Chapter 1. Getting Started with Heroku
All day, every day, the Internet gets larger and larger, and recent estimates show simply phenomenal growth. Every minute, the Web is growing at a rate of over 500 new sites, while popular video hosting service YouTube is said to be receiving over 48 hours of new video content. Twitter users create over 100,000 new tweets, while Facebook users share over 600,000 new posts.
To the common observer, these numbers are amazing. However, to the developer, these numbers are simply incredible, not only because of the sheer size of the applications required to support this growth, but also the infrastructure in the form of servers and bandwidth required to keep these services ticking over happily 24/7.
The Dawn of Virtual Servers
No more than 10 years ago, the way a developer such as yourself would bring a new website or application onto the Web was to go out and purchase a new server, configure it, and find a data center that would host the server in a rack for you. This data center would provide your server with the life support that it needed to carry out its task: bandwidth, power, cooling, and the list goes on. Only once you had all these items lined up would users on the Web be able to type in your URL and find themselves looking at your website.
Now fast-forward a few years. Developers increasingly have the option of virtualization. Virtualization is the practice of renting a “virtual” server from a third party (be it another company or an internal ...