Deploying with Heroku

Design and Build Great Web APIs — by Mike Amundsen (84 / 127)

👈 The Role of DevOps | TOC | What’s Next? 👉

Earlier in this chapter, I described the process of continuous delivery (see ​Continuous Delivery​). To automate on-demand deployment we need to manage lots of seemingly tedious details, such as making sure the app is deployed using the right hardware platform, the correct version of the host operating system, the proper web framework and library dependencies, and so forth. It can be a very daunting task to get that all correct, especially for developers who don’t already know this level of detail on their own systems, let alone the systems running in production.

Luckily, thousands of developers and systems operators before us have boiled the process of continuous delivery down to a stable set of tasks to perform for each deployment. Even better for us, we can take advantage of this accumulated knowledge by using tools and platforms purpose-built for solving this problem. The one we’ll be using in this book is the Heroku cloud platform.

The Heroku Platform

Heroku is a cloud-based Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS). It’s designed to host Internet-based applications and has lots of tools and services to make that kind of work safe, easy, and reliable.[93] Started in 2007 by a handful of enterprising Ruby language developers, Heroku has transformed into a company that supports most of the major web programming languages…