Salesforce Preps Heroku PaaS for Kubernetes Environments
Salesforce this week announced that its Heroku platform-as-service (PaaS) environment now runs natively on Kubernetes clusters, starting with integrations with Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS), Elastic Container Registry (ECR), AWS Global Accelerator, AWS Graviton processors and the AWS Bedrock service for building artificial intelligence (AI) applications.
In addition, the Heroku PaaS now also supports the Open Container Initiative (OCI) specification, along with open-source OpenTelemetry agent software.
Finally, the Heroku Pass now also supports the development of applications written in the Microsoft .Net programming language along with existing support for Node.js, Java, Python, Go, Ruby, PHP, Scala and Clojure.
Pilot access to the new Heroku platform is available now and will become generally available in early 2025. Heroku AI is also available in pilot now and will be generally available in early 2025, while .NET support is available via a public beta, with general availability expected in January.
Heroku CTO Gail Frederick said support for Kubernetes environments is being added at a time when cloud-native platforms have become the default preference for building modern applications in enterprise IT environments.
The challenge is that many of the platforms being used to build those applications require developers to know too much about the underlying infrastructure, she added. The Heroku PaaS abstracts away that complexity, by in effect providing a platform engineering team that enables developers to more easily self-service their own requirements within an opinionated application development and deployment environment.
The Heroku PaaS environment has been historically used to build 12-factor applications, with more than 65 million applications having been built on the platform. By adding support for Kubernetes, it now becomes possible to build cloud-native applications as application developers best see fit for their intended use case, said Frederick.
Ultimately, the goal is to accelerate the pace at which these applications can be built and deployed, she added.
There is, of course, no shortage of application development and deployment platforms, but none have yet to establish any sense of dominance. Many organizations that embraced Kubernetes early on found they needed to construct, and now maintain, their own platforms for building and deploying applications. It’s not clear to what degree that approach has hampered the development of cloud-native applications, but as more organizations rely on a PaaS to build these applications the overall pace of application deployment should accelerate.
Less clear is the degree to which organizations that have already invested in their own custom platforms might be willing to transition to a PaaS environment.
Regardless of approach, there is with the rise of platform engineering a concerted effort among many organizations to standardize the DevOps platforms that individual application development teams are using to build applications. A Techstrong Research survey finds that 61% of respondents work for organizations that are already applying platform engineering principles across all or some element of their IT operations.
Primary reasons for embracing platform engineering include improving developer productivity (59%), the need for standardization of configurations (58%), reducing costs (51%), decreasing the increased complexity of modern applications (49%) and improving security (48%).
The challenge, as always, is that while many developers don’t necessarily want to manage IT infrastructure, they will always be wary of any approach to managing IT that might overly limit their prerogative to experiment with new tools and technologies as they best see fit.
