InfoWorld’s Annual “Technology of the Year” award is given only to the most innovative and useful products, and this year the Platform as a Service (Paas) product Heroku has been recognised as such.
Heroku is a future looking PaaS that allows developers to focus on application development, with deployment, environment and scalability taken care of in the background. It is one of the fastest growing technologies out there in the cloud, and more and more companies and developers are committing to it with mission critical and enterprise applications.
Heroku offers seamless deployment and third party API integration with many current platforms like Facebook, allowing developers to work in a multitude of languages without having to spend time on system administration, database management or elastic scaling.
With the availability of more than 60 Add-ons to the platform adding extra features and third party integration, the Heroku platform offers a very rapid build cycle, even while including full failover and enterprise scalability.
The InfoWorld award is given to any of a wide range of products including both software and hardware, and so Heroku lines up on the podium next to the likes of Amazon Web Services and Hadoop, as well as previous winners such as the iPad, Android, Eclipse and Visual Studio, adding some serious clout to the reputation of the platform.
Since Heroku released Heroku Postgres in November last year, it has become an important stepping stone between a traditionally hosted application and a full move to enterprise Big Data using products like Hadoop. For applications or teams that aren’t quite at the NoSQL or Hadoop stage, the availability of a more traditional and highly performant RDBMS means more applications can be moved to the cloud sooner.
O’Reilly have noted Heroku as a technology to watch in 2012, and we agree. As the year progresses, expect to see a great deal more happening in the PaaS space, and Heroku right in the thick of it.
Have you had success (or headaches) with the Heroku platform? Tell us all about it in the comments!
Toby TremayneA writer and software developer of more than 14 years experience, Toby is passionate about helping new and small businesses make the most of the internet and cloud technology. When he's not writing or telling stories he's busy trying to make technology easier to use for the average business person, and can often be found in dark corners practicing magic tricks or lock sport.
