From a legal standpoint: Does this now comply with the EU (German?) data privacy laws? I was told the other day, that using Heroku was a No-No, because you are storing your customer data with a non-EU-compliant company outside the EU. With this, the data resides in the EU. Does this (magically) make my troubles go away?

Remarks: I am totally not a lawyer

From the "Safe Harbor Compliance is Coming Soon" section:

    Heroku is not yet a registered participant in the Safe
    Harbor program. We’ve laid the groundwork for becoming
    Safe Harbor certified and expect to have it soon. The
    Europe region public beta is designed to let you build
    high-performance apps for European users. It does not
    currently address data residency or jurisdiction concerns. 
    You should assume that some portions of your app and its
    data will be in, or pass through, datacenters located in
    the US.

Oh sh*t. I didn't read the website (only the newsletter). Thanks for posting, though. Should be helpful for others as well!

(I work @heroku)

Europe region beta is not yet Safe Harbor cert. Working on it. Sign up for updates to stay informed heroku.com/europe

Heroku is not (yet) safe harbor compliant, but we have plans to be so.

How close are you to fulfilling those requirements? I am just asking, because there are quite a few German PaaS providers showing up now. So there seems to be a market. And it is a real problem when you try to do business with healthcare

Well, IANAL, but they say they are based on Ireland (in Amazon's EC2 servers), so Irish law (which is a subset of EU law) applies to their servers there.

I'm not sure what they keep meaning by "not safe harbour compliant", since the law applies all the time to all people in Ireland....

IANAL either, but note that Heroku is an American company and that probably has implications due to the PATRIOT act. Check out what a Microsoft exec had to say about this: "Microsoft cannot provide those guarantees. Neither can any other company" - http://www.zdnet.com/blog/igeneration/microsoft-admits-patri...

> Irish law (which is a subset of EU law)

Shouldn't that be "superset"?

ahem yes. :)

The press releases talk about them not being Safe Harbour yet but it is now much more in progress. Your data may pass through the US still at presently.

I may be more excited about Heroku Fork than I am about the EU region. I've copied apps many many times, it's one of those tasks that I always meant to write up into a script and never got around to. Thanks Heroku!

Love to get your feedback on fork - ping me at: rd at heroku as you start using the tool.

Aye this sounds great for setting up staging environments, which until now we've had to do manually.

Is this based in the EU? Or a non EU European country? EU =/= Europe. The blog post keeps mentioning Europe, but a lot of aliases are EU. This is important to figure out what law is applicable. (The graphic implies it's hosted in Ireland)

This is based in the AWS EU datacenter in Ireland. However, as far as the law is concerned, we are not yet Safe Harbor compliant, but are actively working on it.

Sign up for updates to stay informed heroku.com/europe

Going to sacrifice the Karma to say:

I didn't know Europe was out of alpha. They seem to be experiencing integration bugs.

I knew we should have unit-tested Greece.

Just 4.5 years after EC2 was available in Ireland...: http://aws.amazon.com/releasenotes/DevPay/1924

Would love the ability to have one instance in US, another in EU, and have heroku auto-route to the best one...

How would you handle db/data sync between the apps?

..I would let you (heroku) do that for me, magically? ;)

Wouldn't that be nice!

I work on Heroku, on the databases, which are rather thorny in that department...

...it's going to take some evolution in how applications are written to make that work not uglifically (and it'll probably be ugly at first and for a while), but it's the dream, and I think it'll come to pass over time and with work from many people.

There are literally more Heroku folks in this thread than unaffiliated commenters :P well played.

Personally I'd just be happy with a master-master postgres db or sharding, for $money, where money is some amount enough to make that happen without me worrying about it.

Now, could SFDC please do the same - not having a datacenter in EU is so bad. Performance is measurably worse.

And Safe Harbor is nice, but having a DC in EU would make the discussions around it even easier.

Wow, this is awesome for both DR reasons and performance reasons. Congratulations Heroku! (Hopefully a second US Region and an Asia Region will follow...)

Hurrah! I'll be toying around with this first thing in the morning. Thanks for all the hard work, Heroku guys.

I'm hopeful that more regions are in the works. Might we see an Oceania region any time soon?

Sorry, already running on EC2 by now...

woot! here's to hoping we get support for regional redundancy in the US soon.

Agreed, Heroku is fantastic but I'm paranoid about keeping all my servers in one region.

#CTOproblems

if this is a big enough concern, it may be best to just drop down a level of abstraction and run directly on AWS.