Salesforce revamps Heroku PaaS for Kubernetes, .NET

Salesforce plans a major modernization of Heroku, its PaaS, adding support for Amazon Elastic Container Registry, AWS Global Accelerator, Elastic Kubernetes Service, AWS Graviton processors and AWS Bedrock.

The Heroku Next Generation Platform, as it's called, was released at the AWS Re:Invent cloud technologies conference this week. Some of its features are in public beta, with more to come in 2025.

The prevalence of Kubernetes and the rise of AI apps are two trends that mandated such a major upgrade to Heroku if Salesforce was going to continue its PaaS platform, said analyst Rebecca Wettemann, founder of Valoir. Many developers work with Kubernetes to containerize apps across cloud environments, and a growing number are working on AI-enabled apps, including autonomous ones in Agentforce.

"[The update] broadens the ability of Heroku to address those audiences," Wettemann said.

Further, Heroku now supports open telemetry, a standard developers and admins use to monitor and measure app health. Supporting this standard means that Heroku developers can stream app metrics data such as app health, container health and other logs into systems that visualize the data at a glance, said Gail Frederick,  Heroku chief technology officer at Salesforce.

"It's exciting for us because our customers can take this modern stream of metrics and then plug it into whatever open telemetry collector in the ecosystem they would like to [use to] visualize -- and there are a ton of them," Frederick said.