In today’s artificial intelligence- and multicloud-powered world, application development is being reimagined to simplify complexity and accelerate delivery like never before.

As developers juggle everything from autonomous agents to fragmented infrastructure, the pressure to build, ship and scale faster, without burning out, is real. That’s why platforms that abstract away operational headaches, such as Heroku, are gaining renewed relevance. Long known for its developer-first ethos, Heroku is evolving to meet today’s challenges head-on, blending ease of use with architectural rigor to support everything from modern continuous integration and continuous deployment pipelines to AI-assisted workflows, according to Vish Abrams (pictured, left), chief architect of Heroku from Salesforce.

Heroku’s Vish Abrams talks to theCUBE about scalable architecture and integrating modern development principles.

“The more you can uplevel and abstract that out and make it so a developer doesn’t have to worry about the underlying layers of the system, the operating system, keeping your system packages up to date, etc., the better the experience is for deployment,” he said.

Abrams and Betty Junod (right), chief marketing officer of Heroku from Salesforce spoke with theCUBE’s Paul Nashawaty at theCUBE Research’s AppDev Done Right Summit, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed how Heroku is evolving its platform to simplify application development amid growing complexity, AI integration and multicloud demands, emphasizing developer experience, architectural discipline and responsible use of automation. (* Disclosure below.)

Application development success hinges on simplicity, flexibility and AI readiness

Heroku positions itself as a stable and opinionated platform that prioritizes ease of use for developers while integrating modern development principles. From built-in CI/CD tooling to integrations that support AI-enhanced coding workflows, the company enables fast time to value for teams without sacrificing the fundamentals of scalable architecture, according to Junod.

“I’d put it in the realm of simple yet powerful,” Junod said. “It’s not simple at the sake of not having capabilities, but do we need to have so much undifferentiated heavy lifting in choosing, configuring, setting up all of these additional tools that the ecosystem will keep bringing over time.”

As new technologies such as AI agents begin to impact the software lifecycle, Heroku continues to support a “human-in-the-loop” approach. Rather than automating everything, the platform’s philosophy is to empower developers to integrate AI responsibly and maintain visibility and control over how software behaves in production, Junod explained.

“It’s really important to have a human in the loop because the human is the one that has to design it,” she said. “Then there will always be variations. As the agent is running the process, there will be things that don’t fit within the guardrails of the defined process and the defined variances. What you need is an exception where humans can participate.”

Modern application development also requires architectural discipline. To support this, Heroku is refreshing the Twelve-Factor App methodology, a widely adopted framework that guides teams in building applications that can scale, evolve and be operated over time. With new interest in AI-generated code and low-code tools, Heroku sees an opportunity to teach both developers and agents how to build maintainable software, according to Abrams.

“We need to give those same instructions to the agents,” he said. “We’re taking those same principles, that Twelve-Factor App manifesto, and we’re expanding it to a wider audience and teaching a new group of people and agents, both humans and agents, how to use them to build reliable, scalable, dependable applications.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of theCUBE Research’s AppDev Done Right Summit:

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

Photo: SiliconANGLE