What’s Next for Heroku from Salesforce

In this presentation, Chris Peterson, Senior Director of Product Management at Heroku, discusses the future of Heroku and its foundational principles, particularly the 12-Factor App Manifesto. This manifesto, created by Heroku co-founder Adam Wiggins, outlines best practices for building scalable and maintainable applications. These principles have guided Heroku’s development, ensuring that apps built on the platform can scale horizontally and integrate seamlessly with services like databases through environment variables. Heroku is now revisiting and modernizing the 12-Factor App Manifesto to address contemporary needs such as app identity, logging, and telemetry, and is actively seeking feedback from the developer community through open-source discussions.

Peterson also highlights recent advancements in Heroku’s scalability and language support. In 2024, Heroku introduced new features to ensure that customers can scale both horizontally and vertically, offering larger dynos with up to 128GB of memory and smaller options for enterprise customers. The platform has also modernized its language support, adding faster package managers like PNPM and new tools like Poetry for Python. Additionally, Heroku has expanded its Postgres offerings, providing larger database plans and new versions to accommodate growing customer needs. The platform has also integrated with other Salesforce services, such as Mulesoft Flex Gateway, to enhance API management and security within private spaces.

Looking ahead, Heroku is focusing on enhanced networking, including HTTP2 and HTTP3 support, and expanding its language ecosystem with the addition of .NET support. The platform is also working on deeper integrations with Salesforce through event-driven and API-driven solutions, allowing developers to easily connect Heroku apps with Salesforce events and APIs. Heroku is also embracing open standards, particularly in the Kubernetes ecosystem, and is collaborating with AWS to leverage new services and technologies. These efforts are part of a broader strategy to re-platform Heroku and refresh its core values, ensuring it remains a leading platform for developers in the cloud-native era.