The recent advances in technology coupled with a demand for cost efficient computing have led to an enormous growth of cloud computing usage in modern day businesses. Users want to optimize their resource usage of the CPU, network, and the memory and pay for only what they use. Virtualization, faster/larger computing power, and high speed network backbones have led to an explosion in the deployment of cloud infrastructure across the world. Along with the underlying infrastructure, many platforms have evolved to support the ability to develop real apps for the cloud environment virtually from anywhere. Additionally, new cloud-based software apps have proliferated so fast that they have replaced the notion of installed software for good.

Today, no developer is untouched by the cloud. In their day to day lives, developers use one or the other form of a cloud service—whether it is an Amazon-hosted virtual machine to do testing or a cloud-based development environment to write code for their business apps. Cloud is everywhere.

In this book, we will undertake the journey to explore a very significant and specific aspect of cloud computing, that is, how to develop web apps on the cloud. We will use the Heroku platform to build robust and scalable web apps and in the process understand different aspects of the Heroku platform.

All aboard? Let us begin the journey. In this chapter, we will: