Gail Frederick, Salesforce

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Gail Frederick

Heroku CTO

Salesforce

Heroku announces modernized, cloud-native version of its platform

Heroku, Salesforce Inc.’s platform-as-a-service, is renovating the Heroku platform to encompass all the latest cloud technology....

play_circle_outline Maximizing benefits with Heroku's cloud-native platform overhaul

play_circle_outline Importance of replatforming and modernizing the platform

play_circle_outline Future plans for Heroku in 2025: GA releases, expanding reach, focus on AI

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Gail Frederick, Salesforce

Gail Frederick

Heroku CTO Salesforce

Principal analyst Bob Laliberte from theCUBE Research discussed Heroku's latest developments with CTO Gail Frederick. Heroku introduced over 100 new capabilities this year, emphasizing a new platform based on open standards and fully cloud-native technology. Recent updates include a new .NET language, AI features, and adherence to Twelve Factor best practices. Plans for global expansion, AI integration, and improved developer tools are in place to enhance productivity and user experiences.

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What updates has Heroku made to their platform in order to align with cloud-native standards? add

What infrastructure has Heroku been using for a couple of years and why did they choose to move to managed infrastructure services from AWS? add

What is the roadmap for Heroku in the upcoming year in terms of product development and expansion? add

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Gail Frederick, Salesforce

Bob Laliberte

>> Hello, I'm Bob Laliberte, principal analyst of theCUBE Research. And welcome to our Boston Studio for a special CUBE conversation, part of our exclusive CUBE coverage of AWS's annual conference, re:Invent. I'm joined by Gail Frederick, Heroku chief technology officer at Salesforce. Welcome, Gail.

Gail Frederick

>> Hi, Bob. Thanks for having me on theCUBE.

Bob Laliberte

>> Yeah, it's great to have you back. CUBE alumni as well, so fantastic to have you back on. So, in this session, we're going to explore how the latest innovations from Heroku really going to help teams securely build, deploy, and scale modern apps and services in the cloud more quickly and easily. And so, with that said, let's just get started. So, Gail, it seems like Heroku has been a little bit busy lately. Perhaps you can tell us about all your AWS re:Invent announcements.

Gail Frederick

>> Sure. We have been busy. We've shipped more than 100 capabilities to our customers this year.

Bob Laliberte

>> Wow.

Gail Frederick

>> And at re:Invent, we are announcing pilot availability for our next-generation platform. This platform is built on open standards and is fully cloud-native, and that brings a whole host of benefits to our customers. So, it's a big day for us.

Bob Laliberte

>> Yeah, that's fantastic. A lot of good news, a lot of stuff that goes in behind that. One of the things that I was wondering about with all those announcements that you have, you mentioned they bring a lot of benefits. I'm wondering if you could elaborate on that and talk about how these are going to benefit your customers and the application development teams.

Gail Frederick

>> Sure. Well, as you know, Heroku's platform is older than any cloud standard. So, what we have been doing is a total overhaul in uplift to be conformant with cloud-native standards. So, we have a Kubernetes conformant control plane and we're using open container initiative images and we're using open telemetry for monitoring and observability. And actually, internally in our platform, Heroku's been doing some of these things for years. So, it's very exciting for us to make this all available to our customers. Our customers are going to see the massive scale that they're used to with Heroku, with increased performance and our ability to innovate on top of, now that we have a cloud standard platform just grows and grows and grows. So, it's a super exciting announcement for us. We're at the beginning of an incredible new chapter for Heroku.

Bob Laliberte

>> So I know in talking with many other tech vendors that the concept of replatforming and so forth and modernizing the platform, not exactly a trivial task. Takes quite a bit of time and effort to go forward to do that and make that shift. Could you elaborate a little bit on how the company decided that you wanted to do that now?

Gail Frederick

>> Sure. Well, some parts of our platform have been using Kubernetes and specifically AWS, EKS flavor of Kubernetes for a couple of years. The Heroku build system was one of the first to adopt, and we had a lot of learnings from running Kubernetes internally. And for us, it became obvious that if we wanted to move up the stack, adopt managed infrastructure services from AWS and spend our innovation time on the things that make Heroku a strong differentiator, our delightful developer experience, our highly-productive DevOps experience, that this is the way we had to go. And so, for my engineers, I think it's a very important project for the future. It really lands this foundation. We're announcing a lot at re:Invent, actually. Because now that we have this foundation, it's easy for us to jump off here and move faster, providing more and more and more modern capabilities to our customers.

Bob Laliberte

>> Right. Which I was going to say, all those modern capabilities are just going to be able to be transformative in how your customers are using the platform and how it's going to accelerate their development journeys as well.

Gail Frederick

>> That's right. That's right. So, for example, we are really talking about three things at re:Invent. This pilot release of our next-generation platform. We're also releasing a new language on Heroku. We're providing .NET end-to-end across Heroku, and we are releasing our first AI capabilities. All of those things are possible now that we have a informant cloud-native platform.

Bob Laliberte

>> Well, I'm so glad that you brought up AI because you can't have a conversation these days without having some form of AI included in that. And obviously, from what we've seen in that development space as well, AI is playing a more significant role for a lot of organizations that want to help with that development process as well.

Gail Frederick

>> That's right. I mean, here at Salesforce, we have GA'd an incredible project, Agentforce, bringing agentic AI capabilities across the Salesforce platform. And the Heroku offering is managed inferencing, allowing Heroku developers to access all the latest foundational models very easily inside their Heroku environment.

Bob Laliberte

>> That's great. Yeah, I mean obviously you're already on top of the latest and greatest with the agentic AI and everything that's going on there, so it's going to be a big help I think for developers and helping them, again, accelerate their journeys. The interesting part, like I said at the start, you've been really busy. You've had a lot of announcements here at AWS, but I know just a short time ago, we saw you at KubeCon and you had a number of announcements there as well. I was wondering if you could maybe share a little bit about the news that you announced there.

Gail Frederick

>> Sure. At KubeCon, we announced the open source release of Twelve Factor. And so, Twelve Factor is a set of best practices and principles for running cloud-native applications at scale. Heroku invented these principles in 2011 and we have been stewarding and shepherding these principles over the years. They have really taken hold across the entire app development industry. It's beautiful to me how durable these principles have been for 13 years, but we know... So, we've been building this platform. And as we're looking forward, we're also looking back and we're taking lessons from running millions of apps at scale on the Heroku platform. And as we've been reflecting, we've seen that some areas of these Twelve Factor principles need to be uplifted. And so, we decided to do this the Heroku way, which means releasing the principles as an open source project, inviting companies and individuals to work with us as we decide together what are the 12 most important factors for cloud-native apps?

Bob Laliberte

>> Awesome, that's great. And it's always great to see technology when it's shared with the community, certainly to help, like I said, modernize it, upgrade it if needed and so forth, and get that feedback. Based on that, since the announcement, what kind of feedback have you gotten? How has it been received that you open sourced it?

Gail Frederick

>> We had a very busy KubeCon at the Heroku booth, both because we were starting to talk about the platform release and then all of this interest about Twelve Factor. So, we started the week announcing 12 maintainers from six tech companies, AWS, Salesforce, Heroku, Google Cloud, Intuit, others, and we've had a tremendous interest in the Discord channel. It's actually really great to watch the community come together. And I have a lot of optimism about we will upgrade these factors and we'll do it not only in open source with the entire community, but we're going to end up with a set of factors reflective of how developers build and run apps in the cloud, no matter where they're running them.

Bob Laliberte

>> Awesome. Yeah, that's going to be great. Obviously, organizations love to see that technology or that innovation, et cetera, being outsourced, so we can accelerate that, having other companies weigh in. And it'll be interesting to see how it evolves as well, whether there's different factors that get added in or whether those still remain to be true as the technology progresses and as agentic and AI continue to factor into the development process.

Gail Frederick

>> I'm so excited to watch this community get going on the Twelve Factor modernization. Today, Twelve Factors are principles, they're documents, but I think we're going to see participants offering code, offering examples about how to implement a factor in an application. So, I can't wait. I have a lot of excitement about this project.

Bob Laliberte

>> Well, that's great. That sounds like maybe an opportunity to get you back on here again so that we can discuss the developments after about, maybe, we'll give it maybe six months or so and see if we can get you back on to hear more about how that's progressing.

Gail Frederick

>> Definitely.

Bob Laliberte

>> That would be fantastic. Clearly, there's been a lot of innovation that you've announced over the last couple of weeks and this week as well. Really, curious for customers, I know some of it's being announced, some of it's being released. How do your customers get their hands on this technology? How can they start getting comfortable with it, start using it, learn more about it?

Gail Frederick

>> Sure. So, the major software releases that we're doing at re:Invent right now are available to all of our customers. Just go to heroku.com. There's a form you can fill out to request to be added to the pilots, and then you're in and you're using the products and you're giving us feedback.

Bob Laliberte

>> That's great. And obviously, that feedback loop is so important for the development cycle and ensuring that you're getting everything just right for the GA release as well. So, that's great. What's next for Heroku? You've been very busy, you've been working hard, you've had all these announcements. We're at the end of the calendar year, right? re:Invent typically closes out the show season. What is it that you're looking forward to in 2025?

Gail Frederick

>> These pilot releases are incredibly important for Heroku. As I said, we're at the starting line. Now,. We have a fully cloud-native platform. We have a managed inferencing add-on available to our customers, and so we're going to be spending the next year bringing these products to GA and then expanding the reach of these products across regions. As you know, Heroku can be used in a couple of ways. We have a common runtime that's massively multi-tenant, and then we have private spaces for companies who want isolation. All of that's going to go cloud native next year. Then I think you're going to see us do more and more in AI, do more with agents, and also, come back to our roots and improve the developer experience of Heroku and that's an enduring experience. And even now with this major platform release, that experience, stays highly productive. And I think you're going to see us go back and examine things like Flow, CI, CD and really look at how we can make those even better for our customers.

Bob Laliberte

>> Yeah. Well, it certainly sounds impressive. I'm looking forward to seeing how all those new innovations and technology gets implemented, again, all for driving higher productivity, better experiences, accelerating that development journey. So, all great stuff to look forward to in 2025. Unfortunately, we're running out of time here. So, Gail, thank you so much for joining me today.

Gail Frederick

>> Thank you so much for having me. I hope I'll see you soon.

Bob Laliberte

>> Yeah, absolutely. And thank all of you for watching this special CUBE conversation from our Boston studio, part of our exclusive CUBE coverage of AWS's annual conference, re:Invent. For more information on Heroku's innovative new platform and other services, please visit the Heroku section of the Salesforce booth on the re:Invent show floor or on their website. And be sure to swing by theCUBE on Media Road and say, "Hello."