As part of the Salesforce Inc. family of offerings, Heroku has become a useful tool for developers to build, run and operate applications entirely in the cloud. It has also emerged as an effective way to navigate the tricky process of AI app deployment at scale.

“Heroku is well-known for taking things that are complicated and valuable and making them graceful and accessible,” said Rand Fitzpatrick (pictured), head of product, Heroku, at Salesforce. “When I take a look at what’s going on in the AI landscape right now, we’re seeing a lot of things that are really compelling for a lot of companies to do with AI, but a lot of the moving parts can be pretty hard to operate, manage and scale. What we’re doing with Heroku is making those things a lot more accessible and graceful for the actual construction of meaningful applications that will drive value without you getting lost in the noise.”

Fitzpatrick spoke with theCUBE Research’s Rebecca Knight for theCUBE’s “Cloud AWS re:Invent Coverage,” during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed the evolving role of Heroku in app deployment for enterprise AI. (* Disclosure below.)

Streamlining app deployment

Heroku’s value for developers can be seen in its ability to streamline app deployment. It supports a wide range of programming languages and can connect directly to a developer’s GitHub repository, automating tasks and taking away the burden of infrastructure management.

“If you’ve ever instantiated a Postgres database or similar on the platform, it is often as simple as Heroku add-ons,” Fitzpatrick explained. “It’s a pretty comprehensive service that gives you a lot of nice affordances that your developers can focus on the business value of your application and the utility of your application without having to manage all of the infrastructure, all of the tuning, all of the nuance of these things, and do so in a unified way.”

Salesforce’s relationship with Amazon Web Services Inc. adds trust and security to the Heroku process. Heroku’s physical infrastructure is hosted and managed within Amazon’s data centers using AWS tools.

“All of Heroku runs on AWS, and we’ve got great shared practices in terms of security, isolation, boundaries and governance so that we make sure that all of the data exchange is visible, auditable and transparent for use cases,” Fitzpatrick said. “Between the management of those guardrails and hardening of the AI models, as well as the provenance and tracking and auditability of all the data flows, all of that should be out of the box, predictable, visible and trustable for our users.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s “Cloud AWS re:Invent Coverage”:

(* Disclosure: Salesforce Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Salesforce nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE