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Heroku Architect

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Heroku Architect

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  • Platform Administrator
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Demonstrate an understanding of the basics behind building and deploying apps on Heroku.

0/15

  • What is a Heroku slug?
  • What is the role of a Procfile in a Heroku application deployment?
  • How does a Heroku buildpack work, and at what phase of the deployment pipeline is it applied?
  • How does Heroku's dyno model differ from traditional server-based infrastructure in terms of lifecycle and state management?
  • What is a one-off dyno in Heroku, and how does it differ from web and worker dynos in terms of lifecycle, routing, and appropriate use cases?
  • How does Heroku's release phase work, and when should a team use it instead of a post-deploy script?
  • Why is using Heroku Config Vars the required pattern for secrets and environment-specific configuration?
  • How do Heroku Config Vars differ from hardcoded environment values in source code?
  • What are the differences between the Common Runtime and the Private Space Runtime in terms of dyno isolation and networking?
  • A team needs to run a Ruby web process and a background worker from the same codebase. How should the Procfile and dyno formation be configured?
  • A development team wants to promote a release from staging to production without rebuilding the slug. Which Heroku feature enables this, and what are the constraints?
  • What are the consequences of a Heroku slug exceeding the 500 MB limit?
  • What Heroku feature allows multiple buildpacks to be applied in sequence when an app requires multiple runtimes (e.g., Python web server and Node.js asset compiler)?
  • What ordering constraint must be observed when using multiple Heroku buildpacks?
  • What happens to in-flight requests and ephemeral filesystem data when a Heroku dyno restarts or is cycled?

Architect scalable solutions that are performant even during high-traffic spikes.

0/7

How does horizontal scaling (adding more dynos) differ from vertical scaling (upgrading dyno size) in terms of cost, throughput, and appropriate use cases on Heroku?

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How does Heroku's router distribute requests across dynos, and what implications does this have for session affinity requirements?

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An application needs to offload slow processing tasks to avoid request timeouts during peak traffic. What Heroku architectural pattern addresses this, and what add-ons typically support it?

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A web application experiences sudden traffic spikes during flash sales. The team is choosing between Heroku Autoscaling and manually scaling dyno counts. What architectural factors determine which approach is most appropriate?

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When should a Performance-tier dyno be selected over Standard on Heroku?

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What is the Heroku request timeout limit for web dynos, and how should architects design applications to avoid H12 errors?

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A Heroku app's response times degrade under load even after scaling dynos. The architect suspects the issue is at the database connection layer. What is the recommended solution?

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Architect and deploy solutions using add-ons and other components from the Elements Marketplace, including various add-ons, buildpacks, and Heroku Buttons.

0/8

  • What is the purpose of the app.json manifest file, and what elements does it configure for a Heroku Button deployment?
  • When should a Heroku Button be used to deploy an application, and what does it require in the repository?
  • What is Heroku Review Apps and how does it integrate with a pull request workflow?
  • What does Heroku Review Apps provision automatically from app.json?
  • A team wants to enforce automated test execution on every pull request before merging. How does Heroku CI integrate into this workflow, and what configuration file does it require?
  • How does Heroku add-on attachment work, and what is the difference between a provisioned add-on and an attached add-on?
  • A team needs to support a Ruby on Rails app with additional native dependencies that the default Ruby buildpack does not provide. What is the recommended approach using the Elements Marketplace?
  • A company wants to share a single Heroku Postgres database across multiple Heroku apps without duplicating credentials. What mechanism enables this?
  • What is a Heroku Postgres follower database, and how does it differ from the leader in terms of read/write capability and replication lag?
  • What is the difference between a Heroku Postgres fork and a Heroku Postgres follower?
  • What are the appropriate use cases for a Heroku Postgres follower database versus scenarios where a follower is not the right solution?
  • When should a Heroku Postgres fork versus a follower be used?
  • What is the process for performing a zero-downtime upgrade of a Heroku Postgres plan using a follower database?
  • A high-traffic e-commerce application is experiencing read performance bottlenecks on its primary Heroku Postgres database. The team is deciding between adding a follower database and upgrading to a larger plan. What architectural factors should drive this decision?
  • A team is preparing a major schema migration on a large production Heroku Postgres database and wants a safe copy to test the migration script without impacting production. What Heroku Postgres feature is most appropriate, and why is a follower not the right choice here?
  • What connection limit constraints are imposed by Heroku Postgres plan tiers?
  • Why does an application that opens a new database connection per request exhaust connections at scale on Heroku Postgres?
  • How does PgBouncer (connection pooling) address Heroku Postgres connection exhaustion?
  • How does Heroku Postgres continuous protection (WAL archiving) work, and what recovery point objective (RPO) does it provide?
  • In what recovery scenarios should Heroku Postgres manual backups versus continuous protection be used?
  • How does Heroku Postgres handle encryption at rest and in transit?
  • What compliance scenarios does Heroku Postgres encryption address?
  • A company has a data residency requirement mandating that EU customer data never leaves the EU. How does Heroku Postgres region selection and Private Space region enforce this constraint?
  • What are Heroku Dataclips, and in what scenarios are they most appropriately used over direct database access?
  • A data analyst needs to run ad-hoc SQL queries against production data without impacting application performance or exposing database credentials. What Heroku feature addresses this requirement?
  • A regulated financial services company is evaluating Heroku Postgres for PII storage. What Heroku Postgres plan tier and runtime environment is required to meet HIPAA or PCI compliance?
  • What is Apache Kafka on Heroku, and what architectural problems does it solve that a traditional message queue does not?
  • What is the role of Kafka consumer groups and offsets in designing event-driven data flow on Heroku?
  • How does topic partitioning in Apache Kafka on Heroku affect message ordering guarantees and consumer parallelism?
  • What retention and durability guarantees does Apache Kafka on Heroku provide, and how does this influence replay and auditing use cases?
  • When should an architect choose Apache Kafka on Heroku over Heroku Key-Value Store (Redis) as the messaging backbone?
  • A microservices architecture on Heroku uses Kafka to pass order events between services. One consumer group is processing messages too slowly and causing lag. What architectural adjustments should the architect recommend?
  • What is the role of Kafka topics and partitions in designing event-driven data flow on Heroku?
  • How does Apache Kafka on Heroku integrate with Heroku Private Spaces, and what is the impact on producer/consumer connectivity from apps in the Common Runtime?
  • What is Heroku Key-Value Store (KVS), and what are its primary architectural use cases on Heroku?
  • What are the implications of choosing the in-memory-only plan versus a persistent plan for Heroku KVS application state?
  • A developer is deciding between using Heroku KVS (Redis) for session caching versus storing session data in Heroku Postgres. What factors should drive the architectural recommendation?
  • How can Heroku KVS be used to implement a job queue pattern, and when is this preferable to Apache Kafka on Heroku?
  • How does Heroku KVS support the pub/sub pattern, and when is this preferable to using Apache Kafka on Heroku for inter-service messaging?
  • When would an architect choose LRU over no-eviction for Heroku KVS?
  • An application uses Heroku KVS for rate-limiting. After a Redis restart, all rate limit counters are reset, causing a burst of allowed requests. What KVS plan configuration prevents this?
  • How does Heroku KVS handle data persistence?
  • A real-time leaderboard application needs to maintain sorted scores for millions of users with sub-millisecond read latency. Which Heroku KVS data structure is most appropriate, and why is Heroku Postgres a poor fit?
  • How does add-on attachment differ from add-on sharing in Heroku?
  • What are the security implications of add-on attachment versus add-on sharing in Heroku?
  • A company has two Heroku apps that both need access to the same Elasticsearch instance. What is the recommended approach using Heroku add-on sharing, and what are its limitations?
  • What criteria should an architect use when evaluating whether to use a Heroku-native data service versus a third-party add-on from the Elements Marketplace?
  • When should an architect prescribe a third-party add-on over building a custom internal service for capabilities like search, email delivery, or monitoring?
  • What compliance certifications does Heroku Shield provide that are not available in the Common Runtime, and what types of regulated industries benefit most?
  • What is the difference between SOC 1 and SOC 2 compliance on Heroku?
  • How do SOC 1 and SOC 2 differences affect what assurance an architect can provide to enterprise customers?
  • Which Heroku runtime and plan tier is required to host applications that must comply with HIPAA?
  • A PCI DSS merchant wants to run cardholder data applications on Heroku. What Heroku architectural controls are required to satisfy PCI scope reduction?
  • A global fintech company requires ISO 27001 certification for its hosting environment. How does Heroku Enterprise with Private Spaces address this requirement?
  • A healthcare SaaS company needs to store and process PHI on Heroku. What combination of Heroku products, runtime, and data services is required to achieve HIPAA compliance?
  • What is Heroku Private Space Peering, and what network topology does it enable between a Heroku Private Space and an AWS VPC?
  • When is a Heroku Private Space VPN connection the more appropriate choice over VPC Peering for connecting to a corporate network?
  • A company has an on-premises data center that needs low-latency, private connectivity to a Heroku Private Space. Should they use Private Space Peering or a VPN connection, and why?
  • What are the limitations of Heroku Private Space VPC Peering (e.g., overlapping CIDR, transitive routing), and how should an architect plan around them?
  • A company has both AWS and Azure infrastructure. Their Heroku Private Space is in AWS. What connectivity options exist to integrate the Azure-hosted services with the Private Space?
  • What IP ranges does Heroku assign to Private Space dynos, and why is knowing this essential when configuring inbound firewall rules on a peered network?
  • What are the key differences between the Heroku Common Runtime and Private Space Runtime in terms of network isolation, compliance, and dyno behavior?
  • What outbound static IP capability does Heroku Private Spaces provide, and why is this critical for whitelisting in enterprise integrations?
  • What are the additional costs and operational trade-offs of running apps in a Heroku Private Space versus the Common Runtime that an architect must communicate to stakeholders?
  • A company is running a mix of public-facing marketing apps and internal regulated back-office apps on Heroku. How should the architect distribute these workloads across Common Runtime and Private Spaces?
  • An enterprise client requires that all traffic between their Heroku apps and their Salesforce org never traverse the public internet. Which runtime and connectivity mechanism satisfies this requirement?
  • How does Private Space region selection satisfy data residency requirements for multinational applications?
  • A startup is building a consumer app with no compliance requirements and a small budget. They are evaluating the Common Runtime versus a Private Space. What recommendation should the architect make, and why?
  • What features differentiate Heroku Enterprise from Heroku's standard offerings, and which architectural problems does each Enterprise feature address?
  • How does Heroku Enterprise's Single Sign-On (SSO) capability improve security and user management compared to individual Heroku accounts?
  • How does the Heroku Enterprise Audit Trail feature work, and in what compliance scenarios is it a necessary architectural control?
  • An enterprise architect needs to ensure that developer access to production dynos and config vars is restricted and logged. What Heroku Enterprise capabilities are used to enforce this?
  • What is the difference between Heroku Pipelines and Heroku CI/CD as tools for release management?
  • How do Enterprise teams leverage Heroku Pipelines and Heroku CI/CD?
  • A large enterprise wants to enforce team-level access controls, audit log retention, and centralized billing across dozens of Heroku apps. Which Heroku Enterprise features satisfy each of these requirements?
  • A company's Heroku Private Space app needs to call a SaaS vendor API that requires requests to originate from a known static IP. What Heroku Private Space feature enables this, and is any additional configuration required?
  • What is the Internal Routing feature of Heroku Private Spaces, and how does it prevent app-to-app traffic from leaving the private network?
  • What are the performance and latency implications of routing traffic between apps in the Common Runtime and apps in a Private Space via the public internet?
  • When is the Common Runtime's Heroku Private Link (if available) or an outbound proxy the appropriate networking pattern versus migrating to a Private Space?
  • A company has apps in multiple Heroku Private Spaces across different AWS regions. How can these apps communicate privately with each other?
  • An enterprise has a legacy on-premises Oracle database that Heroku apps must access. What networking approach should the architect recommend to make this connection secure and reliable?
  • What is Heroku Shield, and how does it extend Heroku Private Spaces to address regulated industry compliance requirements?
  • What specific compliance certifications does Heroku Shield support that the standard Heroku Private Space does not?
  • How does Heroku Shield Private Spaces enforce network-level data isolation compared to standard Private Spaces?
  • What is Heroku Shield Postgres, and how does it differ from standard Heroku Postgres in terms of encryption, access controls, and compliance posture?
  • What are the restrictions on add-on usage within a Heroku Shield Private Space, and how should an architect plan data service selection accordingly?
  • A healthcare company needs to deploy a patient portal on Heroku that handles PHI. What combination of Heroku Shield features must be enabled to satisfy HIPAA technical safeguards?
  • A customer wants to ensure that log drain output from Heroku Shield apps is also compliant and does not expose PHI. What architectural controls and log drain configuration are required?
  • How does Heroku Shield handle audit logging compared to standard Heroku Postgres?
  • What is a Heroku Enterprise Team, and how does it differ from a personal Heroku account in terms of app ownership, billing, and access control?
  • What roles are available within a Heroku Enterprise Team, and what permissions does each role grant?
  • What is the distinction between the Admin, Member, and Viewer roles in a Heroku Enterprise Team?
  • What happens to apps owned by a Heroku Enterprise Team if a developer's access is revoked, and why is this different from app ownership by an individual account?
  • How does Heroku Enterprise Team SSO integrate with identity providers (e.g., Okta, Azure AD), and what user provisioning model does it use?
  • A company has multiple development teams sharing a Heroku Enterprise account. How should the architect use Enterprise Teams and app-level permissions to ensure team isolation while allowing shared add-on access?
  • A Heroku Enterprise team admin notices that a contractor has been granted the Member role but should only be able to view app metrics. What role change resolves this, and what access is lost?
  • An enterprise wants to enforce that all production apps in a Heroku Enterprise Team can only be deployed by a CI/CD pipeline and not by individual developers. What Heroku Enterprise Team features support this governance requirement?
  • How does Heroku Enterprise Team-level license pooling work for dyno and add-on entitlements, and what reporting is available for cost allocation?
  • What are the Twelve-Factor App principles, and which factors are most directly enforced by Heroku's platform design?
  • How does the Twelve-Factor App 'Config' factor map to Heroku's environment variable model, and why is storing config in the codebase an antipattern?
  • How does explicit dependency declaration using a manifest file (e.g., Gemfile, package.json, requirements.txt) interact with Heroku's buildpack compilation?
  • How does the Twelve-Factor App 'Backing Services' factor (Factor IV) map to Heroku add-ons?
  • What does treating a database as an attached resource enable in terms of environment portability on Heroku?
  • What is the 'Dev/Prod Parity' factor of the Twelve-Factor App?
  • How does Heroku's Review Apps feature support the Dev/Prod Parity principle during development?
  • A company's application has tightly coupled build, release, and run stages managed manually. How should the architect redesign the CI/CD pipeline to comply with Twelve-Factor App Factor V (Build, Release, Run)?
  • What is the Twelve-Factor App 'Port Binding' factor (Factor VII), and how does a Heroku web dyno expose its HTTP service through port binding rather than relying on an injected web server?
  • How does the Twelve-Factor App 'Concurrency' factor (Factor VIII) map to Heroku's horizontal scaling model, and why does it require stateless process design?
  • How does the Twelve-Factor App 'Disposability' factor (Factor IX) — fast startup and graceful shutdown — affect Heroku dyno design, and what happens when a dyno receives a SIGTERM signal?
  • How does treating logs as event streams (Factor XI) translate to a Heroku log drain architecture for centralized observability?
  • A legacy application stores user-uploaded files on the dyno filesystem. An architect is migrating it to Heroku. Which Twelve-Factor App factor does this violate, and what is the recommended architectural change?
  • An application maintains a persistent in-memory cache on each dyno that is not shared across dyno instances. Which Twelve-Factor App principle does this violate, and what is the correct pattern?
  • A team's Heroku app starts slowly and takes over 30 seconds to respond to the first request after a deploy. Which Twelve-Factor App factor and Heroku platform expectation does this violate?
  • How does the Twelve-Factor App 'Processes' factor (stateless, share-nothing) affect the design of session management in a horizontally scaled Heroku app?
  • What is the role of an orchestration layer in a Heroku microservices architecture?
  • How does Apache Kafka on Heroku function as the backbone for microservices orchestration?
  • What are the trade-offs between using Kafka for synchronous request-response versus asynchronous event notification in a Heroku microservices architecture?
  • How should consumer group IDs be assigned across Heroku microservices consuming the same Kafka topic, and what happens if two services share a consumer group ID inadvertently?
  • When designing a Heroku-based microservices architecture with Kafka, how should the architect handle schema evolution and backward compatibility of Kafka messages?
  • A Heroku microservices system using Kafka experiences a downstream consumer outage lasting several hours. What Kafka behavior ensures no messages are lost, and what must the architect configure to guarantee this?
  • What is the saga pattern in microservices, and how can Apache Kafka on Heroku be used to implement a choreography-based saga for distributed transactions across Heroku apps?
  • A company is decomposing a monolith into microservices on Heroku. They need each service to react to order lifecycle events without tight coupling. How should they architect the event-driven communication layer using Apache Kafka on Heroku?
  • What is Heroku Connect, and what synchronization pattern does it establish between Heroku Postgres and Salesforce?
  • What is the difference between Heroku Connect read mappings and write mappings, and what operational distinction must the architect understand about which direction each mapping synchronizes data?
  • How does Heroku Connect handle conflict resolution when both the Salesforce record and the Heroku Postgres record are updated simultaneously?
  • What is the role of External IDs in Heroku Connect, and why are they critical for avoiding duplicate record creation during upsert operations?
  • A Heroku app inserts records directly into the Heroku Postgres tables managed by Heroku Connect. What is the risk if External IDs are not set correctly, and how should the architect mitigate this?
  • What is the difference between Heroku Connect's default polling-based synchronization and accelerated streaming mode?
  • When should an architect choose Heroku Connect accelerated streaming over polling?
  • A company running Heroku Connect notices that Salesforce records updated in bulk are not appearing in Heroku Postgres for several minutes. What synchronization mechanism determines this latency, and what options exist to reduce it?
  • A company wants to build a customer-facing portal on Heroku that reads and writes Salesforce Account and Case data in near real-time. How should Heroku Connect be architected to support both read and write synchronization?
  • What are the limitations of Heroku Connect in terms of supported Salesforce objects, field types, and synchronization latency, and how should an architect communicate these to stakeholders?
  • When is Heroku Connect the WRONG integration pattern for a Salesforce-Heroku integration, and what alternative approaches should the architect recommend?
  • What Salesforce API does Heroku Connect use under the hood, and what implications does this have for API limit consumption in high-volume sync scenarios?
  • A company needs Heroku Connect to sync data from multiple Salesforce orgs into a single Heroku Postgres database. Is this supported, and if so, how should the schema be designed to avoid collisions?
  • What are the primary integration patterns between Heroku apps and the Salesforce Lightning Platform (callouts, Canvas, connected apps, Heroku Connect)?
  • When is each Heroku-Salesforce integration pattern (callouts, Canvas, connected apps, Heroku Connect) most appropriate?
  • How does OAuth 2.0 with a Salesforce Connected App enable a Heroku app to call Salesforce REST APIs on behalf of a user?
  • What OAuth flow (Authorization Code, JWT Bearer, Client Credentials) is appropriate for a Heroku-Salesforce server-to-server integration?
  • How should an architect secure a Heroku API endpoint that is called by Salesforce, ensuring only the authorized Salesforce org can invoke it?
  • A Salesforce admin wants to embed a Heroku app directly within a Salesforce Lightning page. What integration technique enables this, and what authentication flow does it use?
  • A Lightning Web Component needs to call a Heroku REST API directly from the browser. What CORS and authentication configuration is required on both the Heroku and Salesforce sides?
  • When should an architect use Salesforce Platform Events over Heroku Connect for event-driven data flow between Salesforce and Heroku?
  • A Heroku app needs to receive real-time notifications when a Salesforce Opportunity is closed. What Salesforce platform event or streaming API mechanism should the architect use, and how is it consumed from Heroku?
  • A Salesforce org must call out to a Heroku API in an Apex trigger. What are the governor limits and asynchronous patterns the architect must design around to prevent trigger timeouts?
  • What is Heroku External Objects (Salesforce Connect + OData), and in what scenario is this a more appropriate integration than Heroku Connect or direct API callouts?

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How does Heroku's router distribute requests across dynos, and what implications does this have for session affinity requirements?

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Next conceptAn application needs to offload slow processing tasks to avoid request timeouts during peak traffic. What Heroku architectural pattern addresses this, and what add-ons typically support it?

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Explainer

The Heroku router distributes incoming requests across all available dynos in an application's formation. Session affinity is a supported feature that associates all HTTP requests from an enduser with a specific web dyno.

Core information
  • The Heroku router registers web dynos when they start up and begins distributing incoming requests across the application's dyno formation.
More details and nuances
  • The legacy router completed end-of-life in Spring 2025, meaning applications relying on it are no longer supported.