Utilizing rethinkdb on compose.io with heroku does take some hackery, mainly around deploying to the same colo (amzn us-east-1), and then using heroku env variables to store your ssh key that will be used to connect your api/svc to compose box. See this article for more info:
https://www.compose.io/articles/tunneling-from-heroku-to-com...
I was never able to get the referenced python script working, but using a shell script inside `.profile.d` did the trick.
