UPDATED 13:27 EDT / AUGUST 06 2025

Discover how Heroku is reshaping app development with AI, automation and platform simplicity to boost speed, scalability and developer creativity. APPS

Heroku’s vision for the future of app development prioritizes AI, simplicity and scale

The app development landscape is undergoing sweeping changes, with platform-as-a-service solutions, such as Heroku, playing a central role. By prioritizing developers and eliminating friction between concept and deployment, the platform continues to reduce cognitive overhead for developers, allowing DevOps to spend more time coding and less time on infrastructure.

But as app development evolves, how does Heroku see itself moving in lockstep and advancing its vision for easing complexity and streamlining continuous integration and continuous deployment?

“What we are seeing right now with the infusion of AI in every aspect of technology, what’s most interesting is it’s obviously had a huge impact on the application development side and what kind of apps we’re building now,” said Betty Junod (pictured), chief marketing officer of Heroku from Salesforce Inc. “It’s one of those unique things that is fundamentally touching every layer of the stack and every possible facet. It’s both vertical and horizontal at the same time. It’s moving tremendously fast, and I think that presents both opportunities and challenges for builders and operators.”

Junod spoke with theCUBE’s Paul Nashawaty in a lead up to an encore presentation of theCUBE Research’s AppDev Done Right Summit on August 13 — an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed Heroku’s strategic role in simplifying the app lifecycle, embracing AI and powering developer creativity. (* Disclosure below.)

Automation, consistency and speed helm Heroku’s app development blueprint

Heroku has always prioritized developers, removing friction between concept and deployment. The platform continues to reduce cognitive overhead for developers, ensuring they spend more time coding and less time on infrastructure, according to Junod. By abstracting complexity — especially in deployment and environment setup — Heroku helps bring ideas to life faster, streamlining what used to be time-consuming processes.

“When you think about development, it’s the act of writing the code or going from their idea to how to build out features and applications,” Junod said. “That part is the most creative aspect of their time, but that is such a small percentage of the time that they spend per day. So much of it is doing things that, for developers past, took them time to set up in their development environment.”

One of the major themes of the summit is DevSecOps and the importance of continuous integration and continuous deployment. Heroku’s platform provides a built-in, opinionated CI/CD pipeline based on best practices. From code commit to deployment, the platform automates image building, environment creation and promotion to production — all with consistency and governance.

This enables even smaller or less mature teams to leverage enterprise-grade workflows, reducing errors and speeding up release cycles. The key benefit: Developers stay focused on delivering customer value, not maintaining pipelines, according to Junod.

“We are doing the platform economics at a scale across our thousands and thousands of customers — then the auto-scaling and the automation that we’ve built to help them help customers be able to use the right amount of resources at the right time based on the load on that application,” she said.

Heroku is flipping the script on cloud economics. Rather than spending valuable resources on building and maintaining infrastructure, organizations can leverage Heroku’s managed services to focus on modernizing their applications. During the interview, Junod introduced the concept of platform economics — maximizing ROI by investing time and budget into applications not plumbing.

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

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