Heroku

Heroku is an online Rack (and by extension, Ruby on Rails) cloud PaaS (Platform as a Service) run by a San Francisco, California based company with the same name. As one of the very first cloud platform as a service providers, Heroku has been in development since June 2007 and the company reports over 103,000 applications running on its service.

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-compatible projects, but in May 2010 expanded to include experimental support for Node.js and it remains in private beta to date. . Initially funded by Y Combinator and Redpoint Ventures, 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.

In Dec 2010 Heroku was acquired by Salesforce.com for $212 million in cash.

Heroku recently 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 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."

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

Awards and Accolades

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 in 2010, and recognized as a ‘Best Products of 2009’ by ReadWriteWeb.

Competitors

• Google App Engine
• Microsoft Azure Services Platform

External links

• Heroku Official site
• Deploying Azure Hosted Services Should Be as Easy as Deploying a Heroku Application
• Heroku’s Ruby Cloud Platform at Building 43 | Scobleizer
• Venture Wire FASTech Conference Spotlights Most Promising Start-Ups | Wall Street Journal
• Can Heroku Become the Official Cloud of Facebook Apps? | GigaOm