Preface

Cloud application development is "the new black". With the advent of server virtualization, hardware resources have become cheaper. You can buy hardware on demand and pay only for the time you use it. The next wave of virtualization is that of software virtualization, that is, having the ability to use available software on demand and build your own apps on top of it. Here too, you pay only for what you use and how long you use it. The Heroku Platform as a Service (PaaS) is a software platform that provides a combination of the underlying operation system resources, language runtime, and supporting software to help you build your own web apps on demand.

This book on Heroku cloud application development is intended to introduce you to the fundamentals of the Heroku Platform as a Service, and help you to understand the rich feature set of the Heroku platform that enables building powerful and scalable web apps. In addition, this book also showcases techniques to deploy and troubleshoot the web apps deployed on Heroku and helps you understand the nuances of the choices you have to make while building apps for the Heroku environment. And that isn't all. You will also be presented with the best practices of using Heroku for developing web apps as well as getting a feel for the advanced aspects of the platform. The book also educates the user on how to securely use the Heroku platform for developing production-ready and high-performance web apps.

In essence, Heroku cloud application development is all about rapid application development for the cloud, (re)using available software add-ons and underlying platform infrastructure to build, deploy, and manage really powerful and scalable web apps.