, memory allocation is managed, and an errant runaway process will not affect a running production application. Instead, Heroku keeps the process alive and healthy through failed servers, hardware errors, and other extraordinary events.

"We started out on Heroku because of how easy it was, expecting that as we grew we would have to re-architect our app and probably even move off of Heroku," said Brandon Keene of GroupMe. "As we've grown to sending 100s of millions of texts per month we've been amazed at the flexibility that Heroku has provided.  Using Procfile and the process model on Heroku has allowed GroupMe to scale and operate beyond our expectations."

The new version will include 750 free dyno-hours per month for each app.

About Heroku

Heroku is the leading open platform as a service (PaaS) focused on ease of use, automation, and reliability. Headquartered in San Francisco, CA, Heroku is a passionate and active supporter of Ruby technologies and cloud architecture. Heroku was recently named to the "Dow Jones FASTech 50 Start-ups to Watch" list, recognized as a Gartner 'Cool Vendor in Application Platforms as a Service' in April 2010, named to the Always OnDemand Top 100 Private Companies, and recognized as a 'Best Products of 2009' and 'Best Platform of 2010" by ReadWriteWeb. In April 2011, Heroku was named #2 on its annual list of 'Best Places to Work' in the Bay Area by the San Francisco Business Times. For more information, please visit http://heroku.com and http://blog.heroku.com or follow Heroku on Twitter at http://twitter.com/heroku. Heroku is a wholly owned subsidiary of salesforce.com.

Heroku disclaims any proprietary interest in the marks and names of others. Heroku disclaims any proprietary interest in the marks and names of others.  Any unreleased services or features referenced in this or other press releases or public statements are not currently available and may not be delivered on time or at all.  Customers who purchase Heroku applications should make their purchase decisions based upon features that are currently available.

SOURCE Heroku