Over the past year, Heroku has been on a journey of reflection as we rebase the platform to address the changing needs of app teams toward the future without disrupting your business. In the Heroku way, we want to be thoughtful about your experience as we evolve.
When we started Heroku, it was the early days of cloud computing, before Docker and Kubernetes were household names in IT. We launched Heroku (and the platform-as-a-service category) to help teams get to the cloud easily with an elegant user experience in front of a powerful platform that automated a lot of the manual work that slowed teams down. To do that then, we had to build a lot of the tooling ourselves, like orchestration and self-hosting the databases in AWS. The platform delivered customers the outcomes they needed to deploy apps quickly and scale effortlessly in the cloud—all without having to worry about how the platform worked.
Fast forward and so much has changed. The landscape of infrastructure, application, and developer tools ecosystem is unrecognizable. Cloud is now the default mode. Cloud-native is a massive movement; the cloud is built on open source, and Kubernetes is the operating system of the cloud. And in an even shorter amount of time, we have seen AI become pervasive in every facet of life, business, and technology–specifically in the software delivery lifecycle.
The challenges facing technology teams have only grown in complexity and risk while increasing the cognitive load on developers and constraining their productivity. While it seems that everything has changed, what hasn’t changed is our mission—to help teams build, deploy, and scale apps and services effortlessly in the cloud.
We’re excited to announce Heroku’s Next Generation Platform-as-a-Service that continues to deliver on this mission, addressing the needs of cloud-native and AI app delivery at scale with a delightful developer experience and a streamlined operator experience.
Heroku changed how the world deployed apps with git push heroku main. That seamless deployment experience is at the core of what developers love about Heroku. Now, we’re bringing that same magic to .NET. Learn more in this post and get started with the beta today.
Kubernetes is the operating system of the cloud, and its ecosystem is vast and innovative. While powerful, it is a part of a platform, not the platform itself. CNCF’s annual survey shows that lack of expertise and concerns about security and observability prevent teams from adopting or scaling Kubernetes. In this release, Heroku brings AWS EKS, ECR, OpenTelemetry, AWS Global Accelerator, Cloud Native Buildpacks, Open Container Initiative (OCI) and AWS Graviton into the platform. Integrating, automating, and scaling with our platform and its opinions help you get started faster and grow safely. One difference now is that some opinions will be “loosely held” and you’ll be able to adjust those configurations to your business requirements. Learn more about the platform updates in this blog.
The impact of AI—on all aspects of our digital lives—continues to grow. However, the ability for organizations to deliver value to their customers and recognize a return on their investments with AI is presenting an increasing challenge. For most companies complexity and security are the largest impediments to integrating AI into their applications and services. By providing managed inference and AI development with AWS Bedrock into the Heroku experience—empowering developers through opinionated simplification—we take care of all the setup, so that you can focus on delivering value. Learn more about Heroku AI in this blog.
We’re excited about this release and are looking forward to hearing from you. Together you’ve built over 65 million apps and created over 38 million data stores on Heroku since 2007, and your critical business apps are serving over 65 billion requests per day. From students learning how to code to processing insurance claims to curating luxury brand experiences—thank you for building your business on Heroku.
The Heroku Next Generation Platform is available in pilot today and will be generally available in early 2025. Sign-up here for pilot access and to stay informed and check out our public roadmap.