One year ago, Heroku sunsetted its free tier. Today, we want to reaffirm our commitment to maintaining our free tier, dive into why offering a free tier for compute is complicated (we are looking at you crypto miners), take the time to explain how we intend to sustain it, and explain why we are so committed to providing a free tier. Long story short: we aim to keep a free tier thanks to how we control our costs.

If you ever tried to go global, you have probably faced a reality check. A whole new set of issues starts to appear when you start to operate a workload over multiple locations across the globe: So it looks like a great idea in theory, but in practice, all of this complexity multiplies the number of failure scenarios to consider!

We previously explored how we built our own Serverless Engine and a multi-region networking layer based on Nomad, Firecracker, and Kuma. But what about the architecture of the engine that orchestrates these components across the world? This is an interesting topic to work on and we thought it could be useful to share some internals out there. Put on your scuba equipment, this is a deep dive into our architecture and the story of how we built our own global deployment engine.