Chapter 1. Hello Heroku

The recent advances in technology coupled with a demand for cost efficient computing have led to an enormous growth of cloud computing usage in modern day businesses. Users want to optimize their resource usage of the CPU, network, and the memory and pay for only what they use. Virtualization, faster/larger computing power, and high speed network backbones have led to an explosion in the deployment of cloud infrastructure across the world. Along with the underlying infrastructure, many platforms have evolved to support the ability to develop real apps for the cloud environment virtually from anywhere. Additionally, new cloud-based software apps have proliferated so fast that they have replaced the notion of installed software for good.

Today, no developer is untouched by the cloud. In their day to day lives, developers use one or the other form of a cloud service—whether it is an Amazon-hosted virtual machine to do testing or a cloud-based development environment to write code for their business apps. Cloud is everywhere.

In this book, we will undertake the journey to explore a very significant and specific aspect of cloud computing, that is, how to develop web apps on the cloud. We will use the Heroku platform to build robust and scalable web apps and in the process understand different aspects of the Heroku platform.

All aboard? Let us begin the journey. In this chapter, we will:

Define cloud computing and understand its various components
Understand what cloud application development is and what its advantages are
Introduce you to Heroku and trace its history
Review high level Heroku architecture
Get acquainted with Heroku's features
Learn how to install Heroku
Test drive Heroku

What is cloud computing?

Simply put, cloud computing is a form of computing in which the user accesses any computing resource remotely through a simple client, which in most cases is a web browser. This resource could be a software application or an operating system or remotely located hardware. Cloud computing is a manifestation of the desire to optimize the use of shared computing resources by creating an infrastructure that lets you use the computing power, storage, and network optimally and pay for only what you use.

Cloud service models

The services offered by cloud computing are further divided into different service models—infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), and software as a service (SaaS). This classification is done to segregate the different types of services a user can purchase to meet their business needs in a cloud computing environment.

IaaS is the cloud service model that enables the user provision virtualized hardware resources on demand. Physically, these resources could be spread across multiple data centers, which the service provider maintains. These resources include the virtual storage, network connections, and load balancers for the provisioned hardware resource. The user can use the resource on demand and pay per use. If the user needs more resources, the provider has the ability to automatically scale up the hardware according to the need and vice versa. A good example of an IaaS provider is the Amazon Web Services (AWS—http://aws.amazon.com). It is the most popular IaaS provider in the cloud. Rackspace (http://www.rackspace.com) is another such example.

PaaS is the cloud service model that provides the tools to build software applications on the cloud. A close analogy would be to look at PaaS as an operating system and middleware of the cloud environment. PaaS provides developers with the underlying platform to use to develop their apps. It takes care to support a specific language or technology that the stack developers want to use. Many PaaS providers also enable on-demand scaling of the underlying computer and storage resources, automatically, to free the cloud user from the job of allocating resources manually. In PaaS, the consumer of the service controls deployment and configuration. The PaaS provider provisions the servers, network, and the computational needs of the software application. The PaaS model also enables a multitenant architecture so that multiple users could use the web application in a secure, scalable, concurrent, and fail-safe manner. Sophisticated PaaS solutions also provide an integrated web application development environment, which facilitates collaborative coding, source control, and deployment. Heroku (http://www.heroku.com) and Google App Engine (http://cloud.google.com/AppEngine) are two examples of successful PaaS platforms.

The SaaS model of the cloud provides software you can consume from the purview of your web browser. There is no need for complex and time consuming installations. Open a browser, point to a URL, and use the app pointed to by the URL. What happens behind the scenes is all hidden from the user. SaaS has evolved considerably in the last decade. Many SaaS providers have made desktop or locally-hosted software obsolete. All you need is a browser and you are all set to use any app to do anything. No headaches of software upgrades, version incompatibility, or software portability. Google's Gmail (http://gmail.com) service is one of the most successful and widely known SaaS implementations. The SaaS component has grown exponentially with companies leveraging the underlying infrastructure and platform to build cloud versions of most of their software product offerings. By 2013, almost every company worth its salt has had a SaaS version of its popular software apps available to online customers.

While PaaS is inherently more stable compared to the SaaS component, PaaS has evolved tremendously in the last few years and provided the developer community with amazing tools to work with and deploy distributed apps in virtually no time. The Heroku PaaS is the subject of this book.

What is cloud application development?

One way of describing cloud application development is the ability to create, build, and deploy your software applications from the web browser. You don't need to install anything on your local machine. All you need is a web browser, Internet connection, and the ability to code. The Cloud9 IDE platform is one such example of a web browser-based cloud application development environment. The Cloud9 IDE development platform lets developers write, build, test, and instantly deploy their web apps from the browser. Once deployed, the developer can access the web app using a web URL.

There is another approach albeit a hybrid one to do cloud application development. In this approach, developers write code on their own machine, use locally installed development tools, build their code locally first, and once tested, they deploy those web apps to the platform service on the cloud. The platform as a service on the cloud builds the code again using a supported build tool and deploys the web app to the relevant server. Later, it returns a web URL to the developer to access the web app.

Key advantages of cloud application development

Developing web apps using the cloud application development model is a boon for all developers. It is the magic wand that developers couldn't have imagined before the advent of cloud computing and cloud-based development platforms. There are several advantages of using cloud application development:

One of the key advantages of cloud application development is the no software installation required on local machine paradigm. An Internet connection, a web browser, and the ability to code are all you need to write web apps. As a developer, you can focus on building your web app functionality in the best way possible without worrying about the code editors, debuggers, or build/deploy tools to use. All these things are not your business anymore. You can just write your code and the rest gets taken care of for you. Even in the hybrid approach, several cloud application development enabling platforms provide you with compatible tools (compatible with tools in the cloud environment) that you can use to build, test, and deploy your apps.
Another practical advantage of using cloud application development is the fact that you don't need to manage the software, storage, or hardware infrastructure being used. Supporting software (operating systems, development tools, and so on) gets automatically upgraded and new hardware gets provisioned transparently for you; you don't need to worry about compiler versions or third-party libraries you use.
Cloud application development also means reduced the cost of building and maintaining your web apps. You pay as you go and get billed for only what you use. Developers can optimize their investment by using the right toolset and leveraging the available open source tools to build robust, scalable, and well performing web apps.
Mobility is a reason, which by itself gives tremendous advantage to developers who want to build apps on the go. When you can develop, change, or deploy web apps from the web browser of your mobile device, it is a powerful notion. You could be sipping coffee in a local coffee shop, responding to a customer request through your mobile device, bringing your servers up/down, adding a new developer to your app, or increasing the memory required for your web app. The possibilities are unlimited.

Introducing Heroku

Heroku (http://www.heroku.com), pronounced her-oh-koo, is one of the leading PaaS providers in the cloud software business, proving itself to be the leading PaaS solution for small and big enterprises alike. With consistent improvement and the philosophy of "convenience" over "configuration", Heroku has become the leading cloud app development platform for developers, having been used by over 40,000 websites till date. The Heroku philosophy is to let developers focus solely on writing web applications and forget about servers. Heroku magically takes care of building, deploying, running, and scaling the application for the developer on demand.

Heroku is a polyglot cloud application platform that provides tremendous flexibility in choosing an appropriate programming language to develop web apps. Heroku provides platform support for Ruby, Ruby on Rails, Java, Node.js, Clojure, Scala, Python, and PHP as of early 2013.

Heroku's add-on architecture allows the developers to customize the use of various third-party packages based on the need. You have the flexibility to choose a basic or a premium plan based on the requirement of your website. The developer can supercharge the apps with add-on resources, such as Memcached for caching data or a NoSQL database and create really powerful, feature-rich web apps.

Heroku provides a lot of flexibility in managing your app once you have deployed it. With Heroku, a developer can manage the app using the Heroku command-line tool running on the client machine or the dashboard running on the Heroku infrastructure.

Heroku is highly scalable. It scales transparently as your traffic spikes and it can serve applications with over 103 sustained requests per second today.

Heroku Git's focused workflow makes it easy to share code, collaborate with other developers, and deploy code frequently, thereby cutting down on the time it takes the app to reach its users.

Walking down the memory lane

It is very important to understand the history of something to understand how it evolved to its current state. Over the years, the designers of Heroku have made several choices to make Heroku what we see it as today. Heroku has undergone many iterations of evolution. It all started when a few web engineers got together and built a platform as a service that looked very similar to the Unix platform. Developers could build their apps on Ruby and push them to the platform for hosting. All the value added services such as monitoring, logging, or databases were pluggable and easy to use. It was a web developer's dream come true.

The following is a short summary of Heroku's history that walks you through Heroku's evolution over the last several years:

Heroku was launched in 2007 by James Lindenbaum, Adam Wiggins, and Orion Henry.
Heroku was a Y-combinator start up and its base increased to over 2,000 apps and users in just the first six months.
Heroku started with addressing two common issues for web developers: deployment of applications and developer productivity.
By the end of 2007, Heroku came up with interesting features such as "instantly live" (deployment), "create and edit online" (online source code editing), and "share and collaborate" (code sharing).
Sometime later in 2008, Heroku was projected as a Rails-based web development framework and lot more focus was put on deployment and scaling of web applications.
Collaborative code sharing and development through Git paved way for increased interest in Heroku by the developer community. Soon a unified API was part of the Heroku offering.
During 2009, Heroku came up with Herokugarden—an application bed where the developer could create, deploy, and manage web applications. The API (Heroku commands) to manage web applications was part of this suite. This feature was phased out soon though.
Heroku also added the concept of "add-ons"—pieces of software (libraries) you could magically add to your web application and use almost on the fly. By the end of 2009, Heroku had almost 20,000 apps running on various platforms including mobiles.
Heroku was acquired by Salesforce in December 2010.
In the last few years, among others Heroku has done several important changes to the platform, including bringing in the new Celadon Cedar stack and supporting Java, Clojure, Python, Node.js, and Scala languages. It has also added an advanced support for the Postgres database.

An overview of Heroku's architecture

The Heroku architecture consists of a platform stack comprising of the language runtime, various libraries, the operating system, and the underlying infrastructure to support development of scalable web apps.

The high-level architecture of the Heroku platform is shown as follows:

Process management

The dyno manifold (DM) is the foundational block for the execution environment on the Heroku platform. It is a distributed, fault-tolerant, and horizontally scalable execution environment for application dynos. It manages the entire diversity of process type instances via the process model in an automated way with zero maintenance cost.

The unit of work in the Heroku platform is called a dyno. Dynos are fully-isolated, highly available (virtual) containers running on the dyno manifold.

Dynos receive web requests from routing mesh, connect to application resources such as a database, for example, using environment variables, and write an output to the log message sink called Heroku Logplex.

A process type defines the template to be used to instantiate a particular process. It is a declaration of a command. The command is executed when a dyno of that process type is started. There are at least two process types available on Heroku—web and worker. An instance of web process type typically handles HTTP client requests. The router directs all the requests to the web process type. The instance of the worker process type is used to execute other tasks such as custom jobs of long running background jobs and queuing tasks. Heroku also provides the flexibility to create additional process type based on specific needs.

A process is an instance of a particular process type. The Procfile specifies the various process types and how to run them on the Heroku platform.

Logging

Logplex routes log streams originating from various sources, such as application tasks, system components, and backend services into a single output pool. Additional filters can be used to search specific log messages, hence providing flexible logging facilities.

HTTP routing

The requests (dashed vertical lines) for a web resource (for example, web page) are routed to the appropriate web process dyno using the Routing mesh. Incoming requests are received by a load balancer that automatically routes HTTP requests to specific dynos through this mesh. The Routing mesh is responsible for determining the location of the application's web dynos within the dyno manifold and forwarding the HTTP request to one of these dynos.

Heroku interfaces

Heroku provides various control surfaces such as process management, routing, logging, scaling, configuration, and deployment for building and operating an application. These are available as a command-line interface (CLI), a web-based console, as well as a full REST API. These control surfaces provide the application developer with the flexibility to control various aspects of the application through multiple touch points.

The Heroku feature set

Heroku is a fully featured PaaS that provides a complete stack of "true" PaaS features. The following are some of the core features available in Heroku:

Heroku runtime features:
- It enables flexible process control; scalable web and worker (type) processes (called dynos) run from a Procfile.
- It allows a new process type to be defined such as web or worker type.
- Process isolation—anything you store on your web process will be isolated from all other web processes.
- Heroku even lets you run processes during the maintenance mode while serving the application users static page(s).
- It provides fully functional multiple language support.
Configuration:
- Heroku does not use property files or hardcoded configuration variables to read system or application-specific global parameters; instead, it uses configuration variables or environment variables.
- Heroku prefers convenience over configuration, hence the configuration architecture is intentionally simplistic to use.
Effective releases:
- Whenever new code, add-ons, or a configuration is in place, Heroku creates a new release automatically.
- Heroku provides a rich set of capabilities to manage app releases from creating a release and listing available releases to rolling back to previous releases.
Logging:
- Heroku's Logplex facility provides you with an aggregated view of your application runtime behavior.
- Heroku also has provisions to filter log records based on a certain source, process, or both.
Security:
- Heroku provides the ability to set up an SSL endpoint for your application to enable secure communication to your deployed application.
- Heroku also supports SSH keys to enable a secure transfer of developer code to/from the platform.
Real-time status:
- Through a web URL, Heroku provides its users with an ability to verify the running status of the application(s) on a time-range basis. You can go back in time to check for failures and steps undertaken for their resolution.
Git-based deployment:
- Heroku uses Git as the primary method to deploy apps. Git is a popular open source code revision control system that enables shared access to a managed source code environment.
- While managing apps for the Heroku platform using Git, a developer can do the following:
  - Build and track the app
  - Create remote repositories of code
  - Deploy the application in multiple environments (development, staging)
  - Use other version control systems side by side and Git only for deployment
Polyglot platform:
- Though Heroku started off being a Ruby-only web application platform, it has evolved over the years and started supporting many other popular programming languages including Java, Node.js, Scala, Clojure, Python, and the Play framework including the latest releases.
Buildpacks:
- Heroku's support for a language is enabled by creating a buildpack for that language. A buildpack is a set of scripts required to identify the source code language and provide instructions to build it into executable code. For example, the Ruby (https://github.com/heroku/heroku-buildpack-ruby) buildpack is one of the most commonly used buildpacks on Heroku.
Add-ons:
- Heroku offers a growing number of add-ons via its add-on provider program. Additional services, such as error tracking, reporting, e-mail services, hosted NoSQL databases, and full-text search among others are available instantly via a few clicks or commands on the Heroku CLI prompt.
- There is a provision to add and remove add-ons using the Heroku API.
The Heroku command-line tool (CLI):
- The Heroku command-line tool is an interface to the Heroku web API. The tools provide an easy to use command-line interface to do things such as creating/renaming apps, running one-off processes, taking backups, and configuring add-ons.
- This tool is usually installed with the toolbelt program. It also has a plugin architecture that allows developers to extend the functionality of the command as needed.
- It is purposely kept similar to UNIX shell commands to reduce the learning curve for system administrators or users of the Heroku API.
A fully featured Platform API
- The Heroku Platform API is a standard list of functions that allow you to programmatically call the Heroku backend and perform various operations such as creating an app or deleting it. It helps the developer gain complete control of the app.
Managed, multitenant architecture:
- Heroku's platform architecture provides a managed process execution environment and a high degree of isolation between running apps, all of which are transparent to the application client.

Let's play Heroku

Now that we have a basic understanding of what Heroku is and what it has to offer for developers planning to build and deploy cloud-based apps, let us take Heroku for a quick test drive. You are going to love it.

Getting ready for the ride – the prerequisites

There are a few prerequisites before you start using Heroku. You need to perform the following steps:

Get a Heroku account (https://www.heroku.com).
Install Heroku toolbelt client (https://toolbelt.heroku.com/).
Set up SSH for your user account.
An SSH key is an encrypted token that your machine and your Heroku account share to validate the authenticity of the user invoking a command on the Heroku platform.

In the next part, we will learn the actions required to set up a Heroku client on your local machine.

Signing up

To start using Heroku, you will need to sign up for a Heroku account. The following screenshot shows the sign up page to create a new Heroku account:

Once you have entered an e-mail address, you need to validate your credentials by logging in to your e-mail account and verifying your account credentials for Heroku. Consider the following screenshot:

Once you validate your account credentials, you will be redirected to the Heroku password-setting page, where you need to enter a valid password and confirm it, as shown in the following screenshot:

After successful password confirmation, you will be redirected to the Heroku dashboard. Since you are a new user, it will not contain any deployed applications yet. Consider the following screenshot:

Installing the Heroku toolbelt

The Heroku toolbelt is the client software required to work with the Heroku platform. It can be downloaded from https://toolbelt.heroku.com/ for Windows, Debian/Ubuntu, Mac OS X, and standalone platforms. For our example, we will use the Windows version as shown in the following screenshot:

Install the Heroku toolbelt by double-clicking on the downloaded executable and following the instructions.

The Heroku toolbelt contains the following components:

Heroku client: This is the command-line tool to help create and manage apps.
Foreman: This is a utility to give you the flexibility of running applications locally, especially sometimes when you want to troubleshoot.
Git: This is the revision control system and relevant utility program that helps you push your code to Heroku or download it from remote repositories. You can also download a client specific Git UI to your operating system if you want a user interface to issue Git commands.

Logging in and generating a new SSH key

After installing the toolbelt, you can issue Heroku commands from the Heroku client command prompt. These commands (or code) are sent to the Heroku server and executed on the Heroku platform. However, Heroku needs to verify that the commands and code being sent to it are from an authentic user. Hence, you need to create a public/private key pair to push the code to Heroku.

Follow these steps to create the key and upload it to your Heroku account:

Generate the key on the local machine using the ssh-keygen tool (available at http://www.openssh.com/).
Add this key to the related Heroku account using the keys:add Heroku command.
- In order to add the key manually, consider the following figure:
- You can log in to the Heroku dashboard (https://dashboard.heroku.com/account) and add the key manually too, as shown in the following screenshot:

In our example, we use the Heroku command-line interface to create the key and add it to the Heroku account. If you have previously uploaded an SSH key to Heroku, Heroku will assume that you will keep using it and will not prompt you to create a new one.

Test driving Heroku

What fun is it to see a Ferrari and not drive it? So, let us put on our seatbelts and take Heroku for a spin. We assume that we are running the Heroku client on a Windows 7 machine. We assume that we have the Windows version of the Heroku toolbelt (download instructions in the prerequisites section). We have also created and added the SSH key to our Heroku account.

In this section, we will create a barebones Rails 3 app on the Heroku platform. You can use any other supported language, yet the steps won't change except for the language specific details (buildpack used). First and foremost, we need a few things up and running before we can create our first app on Heroku. These requirements are specific to the language we use here.

So, before we get started:

Ensure you have certain prerequisites for the Rails 3 example. You need:
- Ruby 1.9.2 (the Ruby runtime toolbelt comes bundled with one)
- Ruby gems (http://rubygems.org)
- Bundler (http://rubygems.org/gems/bundler)
- Rails 3 (http://rubyonrails.org/)
Check if the Heroku client is installed and in the path open the command prompt and type:
```
$ heroku
```
You will get the Heroku usage help as follows:

Log in using the e-mail address and password you used when creating your Heroku account:

$ heroku login
Enter your Heroku credentials.
Email: xxxx@yyyy.com
Password:
Could not find an existing public key.
Would you like to generate one? [Yn]
Generating new SSH public key.
Uploading ssh public key /users/xxxx/.ssh/id_rsa.pub

Press enter at the prompt to upload your ssh key or create a new one.

Write a simple Rails 3 application:

$ rails new sampleapp_rails3
$ cd sampleapp_rails3

Edit your Gemfile (Gemfile is a file that contains the list of names of libraries/gem files your application needs to function correctly) and change gem 'sqlite3' to gem 'pg'.
This change enables the application to use the newly introduced Heroku PostgreSQL database instead of SQLite.
Re-install your dependencies (to generate new Gemfile.lock):
```
$ bundle install
```
Create your app in Git as shown in the following figure:
To open a Heroku app, type the open command on the Heroku CLI:
```
$ heroku open
Opening pink-poppies-786… done
```
Check the status of running Heroku processes, type the ps (process status) command as follows:
```
$ heroku ps
=== web: `bundle exec rails server –p $PORT`web.1: up for 5s
```
To support more concurrent users, you need to scale up your application. Increase the web dyno count from the Heroku command line. Use the ps:scale command to scale up the web processes to 2 as follows:
```
$ heroku ps:scale web=2
```
If you encounter any issues while running the Heroku app, you can use the logs command to get the details of most recent messages and use the information to troubleshoot pertinent issues as shown in the following figure:

That completes our test drive of Heroku. We created a Heroku account, added our SSH key to Heroku, and wrote a barebones Rails3 app and deployed it on Heroku. Finally, to troubleshoot, we used the logs command to see what was going on behind the scenes just in case something needed attention.

Summary

That brings us to the end of the introduction to Heroku. In this chapter, we built upon on our understanding of cloud computing, the different cloud service models and why cloud-based development makes so much sense in today's business environment. We were introduced to the magical Heroku platform as a service (PaaS), which provides an integrated build, deploy, and operate platform for web developers to deploy and easily manage their apps. We reviewed Heroku's platform architecture and understood the rich feature set of the platform. Finally, we test drove the Heroku platform, touching upon the toolset needed to connect to Heroku and build/deploy a barebones app on Heroku in the process.

In the next chapter, we will delve a little deeper into Heroku's platform architecture and understand how Heroku works under the covers. Specifically, we focus on the details of the Heroku stack, its process architecture, execution framework, and the logging architecture. And there is more—see you there!