Maintain Your Heroku Architect Certification for Summer ‘24
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- Recognize regional updates for Private Spaces and Connect.
- Use SSO for Heroku teams.
- Monitor password history enforcement.
- Enhance Heroku Postgres with pgvector.
- Provision -10 plans for Standard, Premium, Private, and Shield Postgres databases.
- Realize larger sizes for Performance, Private, and Shield dyno tiers.
- Take advantage of free Heroku features for card-paying customers.
- Use cost-effective basic dynos in Heroku Enterprise.
Maintain Your Certification
If you hold the Heroku Architect credential, keep in mind that you need to complete this module by the due date to maintain your certification. Another important part of maintaining your credential is ensuring your Trailhead and Webassessor accounts are linked.
Interested in learning more about getting certified? Check out the Heroku Architect credential.
Protect the Integrity of Your Certification
The quality of our certification exams and the value that our credentials provide are our highest priority. Protecting the security and confidentiality of our exams is essential to providing our customers with credentials that are respected and industry-leading.
As a participant of the Salesforce Certification Program, you’re required to accept the terms of the Salesforce Credential and Certification Program Agreement. Please review the Salesforce certification exam-taking policies in the Salesforce Credential and Certification Program Agreement and Code of Conduct Trailhead Help article for more details.
Salesforce introduced great feature enhancements over the past year. Let’s take a look at some of the more important ones.
Recognize Regional Updates for Private Spaces and Connect
Private Spaces Now Available in New Regions: London, Montreal, Mumbai, and Singapore
Private Spaces are dedicated environments for running dynos and certain types of add-ons within an isolated network. Specify the geographic region where your Private Space is provisioned to bring your Heroku apps and services closer to your users, reducing latency. Heroku Private Spaces are now generally available in these four new regions: London, Montreal, Mumbai, and Singapore.
Since Private Spaces provide a network-isolated environment for running applications, you have more choice and flexibility for deploying applications and adhering to local data requirements. For more information about how your data moves through the Heroku Services, see our Salesforce Infrastructure and Sub-processor Documentation and information on Data Residency.
Heroku Connect Is Available in London, Montreal, Mumbai, and Singapore
Heroku Connect enables seamless data synchronization between your Heroku Postgres database and Salesforce.
You can now create Heroku Connect add-ons in the Heroku London, Singapore, Mumbai, and Montreal regions.
The public IP addresses used by Heroku Connect in each region are listed in the Heroku Connect Dev Center. This information helps you configure your Salesforce org if login IP restrictions are enabled. The API URL for Heroku Connect add-ons created in each region are listed in the Heroku Connect API article.
Use SSO for Heroku Teams
Single sign-on (SSO) is now available for all Heroku teams. SSO for Heroku is a feature that allows users to log in to Heroku using their company’s identity provider (IdP) instead of the Heroku login page. Users only need to enter their username and password one time at the IdP to gain access to all services under the IdP’s control.
Previously, SSO was only available to Heroku Enterprise customers. With this change, any Heroku team can use their existing SAML 2.0-compliant identity provider (IDP) to securely log in to Heroku.
You must be a team admin to enable SSO. To get started, see Using Single Sign-On (SSO) Services with Heroku, for Administrators.
Monitor Password History Enforcement
Heroku now enforces password history for all users. Disallowing the reuse of passwords encourages users to maintain strong, unique passwords and can mitigate the risk impact of another data breach involving an old, potentially compromised password. You can’t reuse any of your 8 previous passwords when you change your current password.
Enhance Heroku Postgres with pgvector
Pgvector for Heroku Postgres
In an era where large language models (LLMs) and AI applications are paramount, pgvector provides the essential capability for performing high-dimensional vector similarity searches. This allows Heroku Postgres to quickly find similar data points in complex data, which is great for applications like recommendation systems and prompt engineering for LLMs.
Pgvector
is now generally available for Standard, Premium, Private, and Shield Heroku Postgres plans on PostgreSQL 15. The pgvector extension for Heroku Postgres adds support for the vector data type and functions for working with vectors.
You can add the extension by running the command in a psql session
:
=> CREATE EXTENSION vector; |
---|
For more information on installing pgvector, see Extensions, PostGIS, and Full-Text Search Dictionaries on Heroku Postgres.
Enhancing Heroku Postgres with pgvector: Generating AI Insights
Vectors are important for working with large language models and other machine learning applications, as the embeddings these models generate are often output in vector format. As of today, pgvector is fully compatible with all Production-tier databases running Postgres 15 at no additional charge, and you can get started with a simple CREATE EXTENSION vector;
command in your client session.
Provision the -10 plans for Standard, Premium, Private, and Shield Postgres Databases
Heroku Postgres Standard, Premium, Private, and Shield-10
databases are now available. -10
plans come with larger disk size, CPU, and memory.
Plan | vCPU | RAM | PIOPs | Connection Limit | Disk Size |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
standard-10 premium-10 private-10 shield-10 | 128 | 1 TB | 32000 | 500 | 8 TB |
You can provision the new plans the same as any Heroku Postgres add-on by specifying the plan name, for example:
$ heroku addons:create heroku-postgresql:premium-10 -a example-app |
---|
See Choosing the Right Heroku Postgres Plan for more information and the Heroku Postgres add-ons for pricing on the new plans.
Realize Larger Sizes for Performance, Private, and Shield Dyno Tiers
Three larger dyno sizes are available for each of the Performance, Private, and Shield dyno tiers. Add more memory or compute power to your application with these new dynos:
Plan | Memory (RAM) | CPU Share | Compute |
---|---|---|---|
Performance/Private/Shield-L-RAM | 30 GB | 100% | 24x |
Performance/Private/Shield-XL | 62 GB | 100% | 50x |
Performance/Private/Shield-2XL | 126 GB | 100% | 100x |
Heroku’s performance-tier dynos gave customers fully dedicated resources to run their most compute-intensive workloads. Today’s complex applications and growing data volumes consume more memory and carry heavier CPU loads than ever before. With these additional dyno types, Heroku can enable new use cases with enhanced compute and memory specifications.
All Heroku customers can start using the new Performance dynos available now. Private and Shield Private Spaces customers can also use the new Private and Shield dyno types.
Take Advantage of Free Heroku Features for Card-Paying Customers
At present, Heroku Teams of up to 25 members are free. Previously, Heroku Teams with more than five people were $10/month.
Heroku CI, which was previously $10/month, is now free. There is no monthly fee for using Heroku CI, but customers are still charged for dyno and add-on usage during CI test runs. See Usage and Billing for more information..
Use Cost-Effective Basic Dynos in Heroku Enterprise
Basic dynos in the Common Runtime are now available for Heroku Enterprise customers. Each basic dyno consumes 0.28 dyno units per month of your Enterprise license. Basic dynos are the new default dyno type for Common Runtime apps for Enterprise customers.
Enterprise customers can now choose a cost-effective option for running less resource-intensive applications or background jobs. For apps with multiple processes, explicitly set the dyno sizes for all processes in your formation to avoid mixing dyno types.
You’ve learned about some of the most important Heroku feature releases over the past year. Now it’s time to test your understanding of these topics and complete the exam to maintain your Heroku Architect certification.
Resources
- Heroku Dev Center: London, Montreal, Mumbai and Singapore Private Spaces regions are generally available
- Heroku Dev Center: Heroku Connect is generally available in London, Singapore, Mumbai, and Montreal
- Heroku Dev Center: Regions
- Heroku Dev Center: SSO for Heroku
- Heroku Dev Center: Password history enforcement
- Heroku Dev Center: pgvector now generally available for Heroku Postgres
- Blog: Enhancing Heroku Postgres with pgvector: Generating AI Insights
- Heroku Dev Center: Announcing the -10 plans for Standard, Premium, Private, and Shield Postgres databases
- Heroku Dev Center: Larger sizes for Performance, Private and Shield dyno tiers
- Heroku Dev Center: Dyno Types
- Blog: Expanded Memory and Compute with Heroku's New Larger Dynos
- Heroku Dev Center: Heroku CI and Heroku Teams now free for card paying customers
- Heroku Dev Center: Basic dynos are now available for Heroku Enterprise
- Heroku Dev Center: Heroku Teams
- Heroku Dev Center: Heroku CI