This summer, we announced the beta release of our new streaming data connectors between Heroku Postgres and Apache Kafka on Heroku. These connectors make Change Data Capture (CDC) possible on Heroku with minimal effort. Anyone with a Private or Shield Space, as well as a Postgres and an Apache Kafka add-on in that space, can use Streaming Data Connectors today at no additional charge.

Customers use connectors to build streaming data pipelines between Salesforce and external stores like a Snowflake data lake or an AWS Kinesis queue for integration with other data sources. They also refactor monoliths into microservices, implement an event-based architecture, archive data in lower-cost...

Today we are announcing a beta release of our new streaming data connector between Heroku Postgres and Apache Kafka on Heroku. Heroku runs millions of Postgres services and tens of thousands of Apache Kafka services, and we increasingly see developers choosing to start with Apache Kafka as the foundation of their data architecture. But for those who are Postgres-first, it is challenging to adopt without a full app rewrite. Developers want a seamless integration between the two services, and we are delivering it today, at no additional charge, for Heroku Private Spaces and Shield Spaces customers.

Moving beyond Postgres and Kafka, the Heroku Data team sees the use cases for data growing...

We are thrilled to announce that Heroku Shield Key-Value Store is now generally available and certified for handling PHI, PII, and HIPAA-compliant data. Heroku Shield Key-Value Store is the final missing data service for Heroku Shield, which is an integrated set of Heroku services with additional security features needed for building high compliance applications. All Heroku Managed Data Services — Heroku Connect, Heroku Key-Value Store, Heroku Postgres, and Apache Kafka on Heroku — are now fully certified for handling PHI, PII, and HIPAA-compliant data as part of Heroku Shield. Security and compliance come standard with Heroku Shield, so developers and enterprises can focus solely on...

Security is always top of mind for Heroku customers; COVID-19 has further increased the urgency for enterprises and developers to deliver more mission-critical applications with sensitive and regulated data.

Given the needs of our customers, including those in regulated industries like Health & Life Sciences and Financial Services, we are thrilled to announce that Heroku Private Spaces and Shield customers can now deploy a new Postgres, Redis, or Apache Kafka service with a key created and managed in their private AWS KMS account. With BYOK, enterprises gain full data custody and data access control without taking on the burden of managing any aspect of the data service itself.

This...

After a successful evaluation period, PostgreSQL 12 is now the default version for new Heroku Postgres databases and an available upgrade for existing databases.

I want to emphasize a few key changes and improvements in Postgres 12:

Native Table Partitioning Concurrent Operations

Native Partitioning was introduced in PostgreSQL 10 and performance improvements for improved parallel processing were added in PostgreSQL 11. Updating tables, altering partitions blocking queries, and executing concurrent operations for Native Partitioning were all improved in PostgreSQL 12. New features include allowing tables to modify partitions without blocking queries, allowing foreign keys to reference...

Today, we’re thrilled to announce four new trusted data integrations that allow data to flow seamlessly and securely between Heroku and external resources in public clouds and private data centers:

• Heroku Postgres via mutual TLS
• Heroku Postgres via PrivateLink
• Apache Kafka on Heroku via PrivateLink
• Heroku Key-Value Store via PrivateLink

These integrations expand Heroku's security and trust boundary to cover the connections to external resources and the data that passes through them. They enable true multi-cloud app and data architectures and keep developers focused on delivering value versus managing infrastructure. Data is the driving force in modern app development, and these...

We are thrilled to announce that Apache Kafka on Heroku Shield is now generally available and certified for handling PHI, PII, and HIPAA-compliant data. Our newest managed data service unifies Heroku Shield, a set of Heroku platform services that offer additional security features needed for building high compliance applications, with Apache Kafka on Heroku, our fully-managed service based on the leading open-source solution for handling event streams.

Organizations of all sizes face relentless pressure to bring better apps and experiences to market, and those with a strong focus on data security like Health and Life Sciences (HLS) organizations need to balance safety and agility. Their...

There are many reasons to choose Heroku Data services, but keeping the services you use secure and up-to-date rank near the top. This foundation of trust is the most important commitment we make to our customers, and frequent and timely maintenances are one way we deliver on this promise.

We do everything we can to minimize downtime, which is typically between 10 – 60 seconds per maintenance. There are ways for you to minimize disruption too (see the tips and tricks below). The rest of the post explains how we think about Heroku Data maintenances, how we perform them, and when we perform them.

An Ounce of Prevention...

Hackers exploit known but unpatched vulnerabilities or out-of-date...

Today, we're thrilled to announce Heroku Postgres via PrivateLink, a new integration that enables customers to seamlessly and securely connect Heroku Postgres databases in Private Spaces to resources in one or more Amazon VPCs. Heroku Postgres via PrivateLink connections are secure and stable by default because traffic to and from Heroku Postgres stays on the Amazon private network; once a PrivateLink is set up, there is no brittle networking configuration to manage. As always, security and trust are top of mind with everything we do at Heroku.

The ability to configure Heroku Postgres via PrivateLink is already enabled on all private Postgres plans. It's also included at no...

On May 10, 2018, we received notice about two critical vulnerabilities in Redis, both embargoed until this morning.

Upon this notice, our Data Infrastructure team proceeded to patch all internal and customer databases in response to these vulnerabilities. As of today, all customer databases have been patched successfully.

At Heroku, customer trust is our most important value - and we are grateful to have your trust in keeping a globally-distributed data fleet safe from harm. If you’re interested in more behind the scenes details, check out our engineering blog post on how our Data Infrastructure team undertook the effort to patch our entire Redis fleet.