Platform-as-a-Service Heroku now available in the EU

Heroku, the Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) owned by Salesforce.com, is now available in the EU. Developers who sign up for the public beta can use the European data centre to significantly reduce latency in applications used there – to the tune of 100 ms or more per end-user request, according to Heroku. Heroku is using Amazon's data centre in Ireland because the platform itself uses Amazon's EC2.

One aspect is still being worked on: cloud service providers from the US who want to set up services in Europe must comply with European data protection laws, which are much stricter than their US counterparts – those companies can apply for Safe Harbor certification to demonstrate that their services comply with European regulations. Heroku has not yet received certification that it follows the Safe Harbor principles, but the announcement states that they have already "laid the groundwork". Until that process is complete, however, developers should assume that their data might still be stored in Heroku's data centres in the US.

Heroku started out as a PaaS for Ruby applications in 2007 and has since become "multilingual", supporting Java, Node.js, Clojure, Python, Scala and PHP.

(sno)