Building and Scaling a Global Chatbot using Heroku + Terraform

Summary

Live Agent, Salesforce’s embeddable chatbot, must handle customer interactions and requests at global scale while remaining highly available across regions. Its eight-person team chose Heroku to avoid managing bare metal, cloud virtual machines, databases, and other third-party services, while relying on managed Java support and regional infrastructure. The platform runs ten apps with Heroku Postgres, Redis, and Apache Kafka dependencies, and deploys them inside Heroku Private Spaces to isolate network boundaries and data. Terraform defines and replicates apps, add-ons, custom domains, logging, and profiling configuration across regions, allowing changes to propagate through a pull request. The result described is a simpler operational model in which Heroku handles maintenance and the team can scale the same architecture into new geographic locations.

Takeaways

1. 1

   Live Agent’s platform consists of ten separate apps and uses Heroku Postgres, Redis, and Apache Kafka dependencies across regions.

2. 2

   Heroku Private Spaces isolate the apps’ runtime and keep data within a network that is inaccessible from outside services.

3. 3

   Terraform lets the team replicate regional infrastructure and update app, add-on, domain, logging, and profiling configuration from code.