Heroku - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

Heroku is a cloud Platform as a Service

Platform as a service

Platform as a service is a category of cloud computing services that provide a computing platform and a solution stack as a service...

(PaaS) run by the San Francisco, California

California

California is a state located on the West Coast of the United States. It is by far the most populous U.S. state, and the third-largest by land area...

-based company with the same name. Heroku led the way for a multi-language PaaS, introducing the 'polyglot platform'. Heroku initially supported the Ruby programming language

Ruby (programming language)

Ruby is a dynamic, reflective, general-purpose object-oriented programming language that combines syntax inspired by Perl with Smalltalk-like features. Ruby originated in Japan during the mid-1990s and was first developed and designed by Yukihiro "Matz" Matsumoto...

, with Rack

Rack (web server interface)

Rack provides a minimal, modular and adaptable interface for developing web applications in Ruby. By wrapping HTTP requests and responses in the simplest way possible, it unifies and distills the API for web servers, web frameworks, and software in between into a single method call.Rack is...

and Ruby on Rails

Ruby on Rails

Ruby on Rails, often shortened to Rails or RoR, is an open source web application framework for the Ruby programming language.-History:...

. Heroku PaaS now supports six languages: Ruby, Java

Java

Java is an island of Indonesia. With a population of 135 million , it is the world's most populous island, and one of the most densely populated regions in the world. It is home to 60% of Indonesia's population. The Indonesian capital city, Jakarta, is in west Java...

, Node.js

Node.js

Node.js is a software system designed for writing highly-scalable internet applications, notably web servers.Programs are written in JavaScript, using event-driven, asynchronous I/O to minimize overhead and maximize scalability....

, Scala

Scala

Scala may refer to:* SCALA, the Student Chapter of the American Library Association* FF Scala and FF Scala Sans, typefaces by Dutch typeface designer Martin Majoor* Scala Sancta or Holy Stairs, a staircase in Rome, Italy...

, Clojure

Clojure

Clojure |closure]]") is a recent dialect of the Lisp programming language created by Rich Hickey. It is a general-purpose language supporting interactive development that encourages a functional programming style, and simplifies multithreaded programming....

and Python

Python

The Pythonidae, commonly known simply as pythons, from the Greek word python-πυθων, are a family of non-venomous snakes found in Africa, Asia and Australia. Among its members are some of the largest snakes in the world...

cloud PaaS. As one of the very first cloud platforms as a service provider, Heroku has been in development since June 2007 and the company reports over 400,000 web applications running on its service.

On December 8, 2010, Salesforce.com

Salesforce.com

Salesforce.com is an enterprise cloud computing company headquartered in San Francisco that distributes business software on a subscription basis. Salesforce.com hosts the applications off-site...

entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Heroku for a reported $212 million. Heroku will continue to exist as a wholly owned subsidiary of Salesforce.com.

History

Heroku was founded by a team of engineers who thought web app development was too complicated. James Lindenbaum, Adam Wiggins, and Orion Henry founded Heroku with exclusive support of Rack

Rack (web server interface)

-compatible projects, but in July 2011 expanded to include support for Node.js

Node.js

and Clojure

Clojure

. Initially funded by Y Combinator

Y Combinator

Y Combinator is an American seed-stage startup funding firm, started in March 2005. Y Combinator provides seed money, advice, and connections at two 3-month programs per year...

and Redpoint Ventures

Redpoint Ventures

Redpoint Ventures is a prominent venture capital firm focused on investments in early stage technology companies. The firm's partners include Allen Beasley, Jeff Brody, Satish Dharmaraj, Tom Dyal, Tim Haley, Brad Jones, Nety Krishna, Chris Moore, Lars Pedersen, Scott Raney, John Walecka, Geoff...

, Heroku secured $3M in funding in 2008.

In October 2009, industry veteran Byron Sebastian joined Heroku as CEO as the company began to build out the platform and achieve rapid growth and adoption in the market.

In May 2010 Heroku secured $10M in Series B funding led by Seattle's Ignition Partners and former Microsoft CIO/CFO John Connors joined the Heroku board.

On December 8, 2010 Salesforce.com entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Heroku for a reported $212 million in cash. Heroku will continue to exist as a wholly owned subsidiary of Salesforce.com.

On July 12, 2011 Heroku announced that Matz

Yukihiro Matsumoto

is a Japanese computer scientist and software programmer best known as the chief designer of the Ruby programming language and its reference implementation, Matz's Ruby Interpreter ....

, the creator of the Ruby programming language

Ruby (programming language)

, had joined the company as Chief Architect, Ruby.

On September 15, 2011 Heroku and Facebook

Facebook

Facebook is a social networking service and website launched in February 2004, operated and privately owned by Facebook, Inc. , Facebook has more than 800 million active users. Users must register before using the site, after which they may create a personal profile, add other users as...

teamed up and introduced Heroku for Facebook,, as a quick and easy way to 'to get your own Facebook app up and running in the cloud.'

Platform as a Service

The Heroku development team regularly adds features to Heroku. Heroku claims to offer the most NoSQL Add-on Solutions in the market today using a single click. Pioneering NoSQL companies available include Cloudant, Membase, MongoDB and Redis, with more technologies in the pipeline. In November 2010 alone, Heroku added a release management add-on, a new and improved database backup solution called 'Heroku PG Backups' that is the officially supported and recommended method of backing up your PostgreSQL

PostgreSQL

PostgreSQL, often simply Postgres, is an object-relational database management system available for many platforms including Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris, MS Windows and Mac OS X. It is released under the PostgreSQL License, which is an MIT-style license, and is thus free and open source software...

database on Heroku in addition to releasing the Heroku PostgreSQL Database Add-on.

In November 2010, Heroku announced a partnership with Facebook, creating the Heroku Facebook App Package which enable companies—large and small—to quickly and easily create Facebook apps reliably. Said Mike Vernal, Director of the Facebook

Facebook

Platform, "Heroku makes building and scaling Facebook applications easier than ever. Developers can focus on their app, getting it in the hands of millions of Facebook users quickly."

Awards and Accolades

Heroku was 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 in 2010, and recognized as a ‘Best Products of 2009’ and one of the 'Top 10 Cloud Computing Services for 2010' by ReadWriteWeb. In April 2011, Heroku was named #2 on its annual list of 'Best Places to Work' in the Bay Area.

Competitors

Google App Engine
Google App Engine
Google App Engine is a platform as a service cloud computing platform for developing and hosting web applications in Google-managed data centers. It virtualizes applications across multiple servers,...
Microsoft Azure Services Platform
Azure Services Platform
The Windows Azure Platform is a Microsoft cloud platform used to build, host and scale web applications through Microsoft data centers. Windows Azure Platform is thus classified as platform as a service and forms part of Microsoft's cloud computing strategy, along with their software as a service...
Cloud Foundry
Cloud Foundry
Cloud Foundry is free, open source cloud computing platform as a service software developed by VMware released as free software under the terms of the Apache License 2.0. Written in Ruby....

External links

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.