Heroku is a container-based cloud Platform as a Service (PaaS). You can use Heroku to deploy, manage, and scale modern apps. Heroku gives developer the freedom to focus on their core product without the distraction of maintaining servers, hardware, or infrastructure.
Problem and solution
Do you want to create a sophisticated, lightning fast app for your CRM business which is on Salesforce? Are your salesforce jobs running too long, which is hampering your org performance? Are you thinking to build microservices architecture? Do you want to access multiple data sources but don’t want to copy them in your salesforce org?
Yes, Heroku is here to rescue you. It can help you to create apps on latest open source stacks such as Rubie, Node.js, Python etc which will be as par with the best and most efficient apps in the market. It can also help you to sync your data in its data base(postgres) with ease and run your complex logic and sync back the outcomes of it.
Pizza as a Service
To understand about Heroku you need know some basics of _ as a Service. lets me tell you an amusing analogy on Pizza as a Service. Have you ever wondered that how many ways you can have your favorite pizza. Here are few options.
1. Make at home
2. Take and bake
3. Pizza delivered
4. Dine out
Which is the easiest way for you to have your favorite pizza without compromising on the quality and teste?
On-premise — Make your own cheese, tomato sauce, toppings and dough. It is good option if you own a pizza factory but if you want to make a pizza just for yourself, this is too much investment and work.
IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) — You are provided with all the raw material (cheese, sauce dough) by a vendor. You still need some tools (oven, fire) and you are responsible for the cooking the pizza. This is a good option if you are an expert in baking, otherwise you will mess up the pizza.
PaaS (Platform as a Service) — You are delivered a Pizza at your doorstep. You are just responsible for arranging drinks, table, cleaning dishes. Provides very little flexibility in what you get (you can have your own choice of drink, dip and table but you have no say in how the pizza was prepared), but a good option if you just want to eat.
SaaS (Software a a Service) — You eat the pizza at a restaurant, very minimal flexibility. Good option if you don’t want to manage anything but still enjoy the pizza.
On-Premise vs IaaS vs PaaS vs SaaS
Below comparision can help you to understand with the above analogy.
What is Heroku?
Heroku, which is built on AWS server provide Platform as a Service(PaaS). You can deploy, manage, and scale modern apps on it very easily. It is elegant, flexible, and easy to use, offering developers the simplest path to getting their apps to market.
Why Heroku?
A PaaS abstracts away the complexity of building and running infrastructure for applications. Heroku allows you to easily create load-balanced collections of containers that run your software.
It is a fully managed PaaS — all the underlying complexity is handled for you by dedicated teams at Salesforce, including things like responding to failures, monitoring security vulnerabilities and patching them, planning for scaling, and actually scaling the PaaS. If you wanted to run your own PaaS, you’d need teams of people managing all these things 24/7/365.
It takes care of these things for you so that you can concentrate on building custom applications to delight your customers.
How does Heroku work?
Heroku is known for running apps in dynos – which are really just virtual computers that can be powered up or down based on how big your application is. Think of dynos as malleable building blocks for running your app.
If you want to process more data or run more complex tasks, you are going to need to add more blocks(what is called scaling horizontally) or increase the size of the blocks (what is called scaling vertically). Heroku then charges you a monthly fee based on the number of dynos that you have and the size of each dyno.
What can I do with Heroku?
1. you can build cutting-edge web/mobile applications from scratch using Heroku with access to your salesforce data with ease using many open source languages such as Java, PHP, Python, Node, Go and Ruby.
2. Heroku provides bidirectional sync with postgres database and salesforce makes it amazing platform to run very complex jobs (which takes hours to run on salesforce and block our other activities) and sync back only the outcomes of it.
3. Modern day, microservices architecture has emerged as a way to decouple the pieces of a system into more easily maintainable, independently deployable services to provide endpoints that bring disparate systems together. Heroku is a great place to run apps and microservices that you can use with Salesforce through a variety of integration methods.
4. As your business grow, your application also become sophisticated. To manage big and complex application you need multiple integration to get data from different sources. Heroku provide a power full feature called data proxies, it doesn’t copy data into salesforce, The data can be read only on demand. This approach enables data science, business intelligence, reporting, and dashboarding tools to collate data across multiple datastores without worrying about data synchronization challenges like storage and staleness. You can integrate legacy systems and external systems through data proxies to provide data to Salesforce, or Salesforce can provide its data to other external systems.
5. One of the best features of Heroku is elasticity, you can build your application very quick and discard it to get new application if needed.
Summary
Salesforce with Heroku has become very trustworthy and bigger platform which can manage multiple applications parallel to your salesforce org without worrying about data synchronization, security, manipulation etc. If you have not tried yet, for whom are waiting for?
References: Trailhead, Heroku and other internet sources.
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