Case Study: Lean Poker achieves rapid scaling and faster continuous deployment with Heroku

Developers Learn Modern Deployment Practices in Fun Poker Robot Competition on Heroku

Lean Poker, founded by Rafael Ordóñez, runs competitive coding workshops that teach continuous deployment and lean startup practices by having teams iteratively build poker‑playing robots. As the program grew from a laptop prototype to a franchisable offering, Rafael struggled with a Rackspace + Docker setup that was costly, time‑consuming to provision and decommission between events, and raised security concerns—he needed a scalable, easy‑to‑manage platform so he could focus on the product instead of sysadmin work.

Rafael migrated the Lean Poker stack to Heroku, adopting a microservices architecture where each player robot runs as a separate Heroku app and deployments are automated from GitHub via the Heroku API; the system uses MongoDB and add‑ons like Logentries and Redis Cloud. The move eliminated much of the operations overhead, improved security isolation, made it simple to scale dynos during events, and enabled growth—Lean Poker has run 21 events across Europe, trains coaches to run workshops, and is preparing to expand to the U.S.

Lean Poker

Rafael Ördög

Founder, Lean Poker