Deploying a Node.js and PostgreSQL Application to Heroku
Serving a web application to a global audience requires deploying, hosting and scaling it on reliable cloud infrastructure. Heroku is a cloud platform as a service (PaaS) that supports many server-side languages (e.g., Node.js, Go, Ruby and Python), monitors application status in a beautiful, customizable dashboard and maintaining an add-ons ecosystem for integrating tools/services such as databases, schedulers, search engines, document/image/video processors, etc. Although it is built on AWS, Heroku is simpler to use compared to AWS. Heroku automatically provisions resources and configures low-level infrastructure so developers can focus exclusively on their application without the additional headache of manually setting up each piece of hardware and installing an operating system, runtime environment, etc. When deploying to Heroku, Heroku's build system packages the application's source code and dependencies together with a language runtime using a buildpack and slug compiler to generate a slug , which is a highly optimized and compressed version of your application. Heroku loads the slug onto a lightweight container called a dyno . Depending on your application's resource demands, it can be scaled horizontally across multiple concurrent dynos. These dynos run on a shared host, but the dynos responsible for running your application are isolated from dynos running other applications. Initially, your application will run on a single web dyno, which serves your application to the world. If a single web dyno cannot sufficiently handle incoming traffic, then you can always add more web dynos. For requests exceeding 500ms to complete, such as uploading media content, consider delegating this expensive work as a background job to a worker dyno. Worker dynos process these jobs from a job queue and run asynchronously to web dynos to free up the resources of those web dynos.
