Until now, Heroku's Postgres database service - originally launched in 2007 - has only been available to Heroku customers for use with Heroku platform apps. Today we're excited to announce the launch of Heroku Postgres as a standalone service.
With measured service uptime of four nines (99.99%), and designed data durability of eleven nines (99.999999999%), the service is trustworthy for mission-critical data. As of today, these production-quality Heroku Postgres databases are independently available for use from any cloud platform, provisioned instantly, metered by the second, and without contract.
Battle Tested
Heroku Postgres has successfully and safely written 19 billion customer transactions, and another 400 million write-transactions are processed every day. Leverage Heroku's scale and expertise while enabling your team to focus on building great apps rather than managing and configuring databases.
Continuous Protection
The safety and durability of your data is our number one priority. Continuous Protection is a set of technologies designed to prevent any kind of data loss even in the face of catastrophic failures. Taking advantage of PostgreSQL's WAL (write-ahead-log of each change to the database's data or schema), Heroku Postgres creates multiple, geographically distributed copies of all data changes as they are written. These copies are constantly checked for consistency and corruption. If a meteor were to wipe out the east coast, you won't lose your data. Continuous Protection come standard with every database running on Heroku Postgres.
100% Pure PostgreSQL
We believe deeply in the value of open-source software, and believe it is even more critical in the context of a database service. We are committed to running off-the-shelf, community PostgreSQL - unforked and unmodified. Rest assured that any standard libpq client will run flawlessly on our service. Should you ever decide that you want to go back to being your own DBA, you can; there is no technical lock-in.
Great Tools for Visibility and Productivity
Heroku Postgres has a rich API, accessible via command-line tools and a clean and simple web-based UI. Use it for provisioning, generating connection strings, viewing usage statistics, and capturing snapshots. These tools work for both standalone databases and those attached to Heroku apps.
The best way to learn more about the service is to give it a try, so check out Heroku Postgres to signup and provision a database today.