In this AppDev Done Right Summit interview, Betty Junod from Heroku sits down with theCUBE Research’s Paul Nashawaty to unpack how Heroku’s developer-first platform is removing cognitive overhead and accelerating the path from idea to production across Day 0 build, Day 1 release and Day 2 operate. Junod explains how built-in CI/CD, auto-scaling and opinionated DevSecOps practices let teams focus on code creativity rather than infrastructure plumbing, a critical advantage as AI, security and compliance pressures mount. She shares data from the Summit showing that while 24 percent of organizations aim for hourly releases, only 8 percent achieve it, illustrating why managed pipelines and foundation-model services are essential for shipping faster without sacrificing governance.
The conversation dives into platform economics and integrated testing trends, spotlighting the jump from 29 percent of organizations running integrated tests in 2022 to 66 percent this year. Junod and Nashawaty explore how Heroku’s staging-plus-production model, rooted in Twelve-Factor best practices, helps teams standardize releases and reclaim modernization budgets for higher-value application work. They also look ahead to an expected rise from 500 to more than 1,000 AI workloads at the edge over the next two years and discuss how Heroku’s support for nine languages, Jupyter notebooks and Streamlit keeps it relevant in Kubernetes-heavy landscapes while empowering both professional and citizen developers.
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Accelerating AppDev from Creativity to Code in the Age of AI
In this AppDev Done Right Summit interview, Betty Junod from Heroku sits down with theCUBE Research’s Paul Nashawaty to unpack how Heroku’s developer-first platform is removing cognitive overhead and accelerating the path from idea to production across Day 0 build, Day 1 release and Day 2 operate. Junod explains how built-in CI/CD, auto-scaling and opinionated DevSecOps practices let teams focus on code creativity rather than infrastructure plumbing, a critical advantage as AI, security and compliance pressures mount. She shares data from the Summit showing that while 24 percent of organizations aim for hourly releases, only 8 percent achieve it, illustrating why managed pipelines and foundation-model services are essential for shipping faster without sacrificing governance.
The conversation dives into platform economics and integrated testing trends, spotlighting the jump from 29 percent of organizations running integrated tests in 2022 to 66 percent this year. Junod and Nashawaty explore how Heroku’s staging-plus-production model, rooted in Twelve-Factor best practices, helps teams standardize releases and reclaim modernization budgets for higher-value application work. They also look ahead to an expected rise from 500 to more than 1,000 AI workloads at the edge over the next two years and discuss how Heroku’s support for nine languages, Jupyter notebooks and Streamlit keeps it relevant in Kubernetes-heavy landscapes while empowering both professional and citizen developers.
Accelerating AppDev from Creativity to Code in the Age of AI
Betty Junod
CMOHeroku
In this AppDev Done Right Summit interview, Betty Junod from Heroku sits down with theCUBE Research’s Paul Nashawaty to unpack how Heroku’s developer-first platform is removing cognitive overhead and accelerating the path from idea to production across Day 0 build, Day 1 release and Day 2 operate. Junod explains how built-in CI/CD, auto-scaling and opinionated DevSecOps practices let teams focus on code creativity rather than infrastructure plumbing, a critical advantage as AI, security and compliance pressures mount. She shares data from the Summit showing t...Read more
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What is the significance of Heroku as a platform in the context of modern application development?add
What is Heroku's philosophy and how is it relevant to current trends in AI and security, particularly in the context of the AppDev Summit?add
What features and benefits does Heroku provide as a managed service for developers?add
What role does Heroku play in helping organizations improve developer velocity and application performance during the modernization of their platforms?add
What are the features of Heroku's AI services that enhance developer accessibility and governance?add
Accelerating AppDev from Creativity to Code in the Age of AI
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Paul Nashawaty
>> Welcome to this special edition of our AppDev Summit series, where we dive deep into the trends, the tools, and the technologies that shape the modern application development landscape. During the AppDev Summit at theCUBE, we've seen a powerful convergence of platform simplicity, developer productivity, AI acceleration, and DevSecOps first thinking, joined with me today is Betty from Heroku. Betty, how are you doing?
Betty Junod
>> I'm doing great, Paul. How are you?
Paul Nashawaty
>> Great. Great to have you on. It's always great to talk to you.
Betty Junod
>> Always. And I see that we both have little Cody's in our backgrounds.
Paul Nashawaty
>> We do, look at it, and I'm right here. He's keeping me on. He's keeping me because today, we're obviously turning the spotlight on Heroku, so we want to make sure that we have that understanding. But as a platform, as a service environment that continues to empower the developers and streamline the path from idea to production, it really is accelerating businesses to help them move faster without compromising security or scalability. Heroku really always has had that developer first philosophy, and it's more relevant now than ever, especially when you think of things like AI and security. But with regards to the AppDev Summit, we focus on day zero all the way through day two with DevSecOps. We looked at efficiencies, we looked at exploring observability and cloud economics, but Heroku really offers that compelling vantage point across the whole application lifecycle. And I'm really excited to unpack this and talk to you today about Heroku and how it's adapting and helping shape really this new era of secure, scalable, and AI-infused software development and delivery. And I'm really excited to have you here today. So yeah, so anything you want to share with the audience before we get going on the topics?
Betty Junod
>> I think it's what we are seeing right now with the infusion of AI in every aspect of technology, what's most interesting is it's obviously had a huge impact on the application development side and what kind of apps we're building now, but it's one of those unique things that is fundamentally touching every layer of the stack, every possible facet. So it's like it's both vertical and horizontal at the same time. So it's moving tremendously fast and I think that presents both opportunities and challenges for builders and operators.
Paul Nashawaty
>> We were seeing the same thing in our research, Betty, when we were talking about that, where it lives in the stack, whether it's vertical or horizontal development, A lot of what we're seeing is the days of development in silos have long since gone. You have to have this focus point of moving and releasing code on a regular cadence. We see in our research that 24% of organizations want to release code on an hourly basis, yet, only 8% are able to do so because they run into things that sold them down. So when we think about this and we look at Heroku has long been known for its developer-friendly abstraction layer of the infrastructure. It's also when we think about the context of day zero, we think about focus on simplicity and operational efficiencies, how is Heroku really reducing that cognitive overhead for developers while enabling them to scale with confidence?
Betty Junod
>> So when you think about a developer's time in an application, it's the act of writing the code or going from their idea to how will I build this feature? How will I build this app? That part is the most creative aspects of their time, but that is such a small percentage of the time that they spend per day. So much of it is actually doing things in the past it was like how long it took them to set up their development environment, finding the right tools to use internally to get going on their project, and then the big wall getting to deployment. So what's interesting is there's a lot Heroku as a platform, as a service. We have this history of a great developer experience, but it's actually a ton of stuff that we've done is around the platform side, as it needs to deploy and run long-lived running of the application, that's really where we've spent a lot of our time to solve the problems and challenges because the application, it hasn't come to life, if it's not actually running, if it's not serving customer traffic.
Paul Nashawaty
>> Yeah, absolutely. Well, and speaking of that, what we find in our research and in this AppDev Summit, we were finding that you're right, there's a lot of complexities that organizations are overcoming, but what we're also seeing is there's a streamlining, or I guess a general adoption of the CI-CD pipelines and the CI-CD environments. Now, we know that not all organizations have a CI-CD pipeline. We know that that's really where a lot of organizations strive to go, but there is a level of that journey that organizations are on. So whether they have their AppDev team or the platform team or the dev sec ops team increasingly becoming table stakes is that's really what organizations want to get to. When we think about Heroku's involvement in this, regardless of where the organization is on their journey, whether they could be early in their journey and still have silos, or they could be fully mature and have a full CI-CD pipeline, how is the CI-CD pipeline approach ensuring things like automation or repeatability for developers?
Betty Junod
>> I think one of the important parts here is that when you look at your pipeline from build integration and deployment is, like you said, with many organizations may have pockets. So each team has their own. Same thing with things like your underlying infrastructure, Compute, network storage, all the, what kind of data services will they use? What kind of AI services will they use? What we find is organizations are doing all of those in pockets. Are you getting any scale economy out of that, right? Because each application team is spending a ton of time, those engineers are spending a bunch of time managing that stuff themselves, and then they have to go build and deploy the application. So then you have inconsistencies and standards across your organization. On the other side is if, for organizations that may be mature and have a robust pipeline, it is still understanding now what is the ongoing value of doing that heavy lifting yourself? What is that taking away from that is actually driving business value. So from a Heroku perspective, we look at having that built in. We provide those things as a managed service. It's a managed service within the platform. So it's not only just the infrastructure, but it's all the DevOps tooling, and what we've done is taken best practices. Best practices that are from the 12 factor App approach and built that into Heroku and made that automated. So yes, those are what we call our opinions. Those opinions are our opinions from our own experience in building and running cloud service, cloud services. But it is also in ways that helps customers be able to focus on the important part, the apps. So every time there's a code change, new commit, it's going to automatically auto build, auto build a new image. It's going to be a layered image so you have a software bill of materials, and then it's going to go through a CI and CD, it's going to deploy to a staging environment. We always create two environments staging in production. So it goes to a staging environment so that the testing happens first. They can do a sanity check, is it operating as designed before they deploy it to production, promote it to production. So all of those little things, you have consistent environments, you have this automated pipeline that's already provided for you that's already integrated and connected, which make the process, that whole process, much faster for teams.
Paul Nashawaty
>> Yeah. Betty, you hit on a couple of really important points here because one of the things we're seeing out of the research from the AppDev Summit where we were finding that, I've been doing these studies for a number of years and I've seen trending information. Back in 2022, we were seeing that integrated testing, only 29% of organizations were doing integrated testing, but that number jumped up to an astonishing 66% in this year. So to your point, there's a need to do the testing as part of that release cycle. Of course, we all know this, but a lot of organizations, what they were doing, which was a challenge, was they were using almost their clients as the test bed. And the justification was, well, we do sprint reviews, so we'll just update it every two weeks and it's all good. But the reality of it is, is you and I both know that if you're in an airport and you're trying to up a ride app and that ride app doesn't work, you go to another one and you're probably not going back. So that's a challenge. So yeah, I'm a hundred percent in alignment with that optimization there of making sure you have that test environment and making sure the release cycle is more streamlined. But there's other things. When I talked to CIOs in the study here, we were finding that application monetization is key. That's probably the number one thing that organizations want to achieve. The two complexities that they run into, two things that they run into is complexity and skill gap issues. But a lot of times what they'll do is they'll throw a bunch of money at a project because there's incredible pressures for the organization to modernize. But what we found in the AppDev Summit is there's application efficiency that you were talking about, that is a key factor here, and cloud economics and observability play into it, as well, so you can take those actionable insights. So as we look at the day two data and we emphasize observability, cloud span, and performance tuning, how does Heroku really help organizations and the developer velocity as well as performance, especially as those application footprints grow across different regions, too?
Betty Junod
>> And I'm going to start off with them. You said cloud economics, which is one of the areas that I would like to think about this is platform economics. When you see organizations are like, we're going to modernize. We have a large budget to do this whole modernization initiative for their applications. Sometimes a huge part of that investment goes to modernizing their underlying platform, doing that part, because you cannot have modern apps if they're not running on modern infrastructure or using modern principles underneath. And then you think about the percentage of resources spent where if you have truly an application modernization initiative, you want as much of those resources and time and budget to go to the time spent on actually looking at your application components. What needs to be rewritten? Is this an opportunity to replatform certain components and maybe move to different more modern data components or operating system layers, those types of things, or taking advantage of different types of app architectures that may be better suited for your customer apps. So a big area on the economics angle is for us to flip that script. Goes back to what do we provide as a baseline platform? What is built in, what is automated? What are the components that we put in our platform and that we manage for you from a selection, integration, security, and automation perspective so that the customers are spending the bulk of their time and energy on the application, because that's really what's going to keep their customer's attention and drive revenue. So we are doing the platform economics at a scale across our thousands and thousands of customers. And then the auto-scaling and the automation that we've built in really help them help customers be able to use the right amount of resources at the right time based on the load on that application.
Paul Nashawaty
>> And that's incredibly important when we think about efficiencies because as we look at this modernization strategy, this little thing called AI is popping up everywhere. I don't know why.
Betty Junod
>> Never heard of it.
Paul Nashawaty
>> But that is definitely impacting the developer experience. If we don't have these economics across the platform, if we don't have those commonalities so we can have views across the entire ecosystem, that would change how the AI integration is deployed. And when we look at the developer experience and we look at the AI enhanced development tools growing, that's a theme that was really echoed across the AppDev Summit. We were finding that AI tooling is, it's the screwdriver and drill approach, which is how you're going to do this faster, but is it faster? And I think I want to kind of debunk one thing here is, AI is going to take everybody's developer jobs. That's not going to happen. There's still going to need a way to use AI to have better efficiencies at your role, but there's still going to need to have the innovation and developers in place. So when we think about Heroku and enablement of, or I should say enablement of planning of the AI native application development or AI assisted development platforms, how is the development workflows really being enhanced by AI on the platform?
Betty Junod
>> I think there's a few areas in this. There's one in the AI infrastructure making those AI services accessible and part of the experience so that developers can get easy access to them in a controlled way because these things need to be governed just like you would govern access to infrastructure networks, et cetera. So that's really where from a managed inference and those language, those large models, foundation models, we have provided that as part of the Heroku experience now, so they're part of the platform. And talked about earlier about wrapping around automation and best practices. So now with the consistent Heroku experience, developers are able to get access to powerful foundation models. But Heroku is handling some of the configurations so that they're not fiddling around with additional identity or how do I set this up? That part is part of the experience. On the other side, there's a whole new wave of AI native developer tools. Things like let's say like MCP. These are tools to participate in the AI ecosystem as well as things like tools like Cursor, Winsurf, know those cloud desktop that a fundamentally change how people build. So we are, from a Heroku perspective, is we are continue to expand, look at this growing ecosystem and expand to support them. So first, let's look at those AI native tools like the IDE types. That is, we support those in a way that people can be building something on Cursor and then be able to deploy directly to Heroku and then manage from there so that it's continuing to show up in the interfaces that the builders are. I think it's important to understand that these new tools, these AI code gen tools, they're fundamentally changing who is a builder. It has changing the life cycle to prototype. So getting to that first prototype that we may want to put into that first staging environment, test environment to play around with, that's changing. It's not that like developers are being replaced by AI, but we're allowing more people to participate in this economy of that. They may not know how to write code, but they have an idea on what an experience should look like and they're going to be able to spec that out in a way that fundamentally is going dramatically increase the sheer volume of applications that are written. And these are also going to be less technical builders. Do we want them having direct access to infrastructure and defining configurations? No. So having constrained platform type of environments are going to smooth that process, too. And then making sure that there's a test environment in prod allows for the appropriate governance and checks along the way from the right specialists.
Paul Nashawaty
>> Yeah, I really like that answer, Betty, because what our researchers showing out of the AppDev Summit is over the next two years, AI production and workloads and specifically at the edge, but we're seeing the growth of 500 to over a thousand AI production workloads happening at additional workloads and different applications being developed. So you're absolutely right, and it's not going to be the professional developer, it's going to be the citizen developer or the lines of businesses doing the work. And they need those governance, they need controls, they need the regulations and the controls in place. They don't need to be adding storage and configuring things and networking switches. That's not what they should be doing at all. But I think when we look at how to find out, coming to the end here, looking at Heroku's evolving in the AppDev Stack, as we touched on here, organizations are adopting multi-platform or polyglot strategies, and we see that Heroku, historically, was viewed as only this one language, just only this one thing, but now it's not, and we want to make sure that we understood, the audience understands that it's a modern application development stack that is really came up a lot through the AppDev Summit, but Heroku is incredibly relevant in the cloud mountainization, but also Kubernetes dominated narrative. Would you agree?
Betty Junod
>> Yes, absolutely. We originally started back in 2007 as Ruby on Rails helping get those apps to the cloud and really aligning to supporting that language and that framework. We are now at nine different languages. So covering all the major languages that folks are working in and then continuing to expand how we support different types of workloads and different types of app architectures like adding Jupiter notebooks and Streamlit. It's really any kind of workload, any type of lots of different types of architectures, front end, back end. So it's really around how do we help get those ideas to life faster?
Paul Nashawaty
>> Yeah, I agree. I think that there's a lot happening there and there's these environments are converging from those heritage applications to more present state when you have containerization and cloud native states, but also those heritage environments are maybe being encapsulated as systems of record. So there's a lot of bridging the gap between old and new. So that has to occur. Betty, we're at time. I would love to talk to you all day on this. This is a really topic that's near and dear to my heart, obviously, and I know that you're very passionate about it. But any closing thoughts you want to leave with the audience?
Betty Junod
>> I think this is a really exciting time to see what's possible with human creativity. I think AI, the AI tooling is what it's bringing. It's empowering more people and lowering the barrier to entry into building software for more people. You said it earlier, this whole thing of is it going to take everyone's jobs? And I don't think so. I think what is changing is the currency is going to be creativity and those platforms that empower that creativity to become something real, either a software or a physical good faster is really what's going to win out. And that's really focusing on that simplicity and enabling the acceleration for these types of creatives are really where we're focused.
Paul Nashawaty
>> Yeah, that's exciting. And it really is powerful, too, because it really helps. It really does enable the businesses to achieve their goals, their business KPI. So I'm really excited to see where Heroku is going in the future, as well. Thank you for joining me today. This has been really been great, and thank you to all of you that tuned in. We really appreciate you being part of the AppDev Summit community. And that wraps up this episode, but please feel free to tune into the rest of the series with conversations driving tools, trends, and talents to shape the application development landscape. Whether you're deploying at the edge, building with AI, or modernizing your cloud stack, we've got you covered. Be sure to follow us on social. If you have any thoughts, questions, or just want to connect, you can always reach me at pauln@siliconangle.com. Until next time, stay curious and stay building. Thanks.
Paul Nashawaty