For modern enterprises building cloud-native applications, success hinges on achieving maximum development velocity at every scale. Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) providers like AWS provide hundreds of services with the unmatched reliability and scale needed for enterprise infrastructure, but they can require significant effort and expertise for organizations to be effective and efficient. To achieve true agility, development teams turn to a Platform as a Service (PaaS) like Heroku to streamline the path to production and beyond.
Sophisticated enterprises focus their expertise on building unique business value versus undifferentiated heavy lifting. Their unique apps and services that satisfy customers, improve business productivity, and gain a competitive edge. These businesses want to empower their teams with powerful tools to build great apps but not add to their developers’ cognitive load – maximizing time spent on building and optimizing apps and the customer experience. Together Heroku and AWS provide the best of both worlds – robust and powerful infrastructure services, curated together in a simplified experience that is integrated, automated, and optimized for developers and applications. The goal is speed of innovation with enterprise reliability and trust.
Speed, focus, and accelerated innovation: How Salesforce cut approval time by 90%
At Salesforce, our DET team has a saying “An IT dollar is a very expensive dollar” and that guides them in how engineers spend their time on employee-facing technology initiatives. They use Heroku to simplify how they build, deploy, and maintain five major applications that serve over 76,000 employees. These apps are created as a secure, shared service that can be called by both human users via Slack and AI agents via Agentforce. The integration between systems is secured by Heroku AppLink and ensures agents and humans only access authorized data and that tokens are managed securely.
- Strategic focus on code: Heroku is a fully managed PaaS, which means it handles the operational burden of the underlying infrastructure, including OS patching, security updates, and routine maintenance. For the Salesforce team, the choice was not about avoiding AWS, but about leveraging it effectively. It was about focusing on code rather than configuration for high-value, business enablement applications. This frees developers to concentrate solely on the application’s business logic, leading to improved productivity and reducing DevOps toil.
- Rapid deployment: Heroku’s developer-centric experience allows for rapid deployment directly from Git repositories with a simple
git push heroku main. This streamlined process accelerates the time-to-value for new applications, compressing a multi-week deployment process into minutes and enabling fast iteration and continuous delivery. - Instant provisioning of managed services: The PaaS approach allows teams to instantly provision services like Apache Kafka on Heroku, Heroku Key-Value Store, and Heroku Postgres. This eliminates the need for a large, specialized DevOps team to manually set up, configure, and maintain these complex data systems on the IaaS layer.
The transformative results of rapid application innovation can be felt across Salesforce. The Slack Approvals app, which functions similarly to the Deal Desk example, cut expense approval time from two days to just two hours, saving a cumulative 3,310 years in waiting time. Furthermore, the Task Hub app, which manages tasks like license confirmations, helped the licensing team recover $2 million in unused software licenses. This proves that when the developer experience is improved and DevOps friction is reduced with Heroku, massive enterprise ROI is achieved.
Enterprise-grade security and compliance on Heroku
Heroku provides the application-level security and compliance layer that simplifies life for developers in regulated industries.
- Extending the Salesforce Trust Boundary: Heroku AppLink is the key to maintaining security and trust in the connected enterprise, facilitating secure integration with Salesforce clouds and Agentforce.
- Advanced isolation for regulated data: For the sensitive data and highly regulated industries (like healthcare or financial services), Heroku offers dedicated, network-isolated environments :
- Heroku Private Spaces provide a dedicated runtime environment within a specified region, enabling secure, low-latency communication with corporate systems and protecting sensitive data and transactions.
- Heroku Shield Private Spaces offer an enhanced layer of security and trust controls necessary to meet compliance standards like HIPAA and PCI-DSS. This set of services includes high-compliance instances of Heroku Postgres, Heroku Connect, and Private Dynos with features like encryption at rest for ephemeral data and strict TLS enforcement. This greatly simplifies the complexities of regulatory compliance for development teams.
- Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) is recommended for maximum control over complex infrastructure, where appropriate for business or performance reasons.
- Granular access control: Heroku Enterprise features enable detailed management of user access and permissions through Heroku Teams. This allows organizations to grant fine-grained permissions to team members on a per-app basis, supporting the principle of least privilege.
Polyglot advantage: flexibility and an integration ecosystem for developers
For hands-on developers and architects, the true freedom of the Heroku platform lies in its flexibility and expansive integration ecosystem.
- Polyglot support and language choice: Heroku is a polyglot platform, offering first-class support for a wide range of popular open-source languages, including Node.js, Ruby, Java, .NET, Python, Go, PHP, Scala, and Clojure. This allows development teams to choose the absolute best language or framework for each microservice, maximizing both productivity and application performance.
- Heroku Elements Marketplace: The Heroku Elements ecosystem is a key productivity multiplier. It provides developers with:
- Heroku Add-ons: A vast marketplace of over 200 fully managed, third-party cloud services (for logging, caching, monitoring, security, and more) that can be integrated with a single click or command. The Add-on is instantly provisioned, and the configuration is attached to the application via an environment variable. This allows teams to leverage best-in-class, fully supported services from ecosystem partners without performing complex manual integration work.
- Heroku Buildpacks: These allow developers to easily extend the platform to support specific languages or frameworks, or even combine multiple languages within a single project for distinct front-end and back-end components.
AI-assisted development and modern observability
The Heroku AI PaaS architecture is future-proofed for the age of AI and designed to complement and accelerate existing AWS investments. While traditional Twelve-Factor development methods laid the foundation for initial success, today, AI-assisted tools are making the deployment of these cloud-native architectures significantly faster.
- AI-assisted creation: With Heroku Vibes, engineering and business teams can generate the full-stack code for an application like the Deal Desk simply by describing it in natural language. Once deployed, Agentforce Vibes inside Salesforce can automatically generate the necessary Flow to consume the new Heroku service.
- Observability and managed scale: For high-volume, standard enterprise workloads like API services for AI agents, Heroku provides effortless, managed scaling (Dynos). As these agents scale and begin hitting your Heroku services thousands of times an hour, the next-generation Heroku environment, Fir, provides native support for OpenTelemetry. This open-standard integration is critical for architects to monitor performance and gain deep visibility into the traces, metrics, and logs of these high-volume, modern workloads. For highly specialized, custom AI model training that requires raw GPU access, the AWS IaaS layer remains the ideal choice for its full customizability.
Data scalability and enterprise integration
Heroku helps teams realize additional value when apps are securely integrated with existing systems and supported by resilient data services.
- Advanced data scalability: To support demanding data workloads, Heroku ensures that data storage scales as effortlessly as the services consuming it. This is why Heroku is piloting Heroku Postgres Advanced, ensuring the database scales as efficiently as the AI agents consuming its data.
- Fast, reliable Salesforce integration: Heroku facilitates enterprise data integration through Heroku Connect, for two-way synchronization between your Heroku Postgres database and the core Salesforce org. Accelerated Polling can listen to Salesforce Change Data Capture (CDC) to accelerate the polling frequency for your key objects. This capability is essential for connecting custom Heroku services that handle high transaction volumes with the central source of truth in the Salesforce Platform.
The definitive architecture for the AI-powered enterprise
Heroku AI PaaS adds power and flexibility to your application architecture strategy with a streamlined developer and operator experience leveraging the reliability and scale of AWS infrastructure and deep integration to the Salesforce portfolio – the ultimate accelerator for agentic enterprise innovation.
The combination achieves three critical, unified goals for IT leaders, architects, and developers:
- Accelerated agility: It provides developers with the polyglot freedom and fully managed services (PaaS) to focus solely on business logic for rapid deployment, scalability, and easy maintenance. And reserves configuration workloads on the IaaS layer for the business’s most nuanced services and applications.
- Secure extension for Salesforce orgs: It ensures that every custom application and AI service, regardless of complexity, operates within the extended Salesforce Trust Boundary, backed by features like Heroku AppLink and Heroku Shield. This is the non-negotiable layer of security and compliance required for the connected enterprise.
- AI future-proofing: It offers the native OpenTelemetry support (via Heroku Fir) and the scalability (via Heroku Postgres Advanced) necessary to reliably manage high-volume, performance-sensitive workloads generated by the next generation of custom AI agents.
Whether the goal is optimizing complex human workflows or building the custom services that power sophisticated AI agents, enterprise success requires a strategic division of labor. Leaning in to Heroku’s developer velocity gets you AWS’s infrastructure scale based on business requirements and desired outcomes affords IT leaders agility at scale.
Special Offer: Buy Heroku through AWS
U.S. AWS Enterprise Discount Program (EDP) customers, you can buy Dynos, Heroku Private Spaces, Heroku Postgres, Heroku Key-Value Store, Apache Kafka on Heroku, and Heroku Connect through AWS Marketplace Private Offers.
Get in touch with a Heroku sales representative and let them know you’re interested in buying Heroku through AWS.
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