2022 was a transformational year for Heroku. In this post, we share how we’ve been enriching the Heroku developer experience in 2022, especially since committing to Heroku’s Next Chapter. We are dedicated to supporting our customers of all sizes who continue to invest and build their projects, careers, and businesses on Heroku.
Public Roadmap
As part of our commitment to increase transparency, the Heroku roadmap went live on GitHub in August 2022. The public roadmap has grown with the participation of many of our customers. Thank you for engaging with us about the future of Heroku. We want to hear from you! Today, we have approximately 70 active roadmap cards, most of which have an assigned product owner. We have 24 cards in-flight and have shipped 28 projects. Please continue to contribute and share your ideas. The roadmap is your direct line to Heroku.
Focus on Mission-Critical Stability
At Salesforce and Heroku, Trust is our #1 value. To us, trust means being transparent with you about the security incident in April 2022 that affected Heroku and our customers. After taking necessary remediation steps to bring Heroku back to a stable state, we committed to invest in Heroku to improve resilience and strengthen our security posture. We did invest, are investing, and will continue to invest in operational stability in order to maintain your trust. Here is a sampling of our 2022 highlights in this area:
- Adopting a data deletion program
- Improved internal access restrictions
- Infrastructure availability and hardening
- Credential handling improvements
- Observability improvements
- Partner and vendor changes
As part of operational stability, we instituted an inactive account data deletion program. Customers who go a year or more without logging into their Heroku account and are not on any paid plans will receive a notification giving them 30 days to log in to prevent their account’s deletion. Prior to launching this program, millions of stale Heroku accounts and apps were no longer in use, but we were still keeping the lights on, which came with a cost. Deleting inactive accounts also reduces the risks associated with storing our customer’s data, which sometimes includes personal data and other data customers want to keep private. This change allows us to better maintain effective data hygiene practices and safeguard our customers’ data so it doesn’t sit online indefinitely. It also aligns with Salesforce’s commitment to data minimization and other important global privacy principles.
Mission-critical changes for Heroku are always added to our changelog.
Ending Free Plans
In 2022, ending our free plans was an intentional change to focus Heroku on mission-critical availability for our paid customers. We ended our free plans for Heroku Dynos, Heroku Postgres, and Heroku Key-Value Store. We completed this work in December 2022. We understand that adapting to this change wasn’t easy for many of you and there was work required for you to accommodate the low-cost plans into your development cycles. We appreciate your support and loyalty during this transition.
We know that we affected many users of our platform with this change. We want Heroku to stay available for free to students and learners, so we partnered with GitHub to add free Heroku to their Student Developer Pack. We want to give back to the open source community, so we are announcing a Heroku free credits program for qualifying open source projects starting in March 2023.
New Low-Cost Plans - Eco and Mini
Based on your feedback, Heroku introduced new, lower-cost options for dyno and data plans in November 2022. We announced our new Eco Dynos plan, which costs $5 for 1,000 compute hours a month, shared across all of your eco dynos. We are calling these dynos “Eco“ because they sleep after 30 minutes of no web traffic. They only consume hours when active, so they are economical for you.
To match our new Eco Dynos plan, we also introduced low-cost data plans. We announced new Mini plans for Heroku Postgres (10K rows, $5/month) and Heroku Key-Value Store (25 MB, $3/month). You can find complete pricing details for these plans and others at https://www.heroku.com/pricing.
Improvements to Heroku Data
To help our customers who manage data resources in both Heroku and AWS, we provide additional flexibility with the ability to connect AWS VPCs to your Postgres PgBouncer connection pools and manage them using PrivateLink.
Heroku Data Labs CLI, an extension of the Heroku Data client plugin, debuted with two features that allow you to make configuration changes to your Heroku Postgres add-ons. You can now enable or disable WAL Compression and Enhanced Certificates. Previously, you could only enable these features by opening a ticket with Heroku Support.
MFA Enforced for Heroku
On the security side, Salesforce began requiring multi-factor authentication (MFA) in February 2022. Heroku gave its customers time to adopt this new authentication standard and to opt-in when ready. After nearly a year, Heroku is now enforcing MFA for all its customers.
On their own, usernames and passwords no longer provide sufficient protection against cyberattacks. MFA is one of the simplest, most effective ways to prevent unauthorized account access and safeguard your data and your customers’ data. We now require all Heroku customers to enable MFA.
Heroku Joins GitHub Student Program
We realize that Heroku’s free plans were essential to learners. In October 2022, we announced a new partnership with GitHub, which adds Heroku to the GitHub Student Developer Pack. Heroku gives students a credit of $13 USD per month for 12 months. Students can apply this credit to any Heroku product offering, except third-party Heroku add-ons. To date, we’re supporting over 17,000 students on Heroku through the program.
This is an exciting first step as we explore additional program options that include easier access and longer availability to support student developer growth and learning on the Heroku platform. We are also working on a longer-term solution for educators to support a cohesive classroom experience.
For additional questions about the Heroku for GitHub Students program, see our program FAQ.
Supporting Open Source Projects
Heroku is built on open source, and home to a wide range of open source applications. We want to give back by providing free capabilities for qualifying open source projects. We are announcing a Heroku credits program for open source projects. The program grants a platform credit every month for 12 months to selected projects. Credits are applicable to any Heroku product, including Heroku Dynos, Heroku Postgres, and Heroku Key-Value Store; and cannot be applied to paid third-party Heroku add-ons. An application process is open now, with applications reviewed monthly. We have more info here on how to apply, as well as the terms and conditions of the program.
Nightscout
Over 20,000 Nightscout users with diabetes or parents of a child with diabetes choose Heroku to host their Nightscout application that enables remote monitoring of blood glucose levels and insulin dosing/treatment data. Most of these apps were hosted in Heroku free plans. Prior to ending our free plans, we partnered with Nightscout to ensure a smooth transition for all their users, including posting an advisory with instructions on how to continue using this vital service. To further solidify our long-standing relationship and stand alongside an organization that provides critical health information, Salesforce made a corporate donation to Nightscout.
Add-on Providers
Heroku partners enjoy easier management of their add-ons using our latest Add-on Partner API v3. Partners can obtain a full list of apps where your add-on is installed by using a new endpoint. Previously, partners needed to use the Legacy Add-on Partner App Info API, as requests made to Platform API for Partners are scoped to a single add-on resource linked to the authorization token on the request.
We also announced the general availability of Webhooks for Add-ons. All partners can use Webhooks for their add-ons to subscribe to notifications relating to their apps, domains, builds, releases, attachments, dynos, and more. This can now be done without logging a ticket to request access to this feature.
Continuing our Focus and Delivery
We are energized by our focus as your mission-critical hosting provider. Heroku is just getting started on our operational stability and security improvements, and you’ll also see us deliver innovations in 2023. We will continue to keep you informed about the important changes ahead for the Heroku platform. We will continue to post feature briefs on the latest Heroku updates our customers love.
We really want to hear from you, our customers. Join us at TrailblazerDX for more about all the things we are delivering. We invite you to engage with us on our public roadmap to share your feedback, feature requests, and suggestions. Thank you for your loyalty and trust in Heroku.