Heroku is a Cloud Application Platform. It provides platform as a service (PAAS) for developers who want to build and deploy cloud-based applications including (but not limited to) Facebook applications or custom tabs.
The service is put together and priced in such a way that it is accessible for sole developers or large teams with pricing ranging from zero to whatever your application uses. This makes the service ideal for startups, providing serious, scalable infrastructure at zero initial outlay. A platform that will grow (or shrink) according to the success of the product. Heroku has built-in real-time logging and monitoring so that you can keep tabs on your app and find problems or areas that need optimisation.
Deployment is handled through GIT, for those who don’t know:
Git is a powerful decentralized revision control system, and is the primary means for deploying apps to Heroku. You don’t need to be proficient with Git to use it for deploying code to Heroku, but you may find it valuable to learn the basics of this excellent tool for managing source code.
In addition to the core product, Heroku have partnered with a some other companies to offer a number of add-on services. The add-ons offered cover a range of popular web-app tools such as No-SQL databases, node.js, Ruby, PHP and provides easy access to a number of established cloud-based services to enable Video encoding, Email management, SMS, Monitoring, Logging, Geolocation and more. It’s like somebody filled a toolkit with the best cloud-application services they could find and then handed it to you with the words “Go and build something cool”.
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