Introduction

• Heroku 101 provides an overview of Heroku’s platform-as-a-service (PaaS) offering, highlighting its simplicity and utility for developers.

Key Concepts

• Confusion as a Service:
• SaaS (Software as a Service): For software users, providing more features and transparent updates (e.g., Facebook, Trello).
• IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service): For operations, offering on-demand machine resources (e.g., AWS, Digital Ocean).
• PaaS (Platform as a Service): For developers, offering transparent updates with no need to manage servers (e.g., Heroku, App Engine).

Using Heroku with Python

• Locally:
• Create a virtual environment and install dependencies using pip.

• Run a Python web server with python manage.py runserver 0.0.0.0:8000.

• On Heroku:

• Install dependencies with pip and deploy using a Procfile.
• The Procfile specifies the commands that Heroku should run to start your application.

Understanding Dynos

• Dyno:
• A Dyno is a lightweight process running in a container, not a traditional server or VM.
• Dynos can be scaled to handle multi-process web applications using commands like heroku scale.

Managing Applications

• Run Arbitrary Commands:

• Heroku allows running various commands, such as database migrations or opening an interactive Python shell, using heroku run.

• Addon Services:

• Heroku provides managed infrastructure resources like Postgres, Redis, and Kafka.

• Addons are easy to integrate and configure within your application.

• Application Configuration:

• Config variables can be set and managed with heroku config:set, enabling environment-specific settings.