Modern application development is under unprecedented pressure, with organizations racing to build and ship software at breakneck speed. Today’s CEOs are being tasked with delivering modern, AI-driven apps, all while navigating fragmented infrastructure and mounting regulatory demands and an urgent need for application modernization.

The rise of autonomous agents and the growing complexity of multicloud environments are forcing teams to move faster while still meeting high customer expectations and maintaining quality. In this new environment, platforms that aim to reduce operational friction and empower developers are fast becoming a necessity.

“The number one goal for today’s CIOs or CXOs in organizations is application modernization,” said Paul Nashawaty, principal analyst with theCUBE Research. “The two barriers that organizations run into with application modernization are complexity and skill gap issues.”

Findings from theCUBE Research suggest that 67% of organizations hire generalists over specialists, while most application modernization projects are expected to be completed within 12 to 18 months. While 24% of organizations aim to release code on an hourly basis, only 8% are currently able to achieve that level of frequency, according to Nashawaty.

These issues were the focus of the recent AppDev Done Right Summit, which brought together leaders across the software development lifecycle to tackle the rising complexity and widening skill gaps that are stalling innovation in enterprise development. That involves application modernization, embedding security early, streamlining tools and more.

The summit was structured around the full application lifecycle, from Day 0 design to Day 2 operations. DevSecOps was a unifying theme throughout, emphasizing security and automation at every stage. The summit featured tech vendors, including Heroku, Salesforce Inc.’s platform-as-a-service, which recently renovated the Heroku platform to encompass all the latest cloud technology. Here’s what Heroku said at the summit and how it sees the future of application modernization moving forward. (* Disclosure below.)

Heroku aims to streamline Day 0

The AppDev Done Right Summit was a chance to learn from Heroku about how the platform is evolving to meet application modernization demands. As a platform-as-a-service, Heroku aims to empower developers to streamline the path from idea to production, offering visibility across the full application lifecycle, from Day 0 planning to Day 2 operations and DevSecOps. Heroku has long made it its mission to abstract away complexity so developers can focus on building value. It has long been recognized as a developer-friendly abstraction layer at the Day 0 stage, reducing cognitive overhead and simplifying operations to help teams confidently scale in this new era.

A developer’s most creative time is spent writing code and turning ideas into features or applications, but that actually makes up only a small fraction of their day. Much of their time is consumed by setting up environments, choosing tools and getting to deployment, according to Betty Junod (pictured), chief marketing officer of Heroku.

Heroku has a long history of delivering a great developer experience, but much of the real work happens on the platform side, Junod added. Most of its effort has gone into making sure applications can be deployed and run reliably over the long term while solving the challenges that come with that.

“The application hasn’t come to life if it’s not actually running, if it’s not serving customer traffic,” Junod said.

Heroku is designed to support any language, framework or dependency management stack developers already use, making it flexible and easy to adopt without changing existing workflows. Whether using Python, Go, Ruby or another language, Heroku allows developers to work in their usual local environment and deploy quickly with minimal setup. Reducing the time to that first deployment is critical for Day 0 operations, and it’s an area where Heroku has consistently stood out, Junod explained.

Connecting secure builds to smooth delivery

During the Day 0 cycle, it’s critical to have a platform that enables fast, efficient delivery. At the same time, DevSecOps is becoming table stakes, requiring security to be embedded from the start. Heroku and the CI/CD pipeline ensure software supply chain integrity and continuous compliance across development workflows. So, how does that translate into helping with Day 1 delivery, especially when teams are pushing new products across different languages and codebases? The key advantage is how it streamlines the path from a lone developer coding on a laptop, through staging and production environments, to an entire team collaborating on the same codebase.

Heroku streamlines team collaboration by integrating with source control providers, such as GitHub, and offering features such as review apps. When a developer pushes a branch, a review app is automatically created to show the differences between the original and updated application. Many teams build this into their software delivery and review workflow — pushing code, generating a review app, having someone check the changes and confirming the app behaves as intended.

After the human-level review, the application can automatically promote through the pipeline without any manual steps. This approach ensures that human oversight happens where it’s most valuable, while automation handles the rest of the delivery process efficiently. That’s what makes Day 1 and Day 2 operations far more efficient.

Boosting security and efficiency from build

A deeper look at DevSecOps reveals its critical role across the entire CI/CD pipeline, where it’s increasingly seen as a baseline requirement. With that in mind, a key question is how Heroku aims to help drive the security elements of the CI/CD pipeline. Each code change generates a layered image with a full software bill of materials that automatically flows through CI/CD into a staging environment, according to Junod. Heroku always creates both staging and production, ensuring testing happens first before anything is promoted live.

“They can do a sanity check,” Junod said. “Is it operating as designed before they deploy it to production, promote it to production?”

Heroku’s consistent environments and automated pipeline that’s already integrated and connected makes the entire development and delivery process much faster for teams, Junod added. This built-in consistency not only accelerates delivery, but also lays the foundation for stronger security practices.

Using something such as Dockerfiles without a consistent build process often leads to “security vulnerability proliferation,” according to Vish Abrams, former chief architect at Heroku. As each team defines its own setup for dependencies and installations, these individualized configurations tend to go out of date quickly.

“When you fix it in one place, you then have to go fix it in every place,” he said. “If you centralize the build process through a consistent mechanism using something like buildpacks, then all of those concerns happen in one place in the system.”

Heroku uses a process called rebasing, which allows the platform to automatically update the underlying operating system layers of a container. This means developers can focus solely on their source code while Heroku automatically pulls in updates to address security vulnerabilities throughout the application’s lifecycle.

Part of theCUBE’s AppDev Done Right Summit Day 2 research highlighted observability, cloud spend and performance tuning as key operational priorities. In that context, it’s important to note how Heroku aims to help organizations balance developer velocity with cost-effective observability, especially from a Day 0 perspective.

A key part of platform economics is flipping the script by focusing on what Heroku provides as a baseline: what’s built in, automated and managed. By handling selection, integration, security and automation, Heroku enables customers to spend most of their time on the application itself, which is the part that captures customer attention and drives revenue, 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 in really 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 provides built-in metrics that let users track application performance over time. For certain languages like Java, developers can access deeper instrumentation right out of the box, making performance insights easily accessible without extra setup. For more advanced use cases, Heroku supports exporting OpenTelemetry data directly from the system and applications. Once usage and performance are understood, Heroku also offers simple tools to scale applications up or down as needed.

Preparing for the AI shift with application modernization

During the Summit, AI-enhanced developer tooling emerged as a major theme. With that in mind, a key question is how Heroku is enabling AI-native application development and supporting AI-assisted agents within developer workflows. The company approaches AI in two ways. One focuses on using AI to write the code deployed to the platform, and the other enables AI agents and tooling within applications running on Heroku. 

For the first category, the team is taking a broader, open-source-oriented approach. As part of this, Heroku is updating the Twelve-Factor App Manifesto, originally created to guide developers in building scalable and maintainable applications. For the latter, Heroku recently launched managed inference and agents, allowing developers to easily integrate large language models and build powerful AI features. It allows developers to use tools such as LangChain and Python with minimal setup, according to Junod.

Insights from the AppDev Done Right Summit also show that many organizations are shifting toward cloud-native and Kubernetes-based architectures. It’s something Heroku has had its eye on in recent years.

“Cloud-native is a massive movement; the cloud is built on open source, and Kubernetes is the operating system of the cloud. And in an even shorter amount of time, we have seen AI become pervasive in every facet of life, business and technology — specifically in the software delivery lifecycle,” reads a Heroku blog.

These tools are undoubtedly powerful, and every stage of the modern software lifecycle is under pressure to evolve. As organizations reassess their strategies and consider application modernization, platforms such as Heroku aim to simplify complexity while boosting developer speed and guiding teams through a rapidly changing landscape.

“It’s a pivot point in the industry, and it’s definitely going to be dynamic and fluid. So, hang on and buckle up, because you’re in for a ride,” Nashawaty said.

(* Disclosure: Heroku from Salesforce Inc. is a sponsor of the AppDev Done Right Summit, an event produced by theCUBE Research. Sponsors do not have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE