KubeCon + CloudNativeCon NA 2024 | Betty Junod, Salesforce

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Betty Junod

CMO

Heroku

Heroku’s approach to app deployment with Kubernetes and cloud tools

In the race to meet rising customer expectations, businesses are turning to customer-centric applications that prioritize seamless user experiences and adaptability.Simplifying the development process, platforms such as Heroku enable developers to focus on innovation by eliminating the need to manage complex infrastructure, fostering a streamlined path to building impactful applications, according to Betty Junod (pictured), senior vice president and chief marketing officer, Heroku, at Salesforce Inc.Salesforce’s Betty Junod talks to theCUBE about the realization of customer-centric applications through Heroku

play_circle_outline Exploring Heroku's Impact on Kubernetes with Betsey's Career Transition

play_circle_outline The re-platforming of Heroku to Kubernetes

play_circle_outline Building Strong Communities: Heroku, Salesforce Integration, and Lamborghini’s Innovative Tech Experiences

play_circle_outline Exploring Heroku's OTel Integration & Exciting Product Roadmap for Developers and Operators

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Betty Junod, Salesforce

Betty Junod

CMO Heroku

At KubeCon North America, Savannah Peterson and Rob Streche discussed their interaction with the community and excitement for the event. Betty talked about her career change to Heroku and their focus on working with Kubernetes. Heroku has open-sourced the Twelve-Factor app and is exploring integration with Kubernetes, expanding their presence at events like KubeCon. They aim to make the platform simple and easy for customers, with stories like Lamborghini using Heroku for customer experience during a car wait. Heroku's ties with Salesforce provide seamless in... Read more

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What company did the speaker recently join and what new initiatives are they working on in relation to the CNCF and Kubernetes community? add

What led to Heroku's decision to embrace Kubernetes rather than continue building their own platform infrastructure? add

What are some interesting customer stories that have been shared about companies using Salesforce cloud and Heroku together? add

What do you wish people knew about Heroku that maybe they don't today? add

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Betty Junod, Salesforce

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Savannah Peterson

>> ... and good afternoon nerd fam and welcome back to Salt Lake City, Utah. We are coming to the end of day one of our three days of coverage here on theCube at KubeCon North America. My name is Savannah Peterson with my fabulous co-pilot on this rocket ship, Rob Streche. Rob, what a cool crop of humans we've gotten to interact with today.

Rob Strechay

>> I was going to say, the community continues to grow. Some people we've known from many different places coming back and I think it's just that kind of sense of community that's been here and how people have embraced Kubernetes, that really is a lot of fun.

Savannah Peterson

>> It is a lot of fun. You and I couldn't even eat lunch we had so many friends coming up to say hi.

Rob Strechay

>> That was kind of annoying, but that was fun and annoying at the same time.

Savannah Peterson

>> Speaking of friends, cool people and an absolute Cube OG, Betty, thank you so much for coming to hang out with us today.

Betty Junod

>> Hello. Thank you for having me, so happy to be here.

Savannah Peterson

>> It is such a joy to always have you around and when I saw you on the schedule, I got excited. I thought, what a perfect afternoon. I don't need a coffee, we've got a Betty.

Betty Junod

>> I love it.

Savannah Peterson

>> I am super grateful for that. How's your week going so far?

Betty Junod

>> I mean, is it really only day one?

Rob Strechay

>> I know.

Savannah Peterson

>> Right?

Betty Junod

>> I just got in yesterday. I'm already exhausted. I feel like we've done a ton of stuff, like you say, running into so many people you know. It's like, walked in and within two seconds of trying to get my badge, I ran into five or six people. The logos change, but we're all the same humans, interested in the same stuff. Love seeing how this community and ecosystem has grown over time.

Savannah Peterson

>> You absolutely nailed it too. The logos do change and sometimes I have to kind of trouble check, oh, where are you now? Oh cool, but speaking of, you've had a big career change recently. How are things going?

Betty Junod

>> Yeah, so I just in my 90 days. I joined Heroku from Salesforce. Very, very exciting and I'm sure you know Heroku's been around for a long time. Kind of captured the imagination of developer experience back in the day. We are, with my joining, we've been doing a lot of work there, so really excited that we are spending more time with the CNCF, working with the Kubernetes community, as well as open telemetry, cloud native build packs, so doing a lot of stuff there and you'll be seeing us around a lot more at events like this. Reinvent, a lot of places you guys will be.

Rob Strechay

>> Yeah.

Savannah Peterson

>> That's interesting.

Rob Strechay

>> Well, I think it's been great because we got to talk to you at Dreamforce and again, it's really great to see where you're leaning into Kubernetes and I think we've both been, like you said, all three of us have been around the block with this and it is about the community. You're here for the first time sponsoring and you're really leaning into this. What are some of the other things that are going on?

Betty Junod

>> I want to say earlier this week, but it was just yesterday.

Savannah Peterson

>> Well, both are true.

Betty Junod

>> I know. Yes, both things are true at the same time. We open-sourced the Twelve-Factor app and I know you all have Gail on, Gail Frederick, on later and so she's going to talk much more about that, but that's one of the things that kind of defined Heroku in the early days. What's a great way to build scalable, resilient apps for the cloud, when cloud was still new? Now what we're doing is we're looking at that again and looking at that in the context of Kubernetes and this whole ecosystem with containers and what does that mean to do that with a platform point of view? We love this ecosystem, we love this community, but we all know that it's like hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of different parts. For a lot of customers that's complicated and so our mission is to make that really simple and easy for them.

Savannah Peterson

>> That seems to be the theme and the objective of everyone in this world, in particular. Kubernetes being a fantastic tool, not known for its simplicity.

Betty Junod

>> Powerful, but could be complicated.

Savannah Peterson

>> Yes and especially with AI and everything else that's going on. You mentioned that your presence is going to be expanding at events and things like this moving forward. Why now? Is it the intersection of Kubernetes? AI?

Betty Junod

>> You know what I've seen just kind of in my last couple of years in this is that one, it's a return to platform perspectives versus parts. One of the big reasons why I joined Heroku because I saw the investments that we were making from a product standpoint, re-platforming to Kubernetes, looking at some of these open source things, but doing it in a way that with the philosophies that people have loved about Heroku. Kubernetes is fantastic, but you know what? We'll take care of all the complicated stuff so you get the benefits of it without having to adjust all the knobs yourself, kind of thing. What that means, we'll show up a lot more events like a KubeCon. You'll see us at developer conferences, you'll see us at the cloud builder type of shows, so going back and reaching our people.

Rob Strechay

>> Which I think, again, coming out of Dreamforce, what I was impressed by and like you said, Salesforce has always been about making it easy and I think a big piece of it has been how do you really have that platform? Obviously there's a lot of technical stuff underneath the platform of Salesforce itself and there's a lot of AI being built. Are you seeing and gaining perspective on how you can build a better platform for people by seeing how Salesforce is actually building their platform out?

Betty Junod

>> Oh, that is a great question. I also often get, "Oh, Heroku's owned by Salesforce? Make that make sense." I think that philosophically there's a lot of similarities. You don't build your own CRM anymore. What you do is you buy a separate app. That's really what Salesforce is and it's giving workflows that are really great for the business analyst. Heroku's philosophy is like, you know what? The undifferentiated heavy lifting for a lot of people is building your platform. You should spend the time building your business, building your app and so I think that's where we really share a lot of that same philosophy and together and the integrations that we provide, we unlock a ton of capabilities for all the creators, bringing business analysts like sales ops, marketing ops people together with developers to build the best workflows and automations that they need for their customers and their business.

Rob Strechay

>> Yeah and you talked about the re-platforming and we had touched on it at Dreamforce. Why don't you go a little bit more into that because I thought that was... It caught me by surprise at Dreamforce, in a positive way. Help us understand that so people understand.

Betty Junod

>> If you go back to when Heroku was started, it was before Docker. It was before Kubernetes.

Savannah Peterson

>> Heroku's OG.

Betty Junod

>> Super OG. We were using LXC and we built a lot of this stuff ourselves because we had to at that time. Necessity is the mother of all invention and if you look at where we are today, it's that same principle of this huge community building and contributing and innovating on Kubernetes and why should we spend the time to build that? Why don't we just participate in that and also use that in the platform? It's kind of like we're applying the philosophy that we have for our customers for ourselves as well.

Savannah Peterson

>> You're not reinventing the wheel every time you want to build something new.

Betty Junod

>> We don't need to do that anymore.

Savannah Peterson

>> No and nobody needs to. Your customers, I mean I think that's one of the cool things about this whole ecosystem is the way that everybody collaborates, best breed and then everything's open source and you can go use it and do something awesome. Speaking of customers, now that you're in your first 90 days, are there any really interesting customer stories that you can share with us that you've learned since you joined?

Betty Junod

>> Yeah so because we're part of the Salesforce family, what's interesting is there are a whole bunch of customers like Lamborghini, Workday, that are big Salesforce cloud customers, so they're using CRM, SalesCloud, MarketingCloud, CPQ, all those tools and then they use Heroku adjacent to that, so that they can further customize what they're doing within those clouds, so we're a great complementary story. Again, it's the same thing of custom code, offloaded compute, complex calculations and things. They can use that together, so those are some great examples. Lamborghini, did you know it takes two years from when someone orders a car to when they get it? What they've built using Heroku and Salesforce is this mobile app with a backend experience and such that kind of basically curates that customer throughout those entire two years. You get updates from the factory floor when your car is being built and then you can pick a color and then when it's done, literally, I think the CEO films a video and it's sent to your phone, like here's your new car. That's a fascinating, wonderful customer experience.

Savannah Peterson

>> Yeah, that just kind of gave me chills. I love that. We're talking about luxury automotive, which doesn't always give me chills.

Betty Junod

>> I like the effect that it did.

Savannah Peterson

>> Yes, but that community is and that's really compelling because you've got an interesting... I waited two years for my tattoo artist, shout out to Deanna-

Betty Junod

>> Amazing....

Savannah Peterson

>> and it was so worth it because I knew I wanted it to be her.

Betty Junod

>> Just right.

Savannah Peterson

>> Exactly. I knew that was someone I could trust with this long lasting piece of art. You're investing a lot in a vehicle if you're purchasing a Lamborghini and two years is a long cliff.

Betty Junod

>> To wait when you order something, right?

Savannah Peterson

>> Yeah. We're all living in an Amazon area where it shows up in an hour.

Betty Junod

>> There's no prime delivery on a Lambo.

Rob Strechay

>> I was going to say, I've never bought a Lambo, but I know somebody who did and to your point, before it went into the paint shop it notified him and like last call if you want to change the color of the car and stuff like that. We were talking about paint shops just a couple of weeks ago with cars and it's just the amount of tech that goes into that as well and all of the IOT stuff out there as well. Again, Salesforce is just, especially with the cloud and with data cloud and things that are going on and how you can bring your data there and you tie it up with the stuff that's already, it's so trusted from that. You probably get some of that transference off to Heroku when they're like, it's a trusted platform, we know that this is and this is how it's built. Is that what you've been seeing as well?

Betty Junod

>> We have a phrase of being inside the Salesforce trust layer and so that has meaning for the Salesforce customer. As being part of that family, like this platform, this path where you can do all your custom code, custom actions, in any language and offload compute for complex things, that's all in that trust Layer. That definitely has meaning there and then we have a whole bunch of customers that start on Heroku before they even buy CRM too.

Savannah Peterson

>> Yeah, I was just going to ask about that kind of chicken and egg and how the cross pollination goes like that.

Betty Junod

>> Yeah. So because we've always had a strong pool with developer first, there's a lot of companies that start building their first product on Heroku, so they may be like a startup and they grow with us and then eventually then they need to go buy their CRM, so we've seen it on both sides.

Rob Strechay

>> Again, I think what's neat is that you're also investing back in the community. To Savannah's point here with the community, you chose OTel for instance, observability is a big thing and being able to manage that. Why Otel, I guess you could say?

Betty Junod

>> Well, it's also the kind of ecosystem that OTel brings with it, so we wanted to have that as part of our platform and there's a lot of capabilities we can have, beyond just the drains and such and so this is just the beginning of integrating that into the platform and our product team really has a robust roadmap and how this could one, beef up what we're doing on observability and metrics and all that within Heroku itself, but then how that means we can have our ecosystem of add-on partners work with our platform too. Exciting. There's a lot of excitement and lots of possibilities.

Savannah Peterson

>> It is really exciting. Just thinking about the massive scale of Salesforce too and all the conversations you can have. What do you wish people knew about Heroku that maybe they don't today?

Betty Junod

>> Oh, you know what? Heroku is a platform for both developers and operators. I think people largely think that it's a developer tool, but in this day and age we know there's just not enough people that are really skilled at SRE, platform engineering, all of these things, so I want them to also know that we're a great platform for operations as well, so that we can help scale what they do in supporting their developers and supporting their business teams.

Rob Strechay

>> Are you seeing a pattern in workloads that is coming to Heroku? Like you said, it would seem that the ties with the CRM data and things of that nature because of the cloud-

Betty Junod

>> We see a big mix. We see a big mix. A lot of front-end experiences as well as a lot of backend services. A fair amount of data because of our integration with Salesforce. We have a managed Postgres service and so there's a lot of data syncing that happens and then people are able to manipulate that data within Heroku and then have that initiate different actions in their software.

Savannah Peterson

>> You've been in this world for a long time, so I love your just general community pulse. Are there any projects or exciting things going on here in the room that you're particularly keen to learn more about or excited to see how it evolves?

Betty Junod

>> I have not even done all of my full walk through here. I just cruised the project pavilion earlier today and there's a whole bunch of names that I haven't even seen before.

Savannah Peterson

>> That's what I was kind of driving at because I had the same experience when I did a ten-minute drive-by earlier today.

Betty Junod

>> I know and I'll be honest, I haven't had a chance to go up and talk to some of those folks yet, but it's great to see some of the progress that some of the projects like Liberty and some of those other folks have had. Some had some great successes on what can be possible with sustainable, open source and business, but I am excited to go back and take another look because the names I hadn't heard of. I mean, I've only missed two KubeCon events. What happened?

Rob Strechay

>> It's unbelievable. The amount of AI-related stuff, this has been insane. The problem with day zero is there was five different places I wanted to be at the same time and I could not be there.

Savannah Peterson

>> There's so much going on. Totally agree.

Rob Strechay

>> The atmosphere has been fantastic and I think also to your point, you missed two, but you can look at it and go, over 50% of the people who were in the keynote this morning are new to Kubernetes, are new to KubeCon. It's their first KubeCon.

Savannah Peterson

>> That's every KubeCon. It's so cool.

Rob Strechay

>> They didn't know you weren't here.

Betty Junod

>> I know.

Rob Strechay

>> It's amazing that you can get there and be part of that.

Betty Junod

>> It's amazing. Just thinking that it's been around for 10 years, it's as big as it is. We have as many users as we do all over, but there's still half of the attendees every time are new, so there's still so much more to do here as a larger group.

Savannah Peterson

>> For anyone thinking about joining this community or diving in, there's a lot of new people. Just because we're a bunch of OGs doesn't mean that there's not room for everybody and I think that really matters. All right, I have a very important question for you.

Betty Junod

>> Yes ma'am.

Savannah Peterson

>> We're obviously going to have you back on next Kubecon, hopefully. You'll be there, you'll be at re:Invent, there's going be a lot of stuff going on, but what do you hope you can say when we hang out in London that you can't yet say today?

Betty Junod

>> Oh my goodness. What do I want people to say? I want people to feel that they are getting meaningful value from this. Because of the way that this has grown so fast, I think sometimes people feel like it's and you see it's, in the survey. Some of the gaps on skills and the complexity feel like it's holding them back from getting started. I would like people to feel like it's more accessible for them and they're able to get ROI, either personally or as a team, faster.

Savannah Peterson

>> I love that. I'm here for that. Time to value, quicker and less sensation of feeling overwhelmed, honestly. No, I think that's a really good point.

Betty Junod

>> Yeah, we got enough going on in the world.

Savannah Peterson

>> Preach sis. That is for sure.

Betty Junod

>> Let's have some goodness.

Rob Strechay

>> Yes, absolutely.

Savannah Peterson

>> Thankfully KubeCon's full of goodness. I do feel like that is a vibe. Betty, you're just an awesome human. Thank you so much for taking the time.

Rob Strechay

>> Thanks for coming on.

Savannah Peterson

>> Congrats again on the new job.

Betty Junod

>> Thank you. We'll have to get you awesome purple swag.

Savannah Peterson

>> Yes, absolutely. My favorite color. I'm all for it. Rob, always a joy to hang out with you.

Rob Strechay

>> Always awesome.

Savannah Peterson

>> It was awesome. It'll continue to be awesome and thank all of you for tuning in to our fabulous three days of coverage here on theCUBE. We're at KubeCon North America, in Salt Lake City, Utah. My name's Savannah Peterson. You're watching theCUBE, the leading source for enterprise tech news.