OSM Alert

Introduction to Heroku

We use Heroku to deploy our web app for OSM Alert.

Overview

• platform for easy deploying of web apps
  • “zero-configuration” cloud provider (very quick setup compared to other providers)
• each app runs in an own container (“dyno”)
• supports many different programming languages (Ruby, Node.js, Go, Java, …)
• supports deploying docker containers
• highly scalable
  • ideally suited for small test deployments
  • also works for production web apps with large amounts of users

Most important Concepts / Tools

• concept of “deploying”
  • taking a built app to Heroku which serves the app to users
    • no need to operate own servers
    • focus just on writing the app (no caring about network or uptime)

  • deployment can be triggered manually (Heroku CLI) or automatically (e.g. GitHub actions)

  • Heroku CLI (command line interface)
    • create and manage dynos
    • can trigger deployments
    • manage add-ons
• many add-ons available for a web app
  • Managed Postgres databases
    • relational SQL databases with high availability
  • Redis key-value store
    • in-memory store especially used for caching
  • Cloud mail service (“mailertogo”)
  • Apache Kafka
  • and more

Resources (Links)

• https://www.heroku.com/what
• https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/getting-started-with-java?singlepage=true
• https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/heroku-cli