The number of apps hosted on the Ruby platform Heroku has increased 50 percent since November, pointing out how cloud-based platforms are becoming the norm for the capabilities the services provide in terms of testing and reliability.
Heroku had more than 40,000 apps on its platform last November. Now more than 60,000 apps are using the Heroku service.
Heroku’s success is not alone. Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Rackspace are rapidly expanding. AWS announced its expansion to the Asia Pacific region this past week. In its announcement, AWS featured Kim Eng, one of Asia’a largest security brokers. The firm said the availability of the AWS service helped minimize its latency for its KE Trade iPhone application.
Rackspace developer Mike Mayo built the company’s latest iPad app for customers to monitor Rackspace cloud networks. He said the cloud provides a way for developers to test with better efficiency. For example, using cloud platforms, apps are continually tested for bugs. Those bugs can be fixed one at a time as they pop up. That’s easier than doing a build and then fixing the 20 bugs that are discovered.
Heroku
Heroku is a Ruby-on-Rails platform that according to the company web site “eliminates the need to manage servers, slices or clusters.” Developers focus on the code and that’s pretty much it.
Heroku hosts the Flightcaster application, an interesting example of a service that uses two cloud providers to serve its app. Flightcaster is a service that checks your flight to see if it is on time. It can predict up to six hours in advance if your flight will be late.
Flightcaster uses Heroku to serve the application. But the actual data analysis is done through Amazon S3 where Hadoop manages the data analytics. The data is passed from Heroku to Amazon S3 and then back to Heroku where it is served back to the customer making the request.
Heroku is an example of a service that is making it infinitely easier for developers to develop and manage applications. It’s part of a new breed of platforms emerging that are growing in popularity.
We’ll see if Heroku will grow 100 percent over the span of a year. That would mean 80,000 apps. Seems plausible, doesn’t it?
