Heroku eases Ruby on Rails deployment

There’s always a lot of interest in how programming languages and frameworks make life easier for developers. But what about the IT staff that has to move applications into production? That’s where solutions like Heroku come in.

Think of it as a massively scalable multitenant runtime architecture optimized for Ruby on Rails. You write your applications as before, but when you want to move them into production, a few simple commands are all that’s needed. Forget about having to provision and manage servers. You can just spin up the storage and computation dynamically at Heroku and it takes care of all of the details for you.

Admittedly, deploying simple applications is not that big a burden: Figure out all the parts, make sure you’ve got the right versions, move some files, fix what’s broken. Wash, rinse, repeat. But it gets challenging when you’re dealing with heavy workloads that have significant scale issues. When you’re dealing with dozens or even hundreds of servers, there’s no such thing as a simple deployment. And making updates becomes even more complex.

But as good as Heroku is, I can’t help but think that this is really a general problem when deploying any type of large-scale application, whether it’s in Ruby, PHP, Python, Java, or whatever your favorite programming language is. I suspect that the value that Heroku provides would be equally beneficial to other runtime environments. As cloud computing takes hold in IT, it will be interesting to see the evolution of Heroku and other deployment technologies.