Salesforce Delivers Heroku Platform Innovations to Simplify Cloud-Native App Delivery at Scale

Salesforce today announced a series of updates for Heroku, a platform as a service (PaaS) offering that enables teams to build, deploy, and scale modern applications entirely in the cloud. The latest version of Heroku enhances developer capabilities with support for .NET and integrated AI development; improves platform performance and operational ease with fully integrated infrastructure services including Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS), Elastic Container Registry (ECR), AWS Global Accelerator, and AWS Graviton; and standardizes to open source standards with Kubernetes, Open Container Initiative (OCI), and OpenTelemetry without adding complexity. 

Why it matters: Organizations are under pressure to quickly respond to customer needs, deliver new digital revenue streams, and optimize internal processes. At the same time, technology teams are faced with navigating an increasingly complex technology landscape of infrastructure, cloud-native technologies, and developer tooling while adopting AI capabilities and improving the productivity of development teams. These pressures are increasing friction and risk in the software delivery lifecycle.

• 84% of organizations are using or evaluating Kubernetes as core platform infrastructure, but adoption at scale requires selecting and integrating point technologies from a vast and complex ecosystem. (Source: CNCF 2023 survey)
• 46% of organizations face challenges in maturing their cloud-native adoption due to the shortage of experienced talent and lack of expertise in security, monitoring, and observability. (Source: CNCF 2023 survey)
• 84% of CIOs say incorporating AI technologies into their business is a priority, but only 11% have fully implemented due to complexity. 

Innovation in action: The Heroku platform is addressing these challenges in this release by applying additional programming languages and AI to the development process. These platform updates both enhance and expand the integrated platform infrastructure and AI services while conforming to open source standards for enhanced security, performance, and flexibility. 

Enhancements include: 

• Enhance developer experience with added support for .NET alongside languages already supported like Node.js, Java, Python, Go, Ruby, PHP, Scala, and Clojure. 
• Accelerate AI app delivery with managed inference, including Amazon Bedrock to simplify and streamline the use of AI and foundation models for developers.
• Native DevOps infrastructure and automation, providing more ease-of-use with platform resilience and performance on a global scale. This new release integrates leading AWS services including Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS), Amazon Elastic Container Registry (ECR), AWS Global Accelerator, and AWS Graviton into Heroku.
• A cloud-native, open standards-based foundation to drive alignment to cloud-native strategies and conform with the Kubernetes control plane, Open Container Initiative (OCI), and Open Telemetry-based monitoring and observability extensibility.

Salesforce perspective: “Heroku pioneered the PaaS category and defined what a great user experience should look like. Empowering developers and operators to focus on delivering differentiated value to their business, instead of focusing on the infrastructure plumbing,” said Gail Frederick, CTO and SVP, Heroku. “With the next generation Heroku platform, we continue this leadership, bringing forward the most robust practices to cloud native and AI applications; and managing them so our customers don’t have to. With Heroku, you build it, you deploy it, and we take care of the rest.” 

Heroku helps us improve patient care by dramatically improving the speed and reliability at which we can deliver solutions to our customers — sometimes in just minutes. The innovations that Heroku is bringing to the platform will allow us to, in turn, easily leverage these new capabilities to build more innovative solutions for our customers.

Mark Johnson, Chief Executive Officer, Cardiobase

Reaction to the news:

• “Heroku helps us improve patient care by dramatically improving the speed and reliability at which we can deliver solutions to our customers — sometimes in just minutes. The innovations that Heroku is bringing to the platform will allow us to, in turn, easily leverage these new capabilities to build more innovative solutions for our customers.” – Mark Johnson, Chief Executive Officer, Cardiobase
• “Heroku is a cornerstone of our technology stack, enabling the CarCollect team to focus on what matters — delivering innovative apps quickly to our customers. A great product should simplify complexity, and Heroku does just that by keeping the experience simple and removing burdens from our developers. We are excited that Heroku is adding more developer and AI capabilities without adding complexity, enabling our teams to get more from their user experience.” – Wout Groenendijk, Chief Technology Officer, CarCollect
• “At Kilterset, our customers have customers of their own that they are building digital products for. These end customers don’t care what platform our applications run on, but they do expect the applications to perform at 100%, 100% of the time. Building on Heroku allows us to create world class experiences and deliver speed, scale, and trust without the complex operational overhead of heavy infrastructure or managing tools.” – Chris Peacock, CEO, Kilterset 
• “We wanted the scaling capability of Kubernetes for the apps we build for our customers, but did not want to spend all of our time on configuration and managing the complexity. Heroku’s latest platform gives us speed and scale on cloud, Kubernetes, and AI so we can focus on the apps while keeping our platform maintenance costs low.” – Matthew Wratt, Director of Engineering, Kilterset 

Current plans for feature availability: 

• Pilot access to the new Heroku platform is available now and will be generally available in early 2025.
• Heroku AI is available in pilot now and will be generally available in early 2025. 
• .NET-supported features are available in public beta now and will be generally available in January 2025.

Fast facts: Heroku is a leading cloud application platform, founded in 2007 and acquired by Salesforce in 2010. 

• More than 65 million apps have been built on Heroku.
• More than 65 billion requests are served daily on Heroku. 
• More than 38 million data stores have been created on Heroku.
• Heroku Elements Marketplace hosts over 200 ecosystem add-on services.

Explore more: 

• Learn more about the new Heroku platform
• Sign up for the Heroku platform pilot 
• Sign up for the Heroku AI pilot

Any unreleased services or features referenced here are not currently available and may not be delivered on time or at all. Customers should make their purchase decisions based upon features that are currently available.