Case Study: The RealReal achieves faster deployments and scalable CI/CD with Heroku

Heroku Helps The RealReal’s Engineers Drive Business Growth

The RealReal, a leading authenticated luxury consignment retailer, grew quickly and outpaced its original Chef-based deployment model. As apps, QA environments, and daily releases multiplied, DevOps became a bottleneck; an interim move to Deis/Docker and Phoenix introduced stability and networking issues, leaving the engineering team needing scalable, developer-led CI/CD workflows without expanding Ops headcount.

The company migrated to Heroku Private Spaces and adopted Heroku’s CI/CD tools (Pipelines, Review Apps and Git-integrated deploys), moved toward a microservices/event-driven architecture, and now runs 100+ apps using Phoenix, Rails, GraphQL, Kafka and Redis. The result: faster, more reliable deployments, fewer DevOps constraints, improved developer productivity and collaboration, and the ability to scale securely with less operational overhead.

The RealReal

Fredrik Björk

CTO