What is Heroku

What is Heroku?

Heroku is a modern, container-based Platform as a Service (PaaS) that enables developers to deploy, manage, and scale applications with ease. Designed for simplicity, flexibility, and elegance, it provides the fastest path for developers to take their apps to market.

Key Features of Heroku:

Heroku Runtime: Runs apps inside dynos, which are intelligent containers in a fully managed runtime environment.
Heroku Postgres: A trusted, secure, and scalable PostgreSQL database as a service.
Heroku Key-Value Store: Fully managed Redis service optimized for developers.
Scalability: Scale effortlessly from small projects to enterprise-grade applications.
Heroku Elements: Extend apps with Add-ons, customize languages with Buildpacks, and start projects with Buttons.
Heroku Teams: Streamline collaboration with tools for managing people, app-level permissions, and billing.
Fast Rollback: Instantly revert your app or database to an earlier state for quick recovery.
App Metrics: Access powerful insights into the performance and behavior of your applications.
Continuous Delivery: Simplify release processes with Heroku Flow, providing a visual and efficient pipeline for deploying updates.
GitHub Integration: Automatically deploy branches or test pull requests with disposable Review Apps.
Extensibility: Customize your stack using Buildpacks, either pre-built by the community or crafted by you.
Security and Compliance: Meets high compliance standards, including PCI, HIPAA, ISO, and SOC certifications.

The Evolution of Heroku

Heroku has recently undergone a transformation, becoming fully cloud-native with advanced integrations like Kubernetes, OpenTelemetry, and Agentforce, an AI-powered enhancement to its platform. These upgrades retain the platform’s hallmark simplicity while delivering more performance and tools, such as Graviton processors, EKS, ECR, and AWS Global Accelerator.

AI-Powered Innovation: Agentforce

Agentforce, Heroku’s latest feature, brings AI-powered automation to app development. It empowers both technical and non-technical users by offering natural language workflows for building applications, making it accessible to a wider range of business users.

According to Betty Junod, Heroku’s Chief Marketing Officer at Salesforce, the platform now seamlessly combines user-friendly experiences with cutting-edge AI capabilities:

“We’ve replatformed while keeping the experience as simple as ever, but now with added horsepower, Graviton performance, and managed AI tools like Bedrock.”

Agentforce is particularly impactful for non-developers, guiding them through building apps and automating processes with no-code or low-code tools. This innovation aligns with Heroku’s mission to make app creation easier and more interactive:

“It’s not just apps serving information anymore; users are engaging with them in entirely new ways.”

Deliver Apps, Your Way

Heroku is designed to serve a variety of needs, from quick prototypes to mission-critical enterprise applications. Its fully managed ecosystem allows you to build and scale apps efficiently, leveraging the tools and languages you already know and love.